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candidatures 2010-11

Theory of Landscape and Practices of Habitation

Instructors:
Phoebe Giannisi, Zisis Kotionis
With the participation of the following instructors of the department:
Theoklis Kanarelis, Kostas Manolidis, and Aspasia Kouzoupi.

“serene and still
the mountain viewing
frog”

Kobayashi Issa

 

This course theoretically analyses the viewing of a landscape as an experience that subjects have under certain circumstances. This experience is defined culturally (physical perception, symbolic-social aspect of place, status of subject) as well as in relation to the activity that connects the subject to the landscape.
During the course, a reading group is formed. At the same time, each student selects a topic on which his research concerning a certain area in South Pelion will be based. In this way, we approach the landscape both through a compilation of knowledge bibliographical and other (interviews, photographic depictions) and through travel and the eyes of the traveller.
This course is structured along a series of lectures which analyse the issue of landscape and its connection to the subject of experience. We read travelogues from different eras and in between students present what they have recorded from real places. By the end of the course, the students will be asked to deliver a short essay. Our aim is to compile an alternative travel guide for South Pelion with the help of all the students.

Lucy Orta, an artist, will participate in the course by organising a short workshop.

Schedule of lectures

  1. Presentation of the course.
    Lecture: Phoebe Giannisi: Landscape habitation conditions: The body and the weather.

  1. Selection of topics by the students.
    Lecture: Zisis Kotionis: “Emotional Topography”. Greek modernism and the Greek landscape.

  1. Lecture:  Phoebe Giannisi: The subject of habitation: War, Archaeology, Poetry (Pritchett, Archilohos, Seferis)

  1. Lecture: Kostas Manolidis: Landscape and the geometrization of nature.

  2. Lecture: Aspasia Kouzoupi:  Paleogeography and Paleoecosystems: Recorded Transformations of old Landscapes.

  3. Lecture: Ron Walkey: Mount Pelion and the administration of water in architecture and cultivations.

  4. Presentations of recordings of the routes.

  5. Lecture: Phoebe Giannisi: Travellers and Texts I: Herodotus, Pausanias, Homer

  6. Lecture: Theoklis Kanarelis:

  7.  Lecture: Phoebe Giannisi: Travellers and Texts II: Neoteric Geography of Greece, Travellers of Centuries Past, Lonely Planet

  8.  Lecture: Kostas Manolidis: Transformations of Greek Countryside: Physiology and Morphology

  9. Lecture: Phoebe Giannisi: Travellers and Texts III: “Memoirs d’Hadrien” by Yourcenar and “Narrow road to the Interior” by Basho.

  10. Presentations of students’ projects.

  11. Presentations of students’ projects.

 

Indicative Bibliography

Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977 (=Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’éthnologie kabyle, Paris, 1972)
Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World, The Johns Hopkins University, 1994
Detienne, M. et Vernant, J.-P., Les ruses de l’intelligence: la metis des Grecs, (Flammarion, 1974)
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Kuriyama, Shigehisa, The expressiveness of the body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, Zone books, 2002
S.G.Cole, Landscapes, Gender and Ritual Space, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 2004
Pritchard, K. Greek State at War, Part II, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1974. Sahlins, Marshall,  Culture and Practical Reason, (1976)
Simon Shama, Landscape and Memory, New York 1985