Soul and the city – Art, Literature and Urban Living
(8 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 484
Taught by Arnold Weinstein
Brown University
Ph.D., Harvard University

"A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life." —Samuel Johnson
We spend our lives building in empty spaces. Out of nothing, we make something. We fashion jobs, relationships, structures, and meanings. Without these creations, we would live in a wasteland.
The Soul and the City: Art, Literature, and Urban Living is not a compendium of statistics on city life, a guidebook, or a historical look. This course focuses on complex artistic representations of city life from the 18th to the 20th century.
Brown University's Professor Weinstein (Ph.D., Harvard University) selects particular moments and cities to illustrate urban themes such as anonymity, orientation, and exchange. You visit St. Petersburg just before the Russian revolution, the industrial age in the novels of Charles Dickens, and the present global electronic era on the cinematic screen. Professor Weinstein serves as a literary theorist, cultural critic, and philosopher.
Portraits of humanity come through several great artists in a variety of mediums:
Painter Edvard Munch depicts the emptiness of urban living.
Poet Charles Baudelaire celebrates how crowds impact his imagination.
Author Daniel Defoe dramatizes the freedom the city offers people who want to change their identities.

Two books by Lewis Carroll
There are two books by Lewis Carroll  in one archive:
1. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, illustrated by John Tenniel
2. Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there

CAE Listening and Speaking Skills
Cambridge CAE Skills offer a bridge between communicative methodology and the needs of the exam class. Designed to prepare students for the various CAE papers, these books also consider the four skills in their wider application through the use of exciting topics and enjoyable communicative activities. The skills relevant to Papers 4 and 5 are covered in this single book. Each unit is divided into two sections, one dealing with listening and the other with speaking, linked to a common topic. Topics are innovative and unusual, offering students a genuine stimulus for speaking activities. Exam Tips boxes give students detailed advice about what to expect during each of the CAE papers, and the book offers plenty of opportunity to practise the type of activities that will be encountered during the paired interview. The cassettes feature authentic recordings from diverse sources.


1. Cleaned and reduced audio files added. Thanks to Maria!
2. Cleaned pdf file added. Thanks to megatron!

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