1.    What are the activities that the main character invests his time into?

2.    How are these activities beneficial?

3.    In your opinion, what is the role of movement in the chapter?

4.    Find a passage that you would consider an example of descriptive, sensorial writing?

5.    Find examples of inter-textuality?

6.    In your opinion, could a city be the main character of a story?

7.    Who are the people the main character encounters?

8.    How can you relate loneliness to the chapter?

9.    In your opinion, what is the role of the artist?

10.Who was flâneur? Relate flâneur to Roland Barthes, his urban experience and the observer-participant dialectic?

In class, we will also focus on the following points:

1.    Strolling from page to page like strolling from street to street

2.    City’s cacophony/erudite music

3.    City’s governing principle: montage

4.    Virginia Woolf: the city has inexhaustible richness

5.    What is the conception of metropolis?

6.    Joyce Carol Oates: “If a city is a text, how shall we read it?”Questions and guidelines to chapter one of Open Cityby Teju Cole

1.    What are the activities that the main character invests his time into?

2.    How are these activities beneficial?

3.    In your opinion, what is the role of movement in the chapter?

4.    Find a passage that you would consider an example of descriptive, sensorial writing?

5.    Find examples of inter-textuality?

6.    In your opinion, could a city be the main character of a story?

7.    Who are the people the main character encounters?

8.    How can you relate loneliness to the chapter?

9.    In your opinion, what is the role of the artist?

10.Who was flâneur? Relate flâneur to Roland Barthes, his urban experience and the observer-participant dialectic?

In class, we will also focus on the following points:

1.    Strolling from page to page like strolling from street to street

2.    City’s cacophony/erudite music

3.    City’s governing principle: montage

4.    Virginia Woolf: the city has inexhaustible richness

5.    What is the conception of metropolis?

6.    Joyce Carol Oates: “If a city is a text, how shall we read it?”