Creative Writing - Urban Tales

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label Diverse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Diana Ignat
How can 'outsiders' or 'new arrivals' narrate their personal stories in a foreign landscape? How can they bring their own histories into understanding another history? These questions have long formed an important part of many literary traditions. Through study, discussion and your own creative writing, this course will consider themes spanning arrivals, encounters, and the search for self and identity.

Here, you'll develop your interest, ability and future prospects as a writer while exploring themes within urban societies. Above all, you'll have the chance to enrich your intellectual capacity to reflect our modern age in your own writing and thinking. You'll engage with an international range of texts including Balzac's 'Lost Illusions', Calvino's 'Invisible Cities', Selby's 'Brooklyn Trilogy' and Houellebecq's 'Atomised', as well as British writers who reflect our modern lives from different angles. We will compare Orwell's London with that of Ian Sinclair for example, and what we can learn about Shanghai from Eileen Chang's 1930's Shanghai love stories and J.G. Ballad's childhood experiences in Emperor of the Sun.

Alongside lectures and seminars, you'll also gain inspiration from and interact with established writers by attending poetry readings and other literature events in London's different cultural venues.For this course you will need to read extensively and to do chapter-based in-depth reading and analysis in order to digest and bring out a sense of literary style, as well as studying urban characters through these writings. For your own writing, some key techniques of fiction writing will be discussed, and you will complete two main pieces of work: a short piece on your own experience of arrival in a city in fictional form, followed by a final short fiction piece as an assessment when the course ends.

The teaching will be through readings and discussions of these works, to nourish your response to literature and to point to ways of writing and expressing an individual vision of urban encounters. Additionally to lectures and seminars, there will be the chance for you to attend poetry readings and other literature events in London's different cultural venues, allowing opportunities to be inspired by and to interact with established writers.

Period
01-07-2013 - 19-07-2013 (3 weeks)

Target group
This course is designed for any young people interested in writing and reading, and further study on our modern world and urban environment issues. The subjects of this course are linked with arts and humanities, political science, journalism and filmmaking fields, among others.



Course aim
Through your study on this coure you will develop an ability of creative writing on our modern and urban environment, to enhance your future working possibilities with the ambitions of being a writer.

Credits
7.5 ECTS credits

Many of our students get credit for the summer courses taken at Kings. You should approach your home university before applying to find out whether they accept our courses for credit. We would recommend a three-week course to be equivalent 4 US credits or 7.5 ECTS, for instance.

Course fee
GBP 1350: tuition fee only

Course leader
Xiaolu Guo received an MA in literature and cinema at UK's National Film School and Beijing Film Academy and has published seven novels both in English and Chinese.

King's College London
Address: Strand, London
Postal code: WC2R 2LS
City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/summerschool
E-mail: summerschool@kcl.ac.uk
Phone: +44 20 7848 1533