Literature in the City

label Diverse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Silviu Marinescu
Offering an exciting opportunity to explore your own experiences of cities as urban spaces in terms of key texts and literary theory, this course examines the relationship between narrative representation and urban space by closely 'reading' three cities in modern literature - London, Dublin and Berlin.

From Haussmann's Paris to Victorian London, the labyrinthine London of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, the mythical Dublin of James Joyce, and the beleaguered Berlin of Christopher Isherwood, you'll use a combination of political, social, and literary theory. You'll navigate literal and figurative cityscapes through class discussion, short assignments, and exercises in urban rambling, including visits to the Charles Dickens Museum and the Museum of London.

By focusing on the interface between the body and the city you will combine historical and literary analysis to develop both a sophisticated grasp of modernity as a category of analysis in literature and art, and transferrable skills in academic and creative writing to strengthen your existing interest in modern literature and culture and your background in Arts and Humanities.At every point, emphasis will be placed on the your own experiences of the city in relation to urban space in the course texts. Learning will take place through class discussion, individual and group analysis, and written assignments. Key points of orientation will include:

- Literary style and architectural style, or the city as 'text';

- The individual and the crowd;

- The city as performance space;

- Gender and urban space.Visits to museums and sites of interest will be an important element, and a Joyce-centric trip to Dublin - the ideal city for perambulation - will take place in the second week.

It is hoped that this module will give you an insight into city space as a matrix of creative thought, as well as introducing you to three significant English language writers of the urban experience. Discussion of three cities, and immersion in two, will allow for a multi-dimensional comparative analysis.



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

Target group
This course is aimed at students who have a particular interest in modern literature and culture. Their background may be in the Arts and Humanities, including English or history. It will be particularly beneficial for students intending to progress to graduate level.

Course aim
By attending this course, it is hoped that you will galvanise your existing knowledge and skills in literary analysis by supplementing traditional learning with experiential learning and interdisciplinary analysis. On a practical level, it will also introduce you to an important category of analysis in literary studies, familiarise you with a number of canonical writers, and allow you to extrapolate personal and original lines of enquiry from existing critical theory. By the end of the course, you will have used this introduction to the city in literature to develop transferrable skills in academic analysis and creative writing.

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
Niamh Campbell is a research student in the department of English. Her main interests lie in the interaction between space, language, and historical subjectivity in Irish literature, and her dissertation focuses on the work of the novelist and short-story

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