Mapping London: A Literary Journey through the English Capital Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Program Fall 2017 Semester CEA Study Center Only - London

In the 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad wrote that the city of London hosts, "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires." This course seeks to map 150 years of London's history as a city of evolving literary dreams, political power, and as capital of capitol. As part of this work, we will encounter modernist, working-class, societal, dystopian, and satirical authors who will lead us through the city's socio-political geographies.

Our literary mapping will begin with the polluted, urban landscapes of Charles Dickens before moving to the spies, murder, and anarchy in Joseph Conrad's portrayal of Edwardian London. From here we will explore Arnold Bennett's novel of a destructive, working-class couple in King's Cross. Virginia Woolf's masterpiece then turns Bennett's London society on its head as it privileges the upper-middle class and its interiority of thought on a single day in London's more affluent boroughs. The city then turns to a state of war in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day where espionage, counter-espionage, love, and counter-love take center stage. Absolute Beginners tracks youth culture and racial violence in London's post-war immigration boom while High Rise plots another boom altogether, England's early-1970s housing explosion and the raw violence engendered by an excess of neonate luxury on the outskirts of the capital. The sense of ill-advised plenty continues in Martin Amis' comic romp through the city's seedy places and minds before we turn to London on the 15th of February 2003, a hub of political protest whose arteries are clogged with ordinary folk on an extraordinary day of anti-war unrest. The postmodern powerlessness and disenfranchisement felt by McEwan's Londoners remains a core imperative in today's capital whose properties are far beyond the means of its natives with the higher end owned largely by absent oligarchs. Lastly we look to author Xiaolu Guo (an outsider to the culture and language), and explore both her poverty and her clunky but steady acclimatization to an impersonal, international city that is both fast-paced and money-hungry. Through transformations via politics, class, humanitarian disaster, factionalism, alienation, wealth, and concomitant criminality, we leave London a technological utopia populated by bemusing work- and alcoholic alien forms; at least from the hilarious perspective of a young Chinese immigrant seeking her place among foreign natives.