Literary London: Spend the Summer in Bloomsbury!
“You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
—Samuel Johnson
For one month each summer, students can follow in the footsteps of some of the literary visionaries of the Western world. From Shakespeare’s Globe to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, London offers a literary lineage of truly epic proportion. In this faculty-led English Department program, students will use the city as their classroom, exploring with literature and professors to lead them from the British Museum to the Poet’s Corner, from 84 Charing Cross Road to 223 B Baker Street.
The program runs from June 15th to July 14th, 2008. Students will stay in shared apartments in Bloomsbury, located in west central London. These apartments are close to the Dickens House as well as King’s Cross Station and Russell Square. Students will attend class a mere half block from the famed British Museum and will attend lectures at various cultural locales like museums, gardens, and libraries
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Students will take two linked classes, Victorian London and Metropolitan Modernism. The courses will offer a rich historical context for both the Victorian and the Modernist movements. Taken together, students will better understand the lineage of the movements and the ways in which they interrelate. Students will gather course materials in the United States and take them abroad with them, eliminating the need to purchase books while abroad. While reading and journaling are a major part of the London experience, the papers will be written upon return to the States, thereby allowing students to make the most of their time abroad.
The Courses:
Victorian London
Professor Lisa Sternlieb
The primary object of this class will be to spend as little time as possible in a classroom. Instead, we will take boat rides up and down the Thames to Greenwich and Kew Gardens. We will explore the Kensal Green and Highgate cemeteries in which Victorian luminaries are buried. We will study Victorian painting at the Tate and National Galleries.
We will visit the mansions of Victorian artists, Lord Leighton and Linley Sambourne. We will take walking tours of different neighborhoods -- Dickens’s London, Oscar Wilde’s London, Jack the Ripper’s London. Depending on what is playing, we will also try to take trips to the theater and the cinema. Exploring the city in this way will, I hope, augment your experience of the reading we will be doing. And we will be doing a lot of reading. Writers may include Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Gissing. I will expect you to keep a reading journal and turn it in before leaving London. But your 10-page paper (which will combine literary analysis with historical research) will be due in September. I want you to use the time in London to read and explore. This course may be taken for 100 or 400 level credit.
Metropolitan Modernism
Instructor Amy Clukey
It has been said that British Modernism was a literary movement by exiles and immigrants. This course will put that thesis to the test by examining literature about London from 1900 to 1950. We’ll begin with theoretical essays on cosmopolitanism and urban life that will help contextualize the unique experience of the modern city within English history and underscore the importance of London as a metropole, the beaucratic seat of empire, by Raymond Williams, Georg Simmel, Fredric Jameson, and others. Next, we’ll survey English literature at the beginning of the century. Next, we’ll look on responses to Metropolitan Modernism by immigrant writers. Literary readings will be paired with relevant sites in and around London. For instance, since we’ll be staying in Bloomsbury, we’ll look at the Bloomsbury Group in depth and pay a visit to their country home, Charleston.
Readings will be drawn from the following: Oscar Wilde’s Salome or The Importance of Being Earnest; selected Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Wyndham Lewis’s avant-garde little magazine Blast; Virginia Woolf’s essays about London life and Mrs. Dalloway; Jean Rhys’s novel about a West Indian chorus girl adrift in the city, Voyage in the Dark; Mary Butts’s scathing critique of the Bloomsbury Group and short stories about occultism and urban life; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Elizabeth Bowen’s blitz novel, The Heat of the Day; and Sam Selvon’s novel of Caribbean immigrant life, The Lonely Londoners. This course may be taken for 100 or 400 level credit.
As the two classes will have similar goals and methods, we’ll often take joint day trips and tours.
Costs:
The program fee is approximately $3100 per student.
Please Note: The English Department offers generous scholarships for English majors. Contact Mark Morrisson (mxm61@psu.edu) for further information.
Passports:
Students must obtain their passports as soon as possible. This is a matter of some urgency. Please begin the process early as it takes at least 6-8 weeks to acquire the documents. If you have a passport, please make sure that it is up-to-date. Renewals also take several weeks.
To Apply:
Applications are due by January 20, 2008.
For Additional Information, please contact Lisa Sternlieb at lrs18@psu.edu.
