4aaea002 writing london

4AAEA002 Writing London 2016-2017

Writing London | London Writing

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LEVEL/SEMESTER TAUGHT: Level 4, taught in semester 1 MODULE CONVENOR: Dr Clara Jones

TEACHING ARRANGEMENTS: 1 hour lecture & 1 hour seminar weekly LECTURERS: Dr James Grande Dr Clara Jones Dr Emrys Jones Dr Luke Roberts

Professor Clare Pettitt Dr Ruvani Ranasinha

Dr Sarah Salih Dr Daniel Starza Smith

Professor Mark Turner MODULE VALUE: 15 credits ASSESSMENT: Mid-semester coursework: 1,500 words

(15%); End-of-semester coursework: 2,500 words (85%)


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Outline This module begins with two simple premises: that ‘London’ is as much a creation of the imagination as of bricks and mortar; and that how we understand London is closely connected to how we represent it. The labyrinthine city, the obscure city, the city of strollers and wanderers, of disease, of crime, of riot, of illicit and excessive pleasures, of pretence and vulgarity, of ‘quality’ and taste, of aggressive capitalism and poverty, and of endless variety in people and things: these are just some of the tropes that help us interpret and define the sprawling mass that is ‘London’. The module is arranged in reverse chronological order, to give a sense of digging down into the strata of London’s accumulated meanings. We start with Hollinghurst's account of the Thatcher years, and finish wish an extraordinary fourteenth-century poem which is itself an account of digging down into Roman London. The module also helps lay the foundation for your own writing life in London over the course of your study at King’s College London. Without a doubt London is one of the most stimulating environments in which to engage with literature; and the first semester of your first year marks the start of an exciting time and a place in which to develop your skills as a reader, as an observer, and as a writer.

Learning format

This module is taught in a one-hour lecture, one-hour seminar format. Lectures are led by a series of staff from the Department but every student will have the same seminar leader throughout the module. You can also make use of meetings with Personal Tutors to discuss matters relative to this module, and meet with your lecturers and seminar leaders during her/his Office Hours.

Assessment

One 1500-word essay due in November 2016 (15%) One 2500-word essay due in early January 2017 (85%) A good way to start preparing is to read the Department of English Language and Literature’s which will be available via the Department’s Handbook for current students at the start of teaching.


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Texts

Many readings for this module will be available via the College’s online learning platform KEATS. You should be able to log onto KEATS as soon as you have a King’s user name and password. There you should eventually see a link to 4AAEA002 Writing London with a series of ‘toggles’ which you can open for each week with links to the relevant readings/viewings. Consult this site closely before each week’s classes.

Texts marked with an asterisk on p. 5 must be individually located/purchased and read. (Texts that are not marked with an asterisk will be supplied via KEATS.) They are all readily available second hand: you will find suggested editions below but any edition will do. It is also acceptable to use e-books. These are:

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty [2004] (London: Picador, 2005)

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia [1990] (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) Linton Kwesi Johnson, Selected Poems [2002] (London: Penguin, 2006)

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl [1607-10] (London: New Mermaids, 2003) Or (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

These are also the texts you can read over the summer. Note that ideally you should have completed reading The Line of Beauty before your first lecture in Week 1.

Contacting staff

Effective communication between staff and students is a priority in the Department of English: we are interested in your views, and keen to help you with your studies. The most effective way to communicate with a member of staff is to call in during her/his office hours, two weekly one-hour sessions when s/he is available for consultation. These hours are indicated here and sometimes also on the staff member’s office door. You do not need to be in ‘crisis’ to make use of this contact time, and staff members are always interested to discuss your ideas and plans, and to answer queries to the best of their ability. (If they can’t answer a specific query they can direct you to someone who can.)

You will also have regular meetings with your Personal Tutor during your time studying Writing London. Your Personal Tutor should be your first port of call for any pastoral matters, though by all means also use time with her/him to discuss other aspects of your studies.


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You are, of course, welcome to email members of staff directly on matters related to your studies. Please bear in mind, though, that most academic staff receive dozens of emails a day which require considered responses: your query will be answered, usually within a few working days, but it is usually faster and more efficient to use the office hour and speak to your lecturer/seminar leader in person. You should address general inquiries about 4AAEA002 Writing London to the module convenor.


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Week Commencing London: City of... 1 27 Sept ...Excess

Dr Clara Jones on Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)* 2 4 Oct ...Self-Discovery

Dr Ruvani Ranasinha on Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)*

3 11 Oct ...Revalueshan

Dr Luke Roberts on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Selected Poems (2006)*

4 18 Oct ...Modernity

Dr Clara Jones on Virginia Woolf, ‘The Docks of London’ (1931) and ‘Street Haunting’ (1927) and Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London (1905)

5 25 Oct ...Crime

Professor Mark Turner on Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890), and ‘A Case of Identity’ and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)

6 1 Nov ...Readers Reading week 7 8 Nov ...Surveillance

Professor Clare Pettitt on Charles Dickens’ ‘Night Walks’ (1861) and excerpted chapters from Bleak House (1853)

8 15 Nov ...Pleasure

Dr James Grande on Representations of Vauxhall Gardens and on William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge’ (1803)

9 22 Nov ...Disease

Dr Emrys Jones on Extracts from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

10 29 Nov ...Transgression

Dr Daniel Starza Smith on Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1607-10)*

11 6 Dec ...Transformation


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Dr Sarah Salih on ‘The Pearl Poet’, Saint Erkenwald (1386) 12 13 Dec …Drafters

Essay Consultations

Useful reading

Ackroyd, Peter, London: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) Adburgh, A., Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian

Elegance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979) Beaumont, Matthew, Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to

Dickens (London: Verso, 2015) Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke:

Palgrave, 2007) ----, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (Basingstoke:

Palgrave, 2002) Briggs, Asa, ‘London, the World City’, in Victorian Cities (London: Penguin 1990) Byrd, Max, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century (New

Haven: Yale UP, 1978) Chernaik, Warren et al, eds, The Art of Detective Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

2000) Dyos, HJ and Woolf, Michael, The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London:

Routledge, 1973) Freeman, Nicholas, Concieving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870-1914

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Gilbert, Pamela K., ed., Imagined Londons (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) Kaplan, Morris B., Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) Kestner, Joseph, Sherlock’s Men (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997) Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) Lehan, Richard, The City in Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998) McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London: Routledge,

2004) MacPhee, Graham, The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual

Culture Mancoff, Debra and DJ Trela, Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth

Century City and Its Contexts (New York: Garland, 1996) Manley, Lawrence, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Charlottesville,

VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992) ----, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London (CUP, 2011).


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Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) Maxwell, Richard, Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University Press of

Virginia, 1992) McLaughlin, Joseph, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from

Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938) Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century

London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP, 2000) Onega, Susana and John Stotesbury, eds., London in Literature: Visionary Mapping

of the Metropolis (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002) Parsons, Deborah, Streewalking the Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) Porter, Roy, London: A Social History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996) Resina, Joan Ramon and Dieter Ingenschay, eds., After-Images of the City (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2002) Robinson, Alan, Imagining London, 1770-1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2004) Schwarzbach, F.S., Dickens and the City (London: Athlone Press, 1979) Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization

(NY and London: WW Norton, 1994) Tester, Keith, ed., The Flaneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) Timms, Edward and David Kelley, Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern

European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985) Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-

Victorian London (1992; London: Virago, 1998) ----, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2012) Wall, Cynthia, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998) Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth 1973; rpt. Chatto

and Windus, 1985)


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Assessment (don’t panic!)

Two pieces of coursework... This module is formally assessed with two pieces of coursework. The first, probably the first piece of coursework you will submit at King’s, is due after Reading Week (November 2016), and is a 1,500-word essay answering one of the questions given below. Your answer should refer to any one of the ‘primary’ texts we study in the first five weeks of the semester. By one ‘primary’ text we mean, for example, one of the two novels you’ll read by then, a single poem, one of the essays from Week 4, or a single Sherlock Holmes story. This piece of coursework is worth 15% of your overall mark for the module. The second piece of assessed coursework will be a 2,500-word essay that encourages and tests your ability to draw comparisons across two primary texts from different periods. At least one primary text should be sourced from weeks 7-11 (i.e. from those studied after Reading Week) and you may not select any primary text featured in the same week from which you drew the primary text for your earlier piece of coursework. The questions for this essay will be released after Reading Week; and more information on how to complete the task will also be given then. This second, longer, piece of coursework is worth 85% of your overall mark for the module. Your first assessment task... what is it ‘worth’? As mentioned above, the first assessment task is ‘worth’ 15% of your overall mark for this module; and your overall mark for this module is worth 25% of your overall mark for your First Year. Although, like all assessment tasks, you should take it seriously, it will have miniscule effect on the final result for your degree. Nor will failing it necessarily imperil your chance of passing the module as a whole. Now is the moment, then, to put worries about marks to one side—you’ve got into College for goodness sake, forget about such things for a moment—and think only in terms of creating a meaningful, clearly written, and immaculately presented essay that pleases you first and foremost, not least for its demonstration of your hard work and commitment to your university studies. If you do this, your essay will record what you have experienced and learned in the opening weeks of your time at King’s. It will also record how much you still have to learn; intriguing when—hopefully—you re-read the essay in a few years’ time.


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This is the moment, in other words, to start early, put in the hours, be ambitious, find out about what preparing and writing essays tells you about yourself, and (most importantly for learning) make spectacular mistakes. So... This first assessment task is an opportunity to start stretching your writerly wings! Dust off ‘school’, because learning at school and the teaching you received there has done its job—brilliantly—because here you are at College. Now you are ready for new challenges. But don’t panic! This first assessment task is also designed as a gentle transition into writing at College level...as gentle as you like. We’ll go through some of the issues related to essay writing in your seminars for 4AAEA002 Writing London, including footnoting. Now is also the moment to take a close look at the English Department’s guidance on writing essays available via the Handbook.

The questions: Answer ONE of the following questions with a 1,500-word essay.

1. How does the representation of London inform—and how is it also informed

by—what you consider one or more of the wider themes in one of the primary texts studied in weeks 1-5? When answering the question, don’t forget that the form and style of your chosen text will also have an effect on the way it represents London. Also remember that the historical context of the text’s setting and/or its date of production may also effect its representation of London (which London are we talking about?)

2. Visit just one of the London spaces represented in one of the primary texts

studied in weeks 1-5. This may be a specific place (e.g. Hampstead Heath, Hyde Park, Docklands, the Strand, etc.) or a generic one (the gated garden of a London square, your own room, a busy street, a bookshop, a stationer’s shop...). Briefly describe the impressions and thoughts this space gives rise to in you, right ‘here’ in the present day. Use this description as a starting-point for exploring the representation of the corresponding space in your primary text. How does the author represent the space? How does that representation contribute to what you consider one of the main themes of the chosen text? And what does your own experience of visiting the same/a similar space ‘today’ contribute to answering such questions?


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Issues you may like to consider in developing your answer: – The history of the specific site in question; – How the space was being used when you visited it, and by whom. Do

different people use the space in different ways? Where do you fit in the picture?

– The specific time of the day/night when you visited. What time of day/night is it when the space is described in your primary text?

– How the style of the description in the primary text, and the text’s overall form (novel, poem, essay...) inflect its representation of the space.

3. What, if anything, does ‘London’ as it appears in one of the primary texts

studied in weeks 1-5 have to do with your ‘real’ experience of living here? You might like to start by considering what your chosen text has helped you ‘see’ in your contemporary London surroundings; and what it omits, in your experience. The question, deceptively simple, is really asking you how you connect the inner life of your mind (including your engagement with literature and other forms of cultural expression) with what is going on around you. It’s the kind of question Virginia Woolf ponders in ‘Street Haunting’...but if you are true to her example, your answer will be completely different to hers.

Which question should I pick? In a sense, all three are the same question worded in different ways, prompting differently nuanced answers. But across the three there is increasing emphasis on bringing your own experiences of London to bear upon your reading of the primary text. But NONE of the questions is ‘more challenging’ or ‘more creative’ than the others. ALL require you to make strategic choices and persuade your readers that your insights into the primary text are significant and valid. And ALL essay writing is creative. So in the end it is the primary text that counts here, not you, no matter how much you may have learned about yourself in the course of preparing, reading, researching, writing, redrafting, polishing, and finishing this essay; and even though you are asked in Questions Two and Three to discuss how your own experiences have informed your answer. You may need to try answering each of the questions in turn before deciding which one best suits your current practices of writing. The following points may help you make a decision.


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Question One: May respond more readily to ways of preparing essays you are familiar with. That does not mean there isn’t plenty of scope for creativity and pushing your

existing writing skills to new limits. The suggestions for approaching the other questions may also apply to this

question: at least in early drafts. Question Two: Requires you to argue a specific place or type of place in the text’s London is

particularly significant to its meaning; Highlights the fact that all essays make an assertion regarding what a central

point of a text is, what it is about (where ‘about’ denotes ambiguity and the centre of an orbit). Your job is to persuade your reader of the validity of your assertion

A possible starting point for approaching this question: summarise how the author uses a specific space; consider how it relates to what you consider his/her themes; compare this with what you notice when you visit the precise or similar space; describe how the literary work informs your own active ‘reading’ of the space.

Question Three: Perhaps offers the greatest scope for self-reflexivity but you will still need to

address the representation of London in the primary text, including issues of style and form.

But you will still need to make a case for the representation of London informing, and being informed by, what you see as the text’s wider themes.

And you will need to keep the account of your own experience in control and relevant to the discussion of the primary text.

By the way, it is perfectly acceptable to use the first person in your essays for the Department of English. ‘I am going to argue that...’; ‘I think..’; ‘In this essay, I will...’ etc. If you are being ‘self-reflexive’ in the essay, the ‘I’ you deploy need not be the ‘I’ of your ‘real’ self. ‘You’ can be as ‘creative’ as you like: but the ‘you’ needs to demonstrate insight into the primary text, and write an essay, i.e. mount an argument about the primary text.


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Critical Material ( ‘secondary texts’)

While you are free to refer to critical material related to your text and/or to London—particularly where this helps you mount a persuasive case—the main focus of this assessment task is on your own reading of the primary text. This is not to say that you do not need to bother researching and reading critical material related to your primary text, London, and the literary history of London. It is rather to say that there is no ‘correct number’ of critics to refer to in the essay: a first-class essay may quite feasibly refer to none. Best way forward is to read as much as you can about London anyway, and if what you read falls naturally in your essay and helps you mount your argument, then use it appropriately. As with all references to other people’s writing (including ‘primary’ texts), you will need to footnote any critical material you cite in your essay in footnotes, and include a bibliography at the end of the essay. To learn how to do this, attend seminars, work through the English Department’s Skills Training site on KEATS, and consult the Essay Writing Guide for further information. You can also raise any of these issues with your seminar leader, your Personal Tutor and/or this module’s convenor.

HELP! ...is at hand. While staff are not at liberty to read drafts and write comments on them (because they are also involved in the examination process), if you bring a draft or essay plan to a meeting/office hour, you can discuss it with a member of staff in person. See the Department’s guidance on writing essays available via the Handbook. Consult the English Skills Training site on KEATS. Ask questions in lectures and seminars. Use your seminar leader’s and your convenor’s office hours. And don’t forget to enjoy writing!

4aaea002 writing london

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