Lehrende/r: Prof. Dr. Alison Martin
Veranstaltungsart: online: Hauptseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 06.008.0508
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Credits: 6,0
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 15
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie zzgl. Bevorzugung höherer Fachsemester Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinieÜber die Senatsrichtlinie hinaus werden bei der Platzvergabe für diese Veranstaltung Studierende höherer Fachsemester bevorzugt berücksichtigt.
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: The seminar will take place synchronously via MS Teams.
Inhalt: In The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905), the writer Ford Madox Ford described the English metropolis as ‘a Personality that, whether we love it or very cordially hate it, fascinates us all’. In this seminar, we look beyond the physical existence of London as a city in the south-east of England to explore how it exists as a ‘personality’ in the British cultural and literary imaginary. Where Victorian writers had cast London as a contained and knowable space, by the start of the twentieth century the modern metropolis of London came to be represented as an ‘abstraction’, open to multiple and conflicting representations. In this seminar, we explore how London has been represented in 20th- and 21st-century British culture, and come to be associated with modernity, change and progress. We ask what London signifies to whom and why, by drawing on a range of fictional and non-fictional sources. We will be comparing extracts from H. V. Morton’s bestselling travel account The Spell of London (1926), with Virginia Woolf’s exploration of consumerism and glamour in ‘Oxford Street: Tide’ (1932). John Betjeman’s post-war poetry enables us investigate the creation of suburbia, cast as a semi-rural arcadia, created by the extension of the underground railway system to the outskirts of the metropolis. Extracts from more modern texts, such as J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), offer bleaker reflections on dystopian modernity, while Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) casts a critical eye over how the ‘Windrush generation’ has become an integral part of London life. Finally, by drawing on a passage from Iain McEwan’s Saturday (2004), we see how London is represented both as the subject of terrorist attacks and as a site of response to them.
Empfohlene Literatur: Texts will be made available in the form of a Reader by the start of term. A list of relevant secondary material will be also be made available.
Digitale Lehre: The seminar will take place synchronously via MS Teams.
