Representing the Capital:
London in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture
Tutor: Andrew Gibson
Full course unit to be taught by one two-hour seminar per week in central London (11, Bedford Square). Maximum intake 20. Examination by a portfolio of two essays totalling 7-8,000 words in length, one on work done in the first, the other on the second term's work.
This course aims to introduce students to contemporary representations of London in literature and popular culture. It also aims to introduce them to some of the diversity of such representations and to reflect on representation as a political and ethical question. Issues of power, positionality and mode or modes of discourse will be insistently raised. Who is doing the representing, and how? Whose interests are represented in the representation? At the same time, the course aims to introduce its takers to the currently much-debated issue of how to think and write the city today.
The first term of the course has a precise structure: it begins with and takes its cue from the novelist who is increasingly recognized as the most significant contemporary novelist to have taken London as his particular subject, Iain Sinclair. It proceeds to two comparatively minor figures who have been much influenced by Sinclair, Patrick Keiller and Peter Ackroyd. It then becomes geographically more specific, looking at two of the novelists of whom Sinclair claims that they have `divided London up' between them over the past two or three decades: Michael Moorcock (west central London); and Angela Carter (south London). Beginning with Carter, it then takes on a different specificity, looking at representations of London by women novelists (Doris Lessing, Zadie Smith) and by novelists writing about or from within minority ethnic communities: Timothy Mo, Hanif Kureishi, Sam Selvon.
The course has no syllabus for the first five weeks of the second term (though a list of possible topics is given below). Towards the end of the first term, in consultation with the tutor, students will choose an aspect or area of contemporary representation of London in popular culture on which they will present a paper in the second term. The topics for presentation will be scheduled in five groups over the first five weeks of the second term. The class will be made aware of the schedule and notified of the material to be considered each week. They will be expected to familiarize themselves with at least a representative sample of such material over the vacation. The tutor will provide a theoretical introduction and conclusion (with photocopied material) to each of the five classes in question. The last five weeks of the course will be given over to directed research. Students will continue to work on their portfolio essay in consultation with the tutor.
First Term
Week 1: Iain Sinclair, Downriver
Week 2: Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space
Week 3: Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Week 4: Michael Moorcock, Mother London
Week 5: Angela Carter, Wise Children
Week 7: Doris Lessing, London Observed
Week 8: Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Week 9: Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet
Week 10: Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Week 11: Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Second Term
Weeks 1-5:
There is no syllabus for this section of the course, but material for consideration might include: Time Out, City Limits, What's On in London, Floodlight, Metro, Big Issue, Evening Standard; East Enders, Paddington Green; Peter Vansittart, London: a Literary Companion (London: John Murray, 1992), Ben Weintreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1992), The Faber Book of London, ed. A.N. Wilson (London: Faber, 1993), the London A-Z, tourist guidebooks, guides to children's London, popular books and curiosities on London (e.g. Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London [London: Historical Publications, 1998 reprinting]; Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London Under London [London: John Murray, 1993 edition]; Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, London as it Might Have Been [London: John Murray, 1981]); photographic records (eg Chris Ellman and Alex Werner, Dockland Life: a Pictorial History of London Docks 1860-1970 [London: Mainstream, 1991], Susan Okokon, Black Londoners 1880-1990 [Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1998]), popular books on the history of local areas (eg the Historical Publications series: Clapham Past, Fulham Past etc), souvenir maps (William Shakespeare's London, Dickens's London), John Wittich's London Villages (Shire: Princes Risborough, 1994) and Discovering London Street Names (Shire: Princes Risborough, 1996); and even London as cause for nostalgia or never-never land: Pennie Denton (ed.) Betjeman's London (London: John Murray, 1988).
Weeks 7-11: Directed research on portfolio essays in consultation with tutor.
Reading List
Contemporary London Literature
Peter Ackroyd, The Great Fire of London (London: Abacus, 1984) [FL 828 ACK]
-------------, Hawksmoor (London: Hamilton, 1985) [FL 828 ACK]
-------------, The House of Doctor Dee (London: Penguin, 1993) [FL 828 ACK]
-------------, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (LOndon: Minerva, 1995) [FL 828 ACK]
Martin Amis, London Fields (London: Penguin, 1990) [FL 828 AMI]
J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (London: Paladin, 1990)
------------, Concrete Island (London: Vintage, 1994)
Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1992)
Justin Cartwright, Look at it This Way (london: Picador, 1991)
Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up! (London: Penguin, 1995)
Maureen Duffy, Capital: a Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984)
Maureen Duffy, Londoners: an Elegy (London: Methuen, 1983)
Granta (special edition on London, 1999)
Patrick Keiller, London (film)
---------------, Robinson in Space (London: Reaktion Books, 1999)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (LOndon: Faber, 1995) [FL 828 KUR. Also Videocassette 828 KUR of TV adaptation]
Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (London: Paladin, 1990) [FL 828 LES]
-------------, The Good Terrorist (London: Flamingo, 1993) [FL 828 LES]
-------------, London Observed (London: Flamingo, 1993) [FL 828 LES]
Maria Lexton (ed.), The `Time Out' Book of London Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1993) [FL 828.3108 TIM]
Tim Lott, The Scent of Dried Roses (London: Penguin, 1997)
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986)
Patrick McGrath, Spider (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Vintage, 1992) [828 MO]
Michael Moorcock, Mother London (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1989)
Alan Moore (ed.), The Time Out Book of London Short Stories: It's Dark in London (London: Penguin, 1997)
Geoff Nicholson, Bleeding London (London: Gollancz, 1997)
Nick Rennison (ed.), Waterstone's Guide to London Writing (London: Waterstone's, 1999)
Will Self, Grey Area (London: Bloomsbury, 1994)
---------, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (London: Bloomsbury, 1993)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Longman, 1979) [FL. 828 SEL]
Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat (London: Albion, 1975)
-------------, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (London: Vintage, 1995)
-------------, Radon Daughters (London: Vintage, 1995)
-------------, Downriver (London: Vintage, 1995)
-------------, Lights out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997)
Iain Sinclair and Marc Atkins, Liquid City (London: Reaktion Books, 1999)
Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky's Room
Iain Sinclair and David McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy (London: Phoenix House, 1997)
Literary Theory and Criticism
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, tr. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979)
Homi Bhabha, `Novel Metropolis', New Statesman and Society 16 (February, 1990)
Frank Birbalsingh, `Samuel Selvon and the West Indian Renaissance', Ariel 8.3 (1977), pp. 5-22
Malcolm Bradbury, No, Not Bloomsbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
Aidan Day, Angela Carter: the Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
Adriaan de Lange, `The Complex Architectonics of Postmodernist Fiction: Hawksmoor C A Case Study', in Toby D'Haen and Hans Bertens (eds.), British Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993)
Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote, 1998)
James Donald, `Metropolis; the City as Text', in R. Bocock and K. Thompson (eds.), Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity (Oxford: Polity, 1992) [BL 301 SOC]
Aleid Fokkema, `Abandoning the Postmodern? The Case of Peter Ackroyd', in Toby D'Haen and Hans Bertens (eds.), British Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993)
Gayle Greene, Doris Lessing: the Poetics of Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)
John Guzlowski and Yvonne Eddy, `The Modern Novel and the City', Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978)
Elaine Ho, Timothy Mo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming)
Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies (London: Pluto Press, 1998)
Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998)
David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed, (eds.) The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Mark Looker, Atlantic Passages: History, Community and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon (New York: Peter Lang, 1996)
Roger Luckhurst, The Angle between Two Walls: the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)
S. Manferlotti, `Writers from Elsewhere', in I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds.), The Postcolonial Question (London: Routledge, 1995) [BL 301.36 POS]
Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing (Plymouth: Northcote, 1994)
Susheila Nasta, (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988)
Susana Onega, `Interview with Peter Ackroyd', in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 208-21
John Peck, `The Novels of Peter Ackroyd', in English Studies, Vol. 75 no. 5 (Sept. 1994), pp. 442-52
Simon Perrill, `The Work of Iain Sinclair', in Comparative Criticism, Vol. 19 (1997), pp. 309-39
J. Pickering, Understanding Doris Lessing (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990)
Burton Pike, `The City as Image', in R. Legates and F. Stout (eds.), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996) [BL 301.36 CIT]
Caryl Phillips, Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (London: Faber, 1998) [FL 809.993352]
Rachel Potter, `Culture Vulture: the Testimony of Iain Sinclair's Downriver', Parataxis 5 (1993-94), pp. 40-48
Lorna Sage, (ed.) Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1994). See especially Kate Webb on Wise Children, pp. 279-307
Christine Sizemore, A Female Vision of The City: London in the Novels of Five British Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984)
Susan Squier (ed.), Women Writers and the City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984)
G. Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Novels of J.G. Ballard (New York: Greenwood, 1991)
Edward Timms and David Kelley (eds.), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)
R. Whittaker, Doris Lessing (London: Macmillan, 1988)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1985) [FL 820.932 WIL]
Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern European Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Clement Wyke, Sam Selvon's Dialectical Style and Fictional Strategy (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1991)
Popular Culture
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993)
Jacqueline Burgess and John Gold (eds.), Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1985) [SH 3 KBM Geo]
David Buckingham, Public Secrets: East Enders and Its Audience (London: BFI Books, 1987) [FL 791.457 BUC]
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: the Metropolitan Experience (London: Methuen, 1986)
-------------, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993)
D. Clark (ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997) [BL 791.43 CIN]
J. Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989)
K. Dodd and P. Dodd, `From the East End to East Enders: Representations of the Working Class 1890-1990', in D. Strinati and S. Wagg (eds.), Come on Down? Popular Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1992)
Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage, 1995)
John Fiske, Reading the Popular ((London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
---------, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
David Gilbert, `London in All Its Glory, or How to Enjoy London: Representations of Imperial London in its Guidebooks', Journal of Historical Geography 25 (1999)
-------------, `Tourists', in Steven Pile and Nigel Thrift, City A-Z (forthcoming)
Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992)
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1988)
Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
Gerry Kearns and Chris Philo, Selling Places: the City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present ((Oxford: Pergamon, 1993) [BL 301.36 SEL]
Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1996)
Sharon MacDonald (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998)
Richard Maltby (ed.), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Harrap, 1989)
Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture (London: Cassell, 1997)
Ted Polhemus, Street Style: from Sidewalk to Catwalk (London: thames and Hudson, 1994)
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989)
Keith Selby and Ron Cowdrey, How to Study Television (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) [FL 791.45015]
Colin Sorensen, London on Film: 100 Years of Filmmaking in London (London: Museum of London, 1996)
John Storey, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998)
-----------, (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998)
Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995)
A. Sutcliffe, `The Metropolis in Cinema', in his Metropolis 1890-1940 (London: Mansell, 1984) [SH 63 LGH Met]
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 1990) [BL 380.5]
Suzanna Walters, Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
Leo Zonn, Place Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) [BL 301.1411 PLA]
Contexts: History and Geography
Peter Ackroyd, `London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries' (The London LWT lecture, 1993; in British Library)
Theo Barker, `London: A Unique Megalopolis?', in Theo Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe (eds.), Megalopolis: The Giant City in History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 43-60
M. Brosseau, `Geography's Literature', Progress in Human Geography 16 (1994), pp. 333-53
N. Deakin and J. Edwards, The Enterprise Culture and the Inner City (London: Routledge, 1993)
Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)
Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
Susan Fainstein, Ian Gordon and Michael Harloe, Divided Cities: London and New York in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) [BL 301.36 DIV]
Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson (eds.), Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
Peter G. Hall, London 2001 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1999)
John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998)
Paul Harrison, Inside the Inner City: Life Under the Cutting Edge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) [BL 301.3642 HAR]
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) [BL 301.2 HAR]
Keith Hoggart and David R. Green, London: a New Metropolitan Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1991)
Steve Humphries and John Taylor, The Making of Modern London 1945-85 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986)
Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)
Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996) [BL 301.36]
--------------, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
-------------, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994) [BL.301.34]
Anthony King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (London: Routledge, 1990)
Donatella Mazzeloni, `The City and the Imaginary', in Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires (eds.), Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Routledge, 1993)
Linda McDowell and Joanne Sharp, Space, Gender, Knowledge (London: Arnold, 1997) [BL 910.03 SPA]
Nick Merriman, The Peopling of London: Fifteen Thousand Years of Settlement from Overseas (London: Reaktion Books, 1993) [BL 301.451421]
Allen G. Noble and Ramesh Dhussa, `Image and Substance: A Review of Literary Geography', in The Journal of Cultural Geography, no. 34 (June, 1994), pp. 49-65
Paul Oliver, Ian Davis and Ian Bentley (eds.), Dunroamin: the Suburban Semi and Its Enemies (London: Pimlico, 1994) [FL 728.0942]
Mike and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998)
Roy Porter, London: a Social History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996)
Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974) [BL 301.36 RAB]
Richard Rogers and Mark Fisher, A New London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
Richard Rogers, Cities for a Small Planet (London: Faber, 1997) [FL 711.4 ROG]
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) [BL 332.152 SAS]
Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
R. Silverstone (ed.), Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997) [BL 301.362]
Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989)
Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) [BL 301.4409421]
Andy Thornley (ed.), The Crisis of London (London: Routledge, 1992) [BL 301.36421]
Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins: the Last Days of London (London: Radius, 1991)
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