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photo: Trafalgar Square, London (B. Norquist)
During Spring Quarter 2009, the Department of English will again offer its highly successful program of study in London. We have found that by keeping our numbers small, by tailoring our courses to what is immediately able to be seen in London and in England, and by asking students to actively participate, everyone emerges feeling fuller, as students, as tourists, as people.
The program will consist of four courses: London Theater, taught by UW English Professor Tom Lockwood, and Modernist London, taught by UW English Professor Jessica Burstein. Art, Architecture, and Society will be taught by Professor Peter Buckroyd, and Contemporary Britain will be taught by Professor Michael Fosdal, both British faculty who are experienced teachers of American students. (Three classes are considered a full-time load, but students may take all four if they wish.)
Students in the program will maintain their UW residency and any financial aid eligibility already established. Credits earned will be recorded on students' UW transcripts and apply directly to UW graduation requirements. Credits earned in the English courses may be used to satisfy requirements for the English major.
Housing and board for students will be arranged with families in London. A London Transport pass, good for travel on all subways and busses, will be supplied.
If you would like to be added to an email list to receive updates about this program, please contact Bridget Norquist in English Advising (bridget@u) or 206-543-2634.
London is a great international capital of theater, with something like 250 plays on offer any given night, from big-deal musical productions in the touristy West End, to famous venues for serious drama like the Globe and National Theaters, to tiny experimental performance spaces in pubs, abandoned buildings, parks, or (in at least one case) tunnels. If you are a playwright, you want your play produced on a London stage. Shakespeare came to London for that purpose, and so have most stage writers since. If you are an actor, you want to perform there. The best actors of every generation do perform there, and such is the competition that even those who are just scraping by on the fringes may nevertheless be immensely talented, making for a general performance standard of the highest caliber, whether you are watching Patrick Stewart as Macbeth at the Gielgud Theater, or somebody you've never heard of in a play you've never heard of, on a cheesy little makeshift stage in a part of London nobody ever goes to.
For this course we will be reading and discussing one play per week and seeing it performed. Our focus will be on the drama, both as reading text and as a work for stage performance. Selection of plays will depend on what is being staged while we are there, but will aim to represent a mix of classical and contemporary drama, old and new, cheery and challenging. The class will also be broken into small groups of three or four whose job it will be to find an interesting cheapo fringe play for your group to check out once during the quarter (pub theaters are obvious possibilities) and report on it to the class.
Course requirements: Several short response papers, one longer paper, one exam, and some group work, including performance reading and bits of scenes from the plays we study. Extras for the course may include backstage tours a the Globe or National Theater, the London Theater Museum, a talk to the class about the London theater industry by a working actor.
London itself is a theater, as you will see the first time you are in an Underground carriage watching the other passengers performing their parts as sullen commuters or boisterous tourists, and when you pause to take in the innumerable forms of everyday urban character and situation being acted out on the streets and in the shops or markets aboveground. We will pay some attention to this form of free and unscripted London theater, too.
Modernism as an artistic movement, and modernity as a social phenomenon are each inextricably linked to urban life. Prime examples of modernism's association with urban centers are roles played in 19th and 20th century art by cities such as New York, Berlin, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg and - to our point - London: literature and art spring up, engaging the new status of crowds, the role of public transit, the threat of urban crime, and the specific pressures exerted by the city on bodily experience - blaring traffic and new forms of advertising like sky writing compete for attention with the spectacle of a public newly comprised of unescorted females, dandies on parade and the flâneur. Accordingly, "Modernist London" uses the city of London as its grounding and pivotal text.
The course is divided into two stages. First for two weeks we examine texts - literary, artistic, and critical - which provide the student with background for the interpretation of modernism and the urban experience. We will, for instance, read George Simmel's 1909 essay on "The Metropolis and Mental Life" where the sociologist argues that the metropolis (which he distinguishes from the city) shapes the very psychology of its inhabitants. We will read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," in which the narrator becomes fixated on an individual who seems to exist soley in relation to crowds, and follows him obsessively through the streets of Paris. We will do some quick, brief, and fun work on flâneurie - the activity of observing city life aesthetically from a particular kind of distance; to this end we will read a little Walter Benjamin, and maybe some Oscar Wilde.
After this brief set-up, we are ready for London in all its fascinating particulars, and delve into literature on-site. The majority of our texts take London as an explicit point of reference - they happen here, at different historical moments, but with a focus on the early decades of the twentieth century. We will for instance follow the steps of the two main characters in Virginia Woolf's superb Mrs. Dalloway (1925): a recent edition of the book features a map of London locating the novel's movements, and this class will follow in the footsteps of a male shell-shocked war veteran and a female urban shopper preparing for her party, both over the course of a single day. Graham Greene's fiction too, is exact in its cartographical detail, and we will focus on one of his 1930's "entertainments," which he distinguished from what he considered his more serious works. We will pay especial attention to the birth of the avant garde: one was born in the tea room of the British Museum; another one made a point of trying to keep some paintings safe in the National Portrait Gallery. We'll go on site, read manifestos and poetry, and even investigate how the London Underground - the Tube - is part of the birth of modernism.
Peter Buckroyd
taught by Professor Peter Buckroyd, British Faculty
This course is interdisciplinary. The material is London itself. The course is taught entirely on the streets and in buildings, ranging from medieval, Elizabethan and Jacobean to Victorian, modern and post-modern. As well as equipping students to look more carefully at buildings, pictures and sculpture, the course encourages them to do some imaginative re-creation, considering what it might have been like to have lived at different times in the past as a member of different social classes. Field trips, to locations like Stratford Upon Avon, are included, typically via chartered bus with professional drivers. Students usually stay in established B&B's for any overnight trips.
Michael Fosdal
taught by Professor Michael Fosdal, British Faculty
This course introduces students to various aspects of life in Britain, from royalty to the homeless, from politics to sport. There is a major emphasis on direct contact with the people and institutions of contemporary Britain, including meetings with homeless people and politicians, visits to Parliament and the media, and individual research projects which encourage students to follow up their own interests. The course also looks at issues such as race, crime, the family and the problems (and delights) of being young in Britain today. The course should enable students to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary Britain and equip them better to understand their own society.
