Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description

Imagined London

Instructor(s): Barbara Black, English

This seminar focuses on reading, writing, and seeing the cityscape. What better place in which to investigate the richness of the urban imaginary than London itself? Situated in London, we will learn about London through the stories the metropolis has inspired and generated. Working together, we will construct a genealogy of modern London, as we become attuned to the ghostly echoes of Victorian London still audible today in its streets, its buildings, its ways of life. We will study the new technologies, the new ways of arranging private and public spaces, that (literally) electrified the nineteenth-century capital city. How does one experience time and space in the city? We will be interested in London “above ground”—its monuments, its civic architecture, its streets, its squares—as well as subterranean London, as we journey there both phantasmically (through a study of urban noir and detective fiction) and literally, when we tour the Underground. Some of our concerns will be urban development, the individual and the crowd, loneliness and urban density as we study England’s greatest metropolis, then and now.