London: City of Readers

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course invites students from around the university to explore several facets of contemporary reading culture in the one of the world's most vibrant reading cultures. In this seminar, students will study how and why literature is thriving as a social force in London, by meeting with prize judges and editors of literary magazines and by attending a range of exciting public literary events in the city. We will attend, for example, public lectures arranged by the British Library and London Review of Books, and author events at the Southbank Centre's Literary Festival. Drawing on the literary publications and events of the city, as well as its engagement with literary tourism, our syllabus will bring students into conversation with the most popular and controversial texts igniting public debate, and we will work together to understand and analyze the effects of reading such texts in a range of venues, from the classroom, to the British Library, to the urban café, to the tube or top of a double-decker bus. Selected readings from literary history will place our contemporary investigations in relation to earlier modes of "imagined community" in print culture. The final capstone project involves both literary analysis and direct engagement with the reading cultures of the city.