Michaelmas Term 2014

Modern and Contemporary Literature MPhil: Option Course

The Novel and the City from 1900 - present
Convenor: Dr James Fraser
Michaelmas Term 2014
Friday, Weeks 2-7; 2.00-3.30 pm
First session 17 October 2014; final session 21 November 2014
Location: English Faculty, room SR24
Introduction: The aim of this module is to explore novelistic responses to the changing
face of the twentieth-century city. If the modern city was born and raised during the rapid
industrialisation of the Victorian period, then it reached its maturity in the century that
followed. We will be thinking of the city in as many ways as possible: as a complex of
associations, a physical space, a specific way of organising labour, a novel form of
domestic reorientation. What new possibilities did the city provide? What psychologies did
it produce? What problems? What solutions? What kind of lives could or could not be lived
in this new space? But this is a course on the novel; what kind of novels did the city
produce and what are the questions that novelists sought to answer through city
narratives? In order to answer these questions and more, we will be reading a selection of
twentieth-century novels that deal in various ways with the city as it developed over the
previous century and into the present. As you read these novels, think carefully about the
rolethematic and narrativethe city plays in each text. Nominally the locationthe
settingof these novels, how does the reality of city life constrain and/or liberate narrative
potential in these novels? To what extent are characters defined by their relationships to
certain constructions of the city? What kind of hierarchies do these novels establish in
representing the city, even if these hierarchies often appear unconscious? For example: is
the city mechanical, where the countryside is natural? As Raymond Williams has
suggested, country and city are very powerful words and while the real history of
these settlements has been astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have gathered and
have been generalised. But the city is not merely the non- or anti-countryside: across the
course of these six seminars, we will be envisaging the novels relationship to the city as
both varied and flexible.
Course Structure: 6 x 1.5 hr seminars running Weeks 2-7 of Michaelmas Term.
From week 3, each week there will be either one or two student-led presentations.
Course Admin: Much of the administration will be carried out through a CamTools
site dedicated to the course, to which you will be signed up once your choice of
course is confirmed. Some items of core and contextual reading will be posted on the
site in PDF format.
Essays: Any essays written for this course must bear a clear relation to its themes
and historical scope. You are encouraged to formulate your own question in
consultation with me.
Schedule of Topics:
Week 2 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
Week 3 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Week 4 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Week 5 Elizabeth Bowen, In the Heat of the Day (1948)
Week 6 J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)
Week 7 Zadie Smith, NW (2012)

General preparatory reading:

There will be no general set text for this course, but there is specific set reading listed in
the week-by-week breakdown below. You should read all essential reading and at least
one piece from the suggested reading each week. If you find the topic or text particularly
interesting, further reading lists some books or articles that may interest you.
The city is by no means a new topic of study and there have been several good books and
articles on the relationship between the city and culture, some of which are listed below.
Any reading you do, whether from this list or a discovery of your own will greatly enrich the
discussions we have in class. As a starting point, I would strongly recommend that
everyone reads at least the first few chapters of Raymond Williamss The Country and the
City, which should be available on the Moodle page for the course, along with a range of
other reading, including, where appropriate, set and suggested reading for each week.
The following are either general accounts of the city and literature/culture or accounts of
this phenomenon in the period and region we are covering:

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: an Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism
(London: Routledge, 2003).
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel
(London: Yale University Press, 2005).
Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1870-1914
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Edward Timms and David Kelley, eds., Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern
European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).
Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, and Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Virginia Woolf, The London Scene (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982)
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Max Weber, The City (1921).

For a brief, alternative take on literature and the city, you may like to begin by reading the
following:
Pascal Wyse, What do comics tell us about cities? The Guardian, 9 September,
2014. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/09/gotham-new-york-what-docomics-tell-us-about-cities

2: Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907) The City as a Site of Terror
London is a city of transitions. It is a city of a million houses and no homes; of millions
upon millions of inhabitants and no natives. . . . London is at once the oldest, the
newest, the most stable, and the most fictile of all cities. It is consistent only in its
inconsistency. (Edwin Pugh, The City of the World: A Book about London and the
Londoner [1912]).
This seminar takes as its focus Joseph Conrads novel The Secret Agent. While published
in 1907, it takes as its setting the London of 1894 and an attempted terrorist attack on the
Greenwich observatory. While we will keep the idea of terrorism in mind, we will focus not
on the politics of anarchy but more broadly on the depiction of the city as a site of terror. In
what ways does Conrad build terror into the city itself? How is the scope, variability, noise,
anonymity, and mechanicity of the city portrayed? Rather than conceiving of terror as
merely a thing happening in the city, how can we think of the representation of terror as a
representation of the city?
Essential Reading:
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. John Lyon (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004). This edition includes Conrads short stories The Informer
and The Anarchist as well as his essay Autocracy and War, all of which you
should read.
Suggested Reading:
This week, rather than select specific reading, Id like you all to come prepared with as
much information as you can find relating to the general demographic, geographic, and
economic shifts at work in the United Kingdom in the hundred years or so before the
publication of The Secret Agent. This should take the form of hard numbers (many of
which can be found online) and more general statements describing cultural shifts. This is
a test of your ability to perform contextual research: use the texts and resources Ive
provided, but also seek out your own sources of information. Once you feel you have all
you can get, sort through this in search of the most relevant, interesting, surprising,
perplexing and suggestive material and be prepared to share this in class.
You should also, whether in the research above or in addition to it, attempt to read as
widely as possible in the texts listed in the general preparatory reading. Ideally, each of
you will range slightly differently and we will have a broad set of perspectives on which to
draw.
Further Reading:
There are two excellent books on terrorism and literature that deal in differing ways with
Conrad and The Secret Agent:
Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran
Carson (Oxford: OUP, 2002). Of particular interest is pp. 34-36 from chapter one,
Joseph Conrad: Entropolitics and the Sense of Terror.
Deaglan ODonghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of
Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

You may also be interested in the following:

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911).
___, An Anarchist.
___, The Informer.
Wyndham Lewis, Blast, vols. 1 (1914) and 2 (1915). These magazines can be
accessed online through the Modernist Journals Project:
http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1158591480633184&view=mjp_object
Alfred Hitchcocks Sabotage: A Woman Alone (1936) is loosely based on The
Secret Agent. This should not be confused with Hitchcocks Secret Agent (also
1936), which was based on a pair of Somerset Maugham stories, or Saboteur
(1942), which is unrelated.
3: James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) From Filiation to Affiliation
As we will have discussed in week two, the city represented a different way of organising
associations. A society governed primarily by family ties moved rapidly to one governed by
associations made in the workplace, political organisations, and public spaces. While
considering James Joyces unusually strong attachment to the city of his birth, Dublin, we
will focus in on the way that Ulysses investigates both the psychology of this new
arrangement and the narrative problems and possibilities it unleashes.
Essential Reading:
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus
Melchior (London: The Bodley Head, 1986). You dont need precisely this edition,
but you will need to have a copy of the Gabler edition, which differs in numerous
small but substantive ways from the 1922 edition and has line numbers marked at
the side of the page.)
Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, and Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). [You
should aim to at least skim read the whole book, but make sure you read the main
introduction and section on Joyce carefully and critically.]
Suggested Reading:
Jeri Johnson, Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City, City 4.2 (2000), pp.
199-214.
Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [There are
several relevant chapters, any of which are worth reading. Notably: Introduction:
what hole?; The name and the scar: identity in The Odyssey and A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man; and Skinscapes in Ulysses]
Further Reading:
Michael Begnal, ed., Joyce and the City: the Significance of Place (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2002).
4: James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) The Flaneur
Ulysses has increasingly come to be seen in terms of its flanerie. The flaneur (literally:
stroller or walker) is the city-dweller par excellence in the writings of Charles Baudelaire
and Walter Benjamin. The flaneur is a passionate spectator, a prince who everywhere
rejoices in his incognito, a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each
one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all

the elements of life. Building on the previous weeks discussions, we will be reading the
wanderings of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as potentially flaneurial events, but
we will also ask to what extent Ulysses is itself a flaneur, a kaleidoscope . . . reproducing
the multiplicity of life.
Essential Reading:
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life.
Convolute: M in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) pp.416-455.
Introduction: Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism in Maurizia Boscagli and
Enda Duffy, eds., Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2011), pp. 7-29.
Suggested Reading:
Kieran Keohane, The Revitalization of the City and the Demise of Joyces Utopian
Modern Subject, Theory, Culture & Society 19.3 (2002).
The Vertical Flaneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in The Colonial Metropolis in Maurizia
Boscagli and Enda Duffy, eds., Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 224-249.
Further Reading:
Peter I. Barta, Bely, Joyce, and Dblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Tallahassee:
University Press of Florida, 1996).
5: Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948) The Wartime City
The main focus of this seminar will be on the particular psychological landscape of wartime
London. Building partly on our week four discussions about the modernist flaneur, we will
adapt this conception with reference to the specific possibilities and restrictions of a
landscape constantly under threat of destruction. What is a home that could be destroyed
at any moment? The wartime city is also a space of heightened awareness of friend and
foe. How does the novel dramatise and investigate this psychology? What kind of
relationship between self and other, individual and crowd, does it construct?
Essential Reading:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Vintage Classics, 1992).
Kristine A. Miller, Even a Shelters Not Safe: The Blitz on Homes in Elizabeth
Bowens Wartime Writing, Twentieth Century Literature 45.2 (1999), pp. 138-58.
Suggested Reading:
Petra Rau, The Common Frontier: Fictions of Alterity in Elizabeth Bowens The
Heat of the Day and Graham Greenes The Ministry of Fear, Literature & History
14.1, pp. 31-45.
Saeko Nagashima, Reading Neutrality and Disloyalty in Elizabeth Bowens The
Heat of the Day, Journal of Irish Studies 27 (2012), pp. 5-10.
Further Reading:
Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
Eibhear Walshe, ed., Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).

6: The Drowned World (1962) The Submerged City

Essential Reading:
J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World
Id recommend reading as broadly as possible in Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G.
Ballard, 1967-2008, ed. Simon Sellars and Dan OHara (London: 4th Estate, 2012), but
everyone must read the following selection in advance of the seminar and be prepared to
make specific contributions on the issues they raise and their relation to The Drowned
World:
1968: Uncredited. Munich Round Up, pp. 10-13
1968: Jannick Storm. An Interview with J.G. Ballard, pp. 14-21
1970: Lynn Barber. Sci-fi Seer, pp.22-35
1971: Frank Whitford. Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation
with J.G. Ballard, pp. 36-47
1973: Peter Linnett. J.G. Ballard, pp. 48-55
1974: Carol Orr. How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying, pp. 56-71
1975: James Goddard and David Pringle. An Interview with J.G. Ballard, pp. 81-97
1976: Jrg Krichbaum & Rein A. Zondergeld. It would be a mistake to write about
the future, pp. 99-105
Also read the following pieces, though be forewarned that the second of these deals with a
later Ballard novel that we will not be discussing:
Jim Clarke, Reading Climate Change in J.G. Ballard, Critical Survey 25.2, (2013):
7-21.
Umberto Rossi, Images from the Disaster Area: An Apocalyptic Reading of Urban
Landscapes in Ballards The Drowned World and Hello America,
Further Reading:
The best place to begin would be by reading the accompanying novels in Ballards disaster
triptych: The Burning World (later edited and re-released as The Drought) and The
Crystal World. Ballard was a prolific author and had a tendency to work through a relatively
small number of rich and suggestive ideas, so the wider you read in his work the better.
Perhaps your next step should be his other triptych of urban disaster novels, all of which
engage directly with issues well be discussing in the seminar: Crash, Concrete Island, and
High-Rise.
The body of critical work on Ballard is uneven in quality and scope, so be aware of this
when looking at articles and books. Some of the material in science fiction journals is,
unfortunately, rather poor, but this is by no means the only source of questionable
criticism.
More positively, there have been notable book length studies by David Pringle (the chief
early critic and cataloguer of Ballard studies) and latterly Andrzej Gasiorek, Jeannette
Baxter, and Roger Luckhurst. Gasiorek, in particular, is an excellent starting point if you
are interested in Ballards work.

Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard
(Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1997).

Jeannette Baxter, J.G. Ballards Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Jeannette Baxter, ed., J.G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London:
Continuum, 2009).
Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer, eds., J.G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Will Selfs positive review of The Drowned World is well worth a look:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10273413/Will-Self-on-JG-Ballards-TheDrowned-World.html
7: Zadie Smith, NW (2013) The Hybrid City
In her five novels to date, Zadie Smith has been lauded for capturing the at times
bewildering multiculturalism of the modern city (specifically, though not exclusively,
London). Regularly compared to Joyces Ulysses, Smiths most recent novel is perhaps
her most ambitious attempt to capture the complexity of a London that has been formed in
large part by several distinct waves of immigration since the Second World War. Keeping
the oft-repeated terms multi-culturalism and hybridity at a critical distance, we will
explore the ways Smiths novel envisages the city as both a product and producer of
complex and shifting identifications. Is the city a passive or active participant in the lives of
its inhabitants?
Essential Reading:
Zadie Smith, NW (London: Penguin, 2013).
David Marcus, Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity, Dissent
Spring, 2013, pp. 67-73.
Further Reading:
Philip Tew, Zadie Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Tracey L. Walters, ed., Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
Joyce Carol Oates, Cards of Identity, in the New York Times, Sept. 27, 2012.