Courses Offered

Virginia Woolf’s London (3 credits)
    ENGL 489 (prerequisite ENGL 443) or ENGL 490
Cosmopolitan London (3 credits)
    ENGL 199 or ENGL 499

Virginia Woolf's London
This course will immerse us in modern London and its environs, as we read the works and explore the haunts of novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. We will select our readings, and our London rambles, from a range of fiction and nonfiction works. The readings may include: "The London Scene," a collection of inspired travel essays that roam from London’s docks, Oxford Street, and the city’s Abbeys and Cathedrals to “Great Men's Houses”; "A Room of One's Own," her meditation on women's education and women's rights; "Mrs. Dalloway," her beautiful exploration of gender, class, and disability in the inter-war years; "Three Guineas," her exploration of the economic foundations of education, the professions, and war; and Orlando, her brilliant fable of gender and artistic genius. Drawing our inspiration from these readings, we will visit sites in and around London, such as the British Museum, the Fawcett Library, Regent’s Park, the London Transport Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms, and the National Gallery, as well as the ancient university towns of Oxford or Cambridge, the famous "white garden" of Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst or the celebrated ancient country house, "Knole." Together, we will explore Woolf’s portrait of London in the first four decades of the twentieth century: as a site of dramatic change in human relations, as gender, sexuality, ability, and even the human being were tested, contested, and redefined.

Cosmopolitan London
What distinguishes a tourist from a traveler? An immigrant from an expatriate? In order to address these questions, this course will cover a wide variety of representations of London life by writers from England and elsewhere. We will consider London’s role as the bureaucratic seat of empire, a world financial center, and — as one of the most international cities in the world — a potential site of cosmopolitan human connection and alienation. The course draws on literary texts from the Victorian era to the present, as well as theoretical texts about cosmopolitanism and urban life. Inspired by readings such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Padraic O’Conaire’s Exile, and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, we will discuss the ethical and practical questions raised by international movement and cultural difference, and examine the different visions of London and Londoners that the literature conveys. We will also explore these views of London in person, through a series of excursions around the city.

Eligibility

The program is open to all students with a minimum 2.5 grade-point average. Applicants are considered on a first-come, first-served basis. Students are encouraged to apply early, as enrollment is limited.

Faculty

Emily Sharpe, a doctoral student in English, studies British, Canadian, and American modernisms, with an emphasis on nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and identity. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on international writings about the Spanish Civil War. This project examines the ways in which writers and participants related issues at the core of the conflict — including democracy, socialism, fascism, feminism, and colonialism — to their home countries.

Susan Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies, English, and STS (Science, Technology, and Society) at Penn State, University Park. The courses she teaches span modern literature, women’s studies, literature and medicine, and science and technology studies. Her first edited collection, Women Writers and the City, explored the imaginative power of the urban landscape for women writers. For her next book, Virginia Woolf and London, she read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and manuscripts in libraries and special collections in London, Sussex, England, and New York City in order to examine how the city helped Virginia Woolf carve a workable environment for herself as a woman in modern England. Since then, Squier has published on twentieth-century medicine, literature, and culture in Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994) and Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004); she has edited a number of collections concerning the relations between literature and significant social phenomena (Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism and Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture); and she has co-edited several (Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction, with E. Ann Kaplan, and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited with Helen Cooper and Adrienne Munich). She is about to send to the publisher her most recent book, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet. Professor Squier has won the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award at Penn State and the Stephanie Pavoucek Shields Award for Mentoring. She is an avid traveler, having lived in London for more than a year and spent several summers there doing research for her books. She loves to walk in the city.