Clarissa Dalloway’s Day Walk

You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve got a bit of a surprise . We have one more special event to add to the LLRG Schedule:

Clarissa Dalloway Day

A Women’s History Group event in association with the Literary London Reading Group:

Clarissa Dalloway’s Day on 16 June 2013 starting at 11am.

Celebrating the 90th anniversary of when Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway stepped out onto London’s streets.  Come and join us on our walk from Dean’s Yard, Westminster to Regent’s Park with readings from Mrs Dalloway on location.

We will end with a picnic and discussion led by Clara Jones, PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London. For more info please follow:

Website: womenshistorymonthuk.wordpress.com

Facebook Page: http://goo.gl/zuKAv

‘Site-Writing’ Introduced by Professor Jane Rendell

As this year’s  Literary London Reading Group sessions draw to a close, we are very pleased to announce that Professor Jane Rendell will introduce our final session ‘Site-Writing: Trafalgar Square, Fallujah, and the Truman Brewery’. This will take place on Tuesday, 18 June 2013 from 6.00pm – 7.30pm in Senate House Room 234.

Trafalgar Square: Détournements

Jane Rendell’s essay ‘Trafalgar Square: Détournements‘  published in Site-Writing (2010) was originally written as a talk commissioned by the National Gallery, London and delivered on 6 June 2007. As part of Architecture Week a number of architectural historians were invited to talk about the architecture depicted in various paintings in the gallery, and because of her work on public art it was suggested that she might discuss the sculptures in front of the gallery in Trafalgar Square. On 2 June 2007, after taking photographs in Trafalgar Square, and a weekend before her talk at the National Gallery, Rendell walked down the Mall to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see an exhibition called Memorial to Iraq (2007). This included a work called Fallujah, designed by Studio Orta, written and directed by Jonathan Holmes. Fallujah is a piece of documentary theatre in which professional actors performed the events of the siege among the audience and the artefacts comprising the set in a disused brewery in London’s Brick Lane. The publication of the script, as Jonathan Holmes (ed.) Fallujah: Eyewitness Testimony from Iraq’s Besieged City (2007) also includes material drawn from interviews carried out by the playwright Holmes, drawings of the set by Studio Orta, an essay by triple Nobel Prize nominee Scilla Elworthy, and testimony from those at the heart of the siege: Iraqi civilians, clerics, the United States military, politicians, journalists, medics, aid workers and the British Army. How do we understand London’s spatial and power relationship to other countries through art, theatre and writing? In this session, Professor Rendell will speak about the critical spatial practice of site-writing and ways that we can disrupt dominant operations of power by writing and reading the city itself.

Reading

Extracts from Jonathan Holmes’ Fallujah

“Trafalgar Square: Détournements”, from Site-Writing, Jane Rendell

“Ballons in Fallujah”, from The Guardian, Jonathan Holmes on Fallujah

Professor Jane Rendell is Professor of Architecture and Art, and Vice Dean of Research at the Bartlett, UCL. Her interdisciplinary work explores the intersections between art, architecture, feminism and psychoanalysis, generating new interdisciplinary concepts and processes such as ‘critical spatial practice’ (2002) and site-writing (2005). Her publications includeSite-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002) and the co-edited collection Gender, Space, Architecture (1999). She is currently working on a new book on transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis.

As usual, this event is open to the public; please do invite colleagues, friends, and other varieties of affiliates. We look forward to welcoming you, and the warmer weather, in June!

Kirsty’s Cartoon

I had to publish the cartoon that Kirsty (aka avoidingthebears) has produced for LLRG.  Makes me think of some of the more unsettling  coincidences that are produced by reading terrifying stories about the places where you are walking, drinking or (in Kirsty’s case) sleeping!

 

Dorian Gray’s Crack Den

 

1915-16, London Through the Eyes of a Frenchman: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s ‘Guignol’s Band I and II’, Introduced by Claire Lozier

We’re pleased to be able to announce that Claire Lozier will be introducing our fifth event: ‘1915-16, London through the eyes of a Frenchman: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Guignol’s Band I and II ‘ This event will take place on Tuesday, 16th April from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 234.

One of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century, Céline is also one of the most controversial, mostly due to the anti-Semitic pamphlets he published before and during the Occupation. Written between 1940 and 1945, Céline’s third novel, Guignol’s Band I and II, bears no marks of such hatred. Rather, slipping away from occupied Paris, the book evokes early World War One London where Céline spent 12 carefree months in 1915 and 1916, working as a clerical clerk at the French Consulate after having been injured on the front. Close to the London-based French underworld, his semi auto-fictional protagonist Ferdinand roams the streets of London, where he encounters numerous burlesque characters and tries to escape both from the police and members of the ‘milieu’. Vivid accounts of his seemingly incessant movements combine highly realistic, (geographically) accurate descriptions and incorrect, fantastic representations. Céline knew the London he describes: he worked with maps, made several trips to the city at the time of writing, and received information about the city from a friend who lived there. Several questions arise: Why are Céline’s descriptions of London so inconsistent? How are we to understand his numerous inaccuracies and inventions of Céline’s work? What is the significance of its distortions and inconsistencies? What is the relationship between Ferdinand’s London-based wandering and Céline’s writing?

 

Correction – 8/4/13

It has been pointed out to us that in our publicity statement issued on Wednesday 3 April, it is stated that Céline published anti-Semitic pamphlets during the Occupation. It should be specified that while Les Beaux draps was published in 1941, Céline also published such pamphlets in 1936, 1937 and 1938

 

Reading:

Extract I

Extract II

Extract III

Extract IV

Extract V

Extracts are from the Alma Classics editions… available here (Guignol’s Band I) and here (Guignol’s Band II: London Bridge) if you’d like to purchase them.

Dr. Claire Lozier is Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds. She is the author of De l’abject et du sublime. Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett (Peter Lang, 2012), and of several articles on various aspects of the work of these authors (from their debts to baroque art to their links with contemporary French philosophy). Her new research project focuses on the role played by England and English in the work of French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline.

Spread the word and look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks!

Next Literary London Reading Group – ‘Israel Zangwill’s Whitechapel’ with Dr. Nadia Valman

Portrait of Israel Zangwill by his friend Walter Sickert

As we inch our way towards the Easter break, we are delighted to announce that Nadia Valman will be leading the next Literary London Reading Group, on the subject of Israel Zangwill’s Whitechapel. The session will take place on Tuesday, 19th March, 2013 from 6.00 – 7.30pm in Senate House Room 234. 

Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, Israel Zangwill’s sprawling fictional ethnography of Jewish immigrant life in late-nineteenth-century Whitechapel, was first published in 1892 to great critical and commercial success. Blasting into increasingly politicised public debate about immigration, it gave voice for the first time to Jewish perceptions of living in London’s East End. Through the representation of a diverse and fractured community, Zangwill made questions of modern Jewish identity a weighty, engaging literary subject. Less noticed, however are the ways that in Children of the Ghetto Zangwill rooted the immigrant experience in the environment of the East End itself. The novel’s story is told as much through its locations as its plots, the East End settings of buildings and streets where the particularities of immigrant collective life come into especially sharp focus.

Reading:

Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, Proem, Book I chapters 1, 2 and 22, Book II chapter 11

Text available at http://archive.org/details/childrenofghetto00zanguoft

Nadia Valman is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published widely on Anglo-Jewish literature including the monograph The Jewess in Nineteeth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge UP, 2007) and several co-edited volumes, the latest of which is Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford UP, 2013). She is currently researching the literature of London’s East End

We look forward to seeing you all then.

 

‘Bringing the Boy Back Home: Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Post-War Queer London Novels’ Introduced by Martin Dines

 

After two successful sessions treating ruin and rent strikes London’s streets, our first session of the new year will shift our attention to London’s suburbs. We are delighted to announce that Martin Dines will introduce our third event: ‘Bringing the Boy Back Home: Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Post-war Queer London Novels.’ This session will take place on Tuesday, 15th January, 2013 from 6.00 – 7.30pm in Senate House Room 234.

 

These postwar novels map a variety of queer habitats across London. The most desirable of these, the bourgeois home, corresponds to the new figure of respectable, private homosexual, who avoids the disreputable public spaces of the city. But these texts suggest that such a clear-cut spatial separation is by no means straightforward. What motivates these novels’ ‘retreat’ from the urban ‘underground’ into domesticity? What seems to problematize such a move?

 

Martin Dines is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University, where he also participates as a researcher for the Centre for Urban Studies. He is the author of Gay Suburban Narratives in British and American Culture: Homecoming Queens (2009), has contributed to edited collections on London and Dennis Cooper, as well as publishing articles on topics as various as sitting rooms and suburban gothic. His research is concerned with the relationship between national identity and sexuality.

Copies of the readings are available from the links below (best read in the suggested order):

Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile, 1953

 

Martyn Goff, The Youngest Director, 1961

 

James Courage, A Way of Love, 1959

 

This event is open to the public; please do invite colleges, friends, and other varieties of affiliates! Have an enjoyable holiday season and we look forward to seeing you in the new year.

‘Trouble in Porter Street: A Rent Strike Manual in Fictional Form’ Introduced by Andrew Whitehead

After our first session spent delving into the ruins of blitzed London (thanks to Sebastian Groes for giving a great talk on Bowen and Macaulay) we’re very pleased to announce that Andrew Whitehead will be introducing our second event: ‘Trouble in Porter Street: a rent strike manual in fictional form.’ This will take place on Tuesday, 20th November from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 234.

When the communist novelist John Sommerfield was asked to write an account of how to organise a rent strike, he decided to do so in the form of a short story. The result was Trouble in Porter Street (1939), set in a working-class street in Chelsea. It sold in tens of thousands as a twopenny pamphlet – and was republished in the 1950s. Does it work as agitprop literature? What does it say about the Communist Party’s approach to propaganda? How does Sommerfield engage with a city on the brink of war? Whatever happened to the political pamphlet?

Copies of this pamphlet are available from abebooks for around £10. Or you can download a pdf copy at the following link:

1) John Sommerfield Trouble in Porter Street

Andrew Whitehead, a journalist, runs the London Fictions website http://www.londonfictions.com/. With Jerry White, he is co-editing London Fictions, in which 26 historians, writers and enthusiasts each write about a commanding London novel. It will be published by Five Leaves in the spring.

Spread the word and look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!

“The Fantastic Ruined City”: Blitzed London’s Ruins in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’

Hope you had a fulfilling summer and were able to snatch a bit of time in the sun. The Literary London Reading Group is continuing this academic year, and we’ve got some great sessions planned.

We’re very pleased to announce that Sebastian Groes (University of Roehampton) will be introducing our first event: “The Fantastic Ruined City”: Blitzed London’s Ruins in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day‘ This will take place on Tuesday, 16th October from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 234.

This Literary London Reading Group session focuses on two novels which pay acute attention to the ways in which Blitzed London temporarily offers different perspectives on, and possibilities for the city in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949). The World My Wilderness tells the story of a geographical and mentally dislocated seventeen year old girl, Barbary, who finds refuge in the alternative world of ruined London’s wilderness just after the Second World War. The Heat of the Day is a psychological spy story which points out the Blitz brought about a ‘particular psychic London’ that reveals ‘an overpowering sense of London’s organic power’.  These gendered visions of the ghostly city give us an alternative reading of the traditional relationship between nature and the city we find in the spectacular, post-apocalyptic dystopian visions of London in the literary work of men, whilst demanding a reassessment of conventional perceptions of the Blitz experience itself.

In preparation, please read both novels or the following excerpts (click on the links for the pdfs):

1.     Excerpts from Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness

2.     Excerpt from Chapter 5 in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

Sebastian Groes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton. In 2011 his study of the contemporary London novel, The Making of London, was published by Palgrave. Hope as many of you as possible can attend our first event, spread the word and look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!

‘Theodore Hook and Silverfork London’ introduced by Matthew Ingleby

We’d like to say a big thank you to Brycchan Carey for last week’s talk on Ignatius Sancho. And, we’re pleased to confirm that Matthew Ingleby will be introducing our next event ‘Theodore Hook and Silverfork London.’ This session will take place on Tuesday, June 19^th from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 264.

Theodore Hook, Bloomsbury-born son of composer James Hook, was famous in Regency London as an improvisatore in conversation as much as a controversial wit in the written word. His comic if partisan metropolitan fiction from the 1820s and 1830s, published by the ‘silverfork’ publisher Henry Colburn, represents a neglected niche within London literary history. This reading group session will examine the era-defining ‘silverfork’ genre, whose construction of the city had a long residual effect upon it, and introduce a more-or-less forgotten novelist whose imaginative resemblance to and political distinction from the early Dickens has not received sufficient critical attention.

 

The reading is as follows (click on the links for the pdfs):

1) Extract from Hook’s Maxwell (1830)

2) Extract from Hook’s Sayings and Doings (1824) – this is slightly dark in tone but should be visible when printed.

3) Article by Edward Copeland, ‘Crossing Oxford Street: Silverfork Geopolitics’ from Eighteenth-century Life, Spring 2001

4) Extract from T.H. Lister, Herbert Lacey (1828)

Dr. Matthew Ingleby is a Teaching Fellow at UCL Language Centre, teaching Modern Literature for the UPCH (University Preparatory Certificate in the Humanities). He studied English Literature at Madgalen College, University of Oxford as an Undergraduate and Masters student, and then obtained his doctorate  at UCL, in the English department, where he participated in the Bloomsbury Project, funded by the Leverhulme.

Spread the word and look forward to seeing you all next time!

Ignatius Sancho: An Eighteenth-Century African in London

We’re pleased to confirm that Brycchan Carey will be introducing our next event ‘Ignatius Sancho: An Eighteenth-Century African in London.’ This session will take place on Tuesday, 22nd May from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 264.

Ignatius Sancho’s (1729-1780) origins were African while his earliest memories were of Greenwich, where he was forced to work as a child slave. He persuaded the powerful Montagu family to employ him as their butler, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster. This week we will be looking at a selection from Sancho’s letters and an extract fromThe Life of Ignatius Sancho – this material is available on Brycchan’s website -

We’re pleased to confirm that Brycchan Carey will be introducing our next event ‘Ignatius Sancho: An Eighteenth-Century African in London.’ This session will take place on Tuesday, 22nd May from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 264.

Ignatius Sancho’s (1729-1780) origins were African while his earliest memories were of Greenwich, where he was forced to work as a child slave. He persuaded the powerful Montagu family to employ him as their butler, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster. This week we will be looking at a selection from Sancho’s letters and an extract from The Life of Ignatius Sancho – this material is available on Brycchan’s website - http://www.brycchancarey.com/sancho/index.htm These documents are of great value because they represent one of the earliest accounts of slavery written by a former slave who became known as the ‘Extraordinary Negro’ – a symbol of the humanity of Africans and the injustice of the slave trade.

Brycchan Carey is a reader in English Literature at Kingston University. He is a specialist in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century, and works primarily on empire, slavery, and abolition. His latest book, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761 is about the development of Quaker antislavery thought in the British American colonies, and will be published by Yale University Press in 2012.

Look forward to seeing you all next time!