London is a great place for the study of world literature, and I’ve arranged field trips that hope to prove it. These field trips are a mandatory part of the course, and they are meant to highlight and contextualize our study in a way that’s unique to this type of program. All of these excursions are included in the cost of the program, except for anything that you might want to pick up on the way, like meals.
I recommend that you take advantage of the first weekend’s excursion to Hampton Court Palace. While I’m not sure if your attendance is optional, I strongly encourage you to experience this impressive structure and consider how it fits into our studies.
Week One
Our field trip for week one will take us to the British Museum, the mother of all museums in the UK. Here, we will examine art, artifacts, and perennial themes from the great civilizations of the past to accompany our readings of Gilgamesh and Homer. We will look at the history and culture leading up to and including the European Enlightenment. Before we study the second part of world literature, often referred to as the “Modern Period,” it’s important to know something about what preceded it.
Week Two
Week two takes us to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and a production of Romeo and Juliet. We will get a behind-the-scenes tour of the theater and discuss its importance not only to Elizabethan England, but also to seventeenth-century Europe.
Week Three
Week three’s readings will address decorum in the texts of Molière and Pope, so we will visit Marble Hill, a house in Twickenham built in the first half of the eighteenth century by Henrietta Howard. As we tour this estate, we will consider aspects neoclassicism and the high society of Georgian England and pre-revolutionary France.
Week Four
Week four’s literary concerns will be with modernism and war. Our field trip will take us to the Imperial War Museum. We began the course with the building of civilizations, studied their growth and culture, and we will end with their decline, both literally and figuratively. We will see that modernism brought with it the technology for mass destruction and the ideologies by which to precipitate it, yet it also suggests a new hope with which to transcend our brutal past.
Take a look at the web sites I link above. I will have specific goals for each place we visit posted in the syllabus, but you may want to familiarize yourself with what each has to offer and what you might be interested in seeing.
