17360

SoSe 16: S-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Postcolonial Studies II: History, Empire and the London Flaneur

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

Through the eighteenth century the shape of the world was changing rapidly with the expansion of global trade networks and an increase in scientific voyages, exploration and discovery. More often than not these voyages were associated with, or resulted in, various forms of colonisation and the consolidation of empire. In Britain at least, the rapidly expanding global reaches of empire were accompanied by similar movements of rural populations into major urban centres. By 1801 regional migration into London had expanded the city’s size to the extent that it was, by then, the largest urban centre within Europe, counting over one million citizens and expanding further over the next decade to one and a half million. It is therefore understandable that such dramatic changes in the shape of the world would induce intense anxiety on the part of many of its citizens. Whilst some Romantic writers advocated a return to nature and the countryside as a way of dealing with the changes of Modernity, a new generation of early-nineteenth-century urban writers began to explore the intricate spaces of the city, and in particular, of London, as a means of either embracing or of contesting the kinds of global expansions and teleogical progress inherent to the changing shape of the British Empire. This course will examine the work of early-nineteenth-century writers who took to the streets of London as a way of exploring history and memory in the spaces of the imperial centre. Using Bejamin’s concept of the flâneur, Chakrabarty’s concept of adda, and Ranciére’s concept of ‘the shop of history’, students will consider the extent to which strolling, walking and loitering might be seen as very early destabilisations of British colonisation and the expansions of Empire.
Set Texts: Charles Dickens, Night Walks Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior the the beginning of semester.
Assessment: one 4000-word essay due after the end of semester Schließen