King's College London

The cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries surged with light, money, ideas, and people. New aspects of city life included the arrival of electric modes of mass transit, new technologies of communication, luminous arcades filled with consumer goods, and opulent palaces for commercial entertainment. Successive waves of newcomers sought a better life amidst the bright lights, swelling the cities with restless endeavor. Photographers, artists, poets, journalists and others looked to capture this era of rapid urban change, and make sense of the metropolitan spaces unfolding outwards and upwards before them. Where there was illumination there was also shadow. Amidst the dazzling opportunities offered by the metropolis could also be found its benighted citizens, those whom fortune did not favor. Outcasts and malcontents shared the city’s public spaces, from time to time terrorizing middle-class imaginations. It is this tension of extremes – between the city filled with prospects and the city as the terminus of hope – that this course explores. Focusing on four cities where the possibilities and pitfalls of modernity were felt especially keenly, weekly readings and discussions seek to comprehend what it was like to experience profound transformations in urban living. Rather than try to understand the four case study cities in totality across more than half a century, the course offers specific excursions into the social and cultural histories of London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris. 

The course introduces students to the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which its set texts emerge and explores the diverse ways poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists have engaged with their historical moments and written the city. The course is arranged in reverse chronological order, to give a sense of digging down into the strata of London’s accumulated meanings. The course also helps lay the foundation for students' own writing life in London over the course of their study at King’s. 

This course examines the challenges women filmmakers have faced, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. It introduces students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s onwards, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production, and with a focus on questions of female authorship. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life and social experience? Analyzing the work of female filmmakers who have broken with or resist institutional and aesthetic conventions, and who work primarily on the margins of mainstream industries, this course will address the relationship between film form and ideology. 

This course introduces key works of modernist literature, mostly written in English, though several are by émigré writers. It examines the ways in which modernists developed new forms, whether narrative, poetic, or dramatic, through which to reimagine the representation of consciousness, character, personality, subjectivity, memory, and time. The first half of the course focuses specifically on modernist experiments with narrative voice, exploring the ways that modernist writers such as Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce playfully complicated the relationship between reader and narrator. In the second half of the course students think in more depth about experiments by writers such as T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf with time, memory, and un/consciousness. 

The course provides students with a theoretically-grounded understanding of the role of the European Union as an international actor. Using theories of international relations, European integration and Foreign Policy Analysis, it analyzse and evaluate the EU’s evolving external identity and policy capabilities across a range of external relations, including membership conditionality, trade and development, international crime and terrorism, asylum and immigration, foreign, security and defense policy, and democracy and human rights promotion. The course then examines the nature of key bilateral relationships between the EU and selected countries (US, Russia, and China) and regions (former colonies, regional groups), explaining the extent to which they have been institutionalized and the challenges that define them. It will end by assessing what sort of international actor the EU ‘is’ and ‘wants to be’ – namely civilian, normative or military – and evaluating the likelihood of the EU emerging as a global superpower in the future.