The Jehovah Project

Essex brickmaker John Cant next to a Roman wall.




I'll be offering the following course for grad students in Comp Lit, Winter, 2007. Students in other departments are also invited.








Contemporary Psychogeographies

Psychogeography, the literary movement now ascendant in Europe, is in one sense as old as mid-twentieth-century French Situationism. Yet it seems as if suddenly everyone has something to say about it. Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian writes approvingly of Iain Sinclair’s “anti-materialist psychogeography.” For Keith Wilson the present moment in travel writing is concerned with “the subjectively associational, the psycho-geographic rather than the topographical.” When British literary icon Marina Warner assembled a conference on psychogeography earlier this year at The University of Essex, she did not have to draw from the literary fringes. There may be some evidence that psychogeography is coming into its own even here in North America, though we might have to ask ourselves what would count. Could it be discovered in, say, environmental critic Timothy Morton’s reconceptualizations of environmental time and space—not to mention time and spice, with spice as an emblem of the blandishments of capitalism? Or should we be looking at the traditional novel in, say, Toronto?

This course is an inquiry into the literary form of the phenomenon, even if psychogeography gets much of its energy and “street cred” from a variety of disciplines, genres, and practices. We begin with the French situation in the 1960’s (students will be invited to read in French if they would like). The centerpiece of the course will be urban novels and recent psycho-geographical works from London, together with books about the 2000-year-old “manufactured landscape” of nearby Essex. We will also read novels from Toronto and consider the built landscapes here in this city.

We could define the city—Paris, London, or Toronto, say—as a place where, in a single afternoon, you might be immersed in urban semiotics, struck by a new aesthetic, and run over by a tram. Your position, in other words, matters. Cities are intense and real—a form of wilderness—and the status of this “real” will be interrogated, especially inasmuch as architectural fragments have a tendency to refer elsewhere in the global economy. Topics will include many aspects of the built environment and its negotiations in time and space, including urban nature and architecture and spectacle, and manufactured landscapes. The vocabulary of Situationism—derive, détournement, flaneur—will find a completely new context in contemporary London. Surrealism, mapping, drifting, street haunting, and contemporary art will come within our purview, but the pleasures of the literary text will be, I hope, paramount. Enjoy.

Readings
Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’ (1993); Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), Walter Benjamin, selections from The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk—1940); Angel Rama, The Lettered City (1996)

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Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Jane Jacob’s Dark Age Ahead (2004)

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Martin Amis, London Fields (1989); Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988); W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (1999), Iain Sinclair, Liquid City (1999), Edge of the Orison (2006), Peter Ackroyd, selections from London, The Biography (2000); Ian McEwen, Saturday (2005); Ken Worpole, 350 Miles, A journey through Essex (2005); Marina Warner, “Memory Maps” (2006-07)

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Susan Buck-Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe”; Patrick Wright, “Industrial bread and a ship full of bombs: some reflections on history and heritage in East London” (2006); Susan Alice Fischer, “A Room of Our Own: Rodinsky, Street Haunting, and the Creative Mind” (2001); Timothy Morton, “’Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem” (2001); Brian Baker, “Maps of the London Underground”; Richard Sennet, selections from The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities, Faber and Faber (1991)

Other readings will be posted before the course begins. Check here: http://www.jehovahproject.blogspot.com/

Evaluation
A research paper will be 60% of the grade. The rest will be participation, and a portion of that will undoubtedly take some stock of our particular urban context and what is happening in early 2007. Stay tuned.