London
Costs:
$2,815 program fee*, plus airfare & tuition
*The program fee includes 28 nights of accommodations in London; nine theater tickets; all entrance fees for museums and tours; field trips to Bath, Stonehenge and Salisbury, a one month tube pass, and a special bonus day trip to Oxford. Tuition, airfare, all meals and personal expenses are additional.
Overview:
Explore the theaters, museums, and neighborhoods of this extraordinary city and take two 3 credit courses for upper-level English credit, studying British Theater and British Novels. Literary London runs throughout the month of July. This program, "Novels and Plays in London", focuses on two companion subjects: "Novels In and Around London" and "The London Stage." These courses may be used to meet English major degree requirements (the "Novels" component satisfies the category C requirement), or serve as an elective.
Other Info:
Novels In and around London. In the novels part of the course, you will read one novel each by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf -- in May and June before coming to the U.K. -- and take an exam on them during the first week of class. We will spend most of our class time in July outside the seminar room. We visit the Museum of London to place our novels in the broader context of British material history and we go to the Victoria and Albert Museum to look at clothing and decorative arts from the Regency, Victorian, and Modern periods. In connection with Austen's Northanger Abbey, we visit the 18th-century resort city of Bath, exploring the Jane Austen Center, the Roman Baths and the locations of scenes from Austen's novel. For Dickens's Great Expectations we go to the Dickens House Museum in London and walk through neighborhoods where Dickens lived and worked, and where he set Pip's London adventures. For Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles we will go to Stonehenge and the "Wessex" countryside that Hardy inhabited and wrote about, as well as to the British Library, where the manuscript for Tess is on display. For Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway we will follow the heroine's path through the Westminster and St. James's districts of London, as well as visiting the Roger Fry collection of Post-Impressionist art at the Courtauld Institute and exploring Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury neighborhoods. We will meet in seminar format for 75 minutes, one or two days a week, and requires bi-weekly informal writings about the novels.
The London Stage - The Theater component of the course explores the range of theatrical practice in contemporary London. We will see plays in traditional late-19th century theaters as well as in contemporary and experimental spaces. We will visit the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, a range of 19th and early 20th century playhouses, and the latest theatrical venues in London, including the three auditoriums of the Royal National Theatre. We will read and see a broad range of plays from Shakespeare, to modern classics, to a sample of the most recently written and produced plays available. Specific titles depend on the current productions in London at the time of the course, but we will see at least eight plays as a group. Each student will also choose one play to see and review independently. The course will include backstage visits to the Globe Theatre and the Royal National Theatre. We will study some of the ways theatrical spaces create conditions and expectations for dramatic performance. Students will write review essays about each of the productions we see.
Three Day Weekends – Explore On Your Own
Both classes meet in seminar format or on field trips four days a week, allowing three-day weekends for independent exploration of London, the U.K. and other European locations. While prices in London are generally very high these days, airfares within Europe can be surprisingly cheap.
For More Information
Please contact Andrew Barnaby if you would like to take part in the class via Andrew.Barnaby@uvm.edu.
