Crowds; advertising; speed; shocks; strangers; anonymity; simultaneity; information overload: The experience of the modern city was inseparable from literary modernism. Focusing on Europe, this workshop will ask the broader question: How does the city shape the way we see, think, and write?

Rather than treating setting as backdrop, we will consider the city as an energy that affects perception, fragments attention, and alters the rhythm of thought itself.

Walter Benjamin described the “the insistent, jerky nearness of the crowd,” and how it created the sensory and cognitive sparks that could fire the writer’s brain, and it’s easy to think of a roster of writers whose brains were similarly galvanised by their urban environment.

Drawing on writers whose work is inseparable from particular cities, we’ll look at how streets, architecture, crowds and memory become engines of narrative rather than mere scenery.

Virginia Woolf’s London,

James Joyce’s Dublin,