Module Directory

Memory Maps is concerned with writing on the landscape of this region - the ways the wilder reaches of Essex and Suffolk have been depicted. On field trips (if available and appropriate), we will have the chance to explore these literary landscapes and experience these worlds for ourselves.

A new genre of literature has been emerging very strongly: moving between fiction, history, traveller's tales, and memoir, it explores the spirit of place. Writers bring in personal associations and experiences, as well as stories attached to locality. Sometimes called psycho-geography, it has roots in the English essay tradition, and in sixteenth and seventeenth century meditations by Thomas Browne, for example, and Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy. The tradition has been most vividly taken up and given a new contemporary twist by other writers in the eastern stretches of England: Ronald Blythe, who has lived and written about the area for several decades; W.G. Sebald (his book The Rings of Saturn is set along the East coast) and Iain Sinclair, who has followed in John Clare's footsteps, also partly in the region (The Edge of the Orison, 2005).

The aims of this module are:

• To introduce participants to a wide range of writing and other text (prose, poetry, art, architecture) centring on place - and specifically on Essex and Suffolk and neighbouring counties ('the East')


• To introduce participants to new research on how text may be read and understood by reference to how 'place' functions within a range of texts and genres


• To emphasise that memory mapping includes a set of discovery procedures, including reading, critical reflection and crucially participation in those processes that 'make spaces places'


• To examine critical instances where history (diachrony) intersects with the present (synchrony) in the act of observing (i.e. gazers apprehend depths as well as surfaces - but how can both depth and surface be satisfactorily understood and described?)


• To provide a space, in workshop or other settings, for the development of a substantial and innovative piece of written work which may combine critical with the creative

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Have questioned a range of writing relating to 'the spirit of place'.


2. Have examined critically non-written text relating to representations of 'the East'.


3. Have developed practical skills in the field of description.


4. Have furthered your understanding not simply of how others have seen place but how others have used place (for forms of worship, defence, flight and political defiance).


5. Have completed an innovative and substantial piece of written work and will have had the chance to workshop the ideas which underlie it.

Preparatory Reading: (copies of these books will be needed for the module):

This list is indicative and may be subject to change.

• Canton, James. Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape (Oxford: Signal, 2013)


• Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography (2nd revised edition, 2010)


• Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage, 2002)

Supplementary reading:

• Clare, John. The Journal; Essays; The Journey from Essex (edited with an introduction by Anne Tibble) (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980)


• Conrad, Joseph. The Heart of Darkness (1899 - any good edition)


• Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places (London: Granta, 2007)


• Sinclair, Iain. The Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's Journey out of Essex (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005)


• Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

You might also like to look at the V&A website:

The skies, trees, ponds, rivers and light of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk still resemble closely the vision of some of the country's greatest artists, in spite of ecological, social and historical changes. It is one of the oldest inhabited parts of the British Isles, a landscape marked and shaped by human presence, history and activity, from the pastoral hinterland to the estuarian bustle, including light and heavy industry. Several of the artists who have lived and worked in the area have not confined their interest to the clouds and streams alone: horse-trading, shipping, historical connections to trade and empire, bridge-building and car works figure in their vision. The archive of Recording Britain, kept at the V&A, with works by Michael Rothenstein, John Nash, Kenneth Rowntree, as well as pastoral woodcuts by Eric Ravilious, enrich the picture greatly.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/memorymaps/

This module will be delivered via:

• A weekly 2-hour seminar