Explore History, Culture & Writing

We will discuss questions of memory, history and genre through readings of three fascinating examples of ‘memoir fiction’: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Martin Amis’ Inside Story.

What do we want and expect from life stories? On this online literature course we’ll read a selection of fascinating books and extracts, which experiment in different ways to combine stories of personal experience and literary invention. As well as memoirs the course includes ‘autofiction’ – a description for the work of novelists whose material is, explicitly, their own life – and we’ll explore this tricky and sometimes controversial category of writing. We’ll think too about some of the ethical and cultural questions that writing from life can raise, including privacy and a right of reply, and think about factors that may affect a book’s critical reception.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Explore three ground-breaking works of ‘speculative’ prose fiction, each offering a highly innovative examination of C20 American political populism. From bitter satire, unnerving dystopia, to the lightly comic, we’ll see how the texts embody genuine anxieties of authoritarianism in America. Surely,- ‘it can’t happen here’?

Explore the history and legacy of Akhenaten.

From the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, to Prohibiton and the Depression, this online intertextual course explores the political, social and cultural context of 1920s America through a study of literature, history, music, film and art of the period. With different tutors for each specialism, the course provides a 'taster' in each subject as a gateway to further study in understanding this fascinating period in American culture and society.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Join this course and discover the work of John Locke, the founder of British Empiricism; George Berkeley and his famous view on perception; and David Hume’s fork of ‘relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'.

Learn about the Harlem Renaissance and some of its core artists. Explore the goals and aspirations of the movement and how it impacted 20th century America.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

A reading group focusing on the Argonautica by the Greek poet Apollonius of Rhodes (in English translation).



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This unique and wide-ranging course provides a broad introduction to the three major languages of the Ancient Near East, which together traverse a vast history of four millennia. In them were written some of the great landmarks of world literature, such as the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Sumerian Descent of Inanna.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club: Agnes Varda, where for one day only, we will watch and discuss a film directed by this iconic and influential filmmaker. A development from our existing Cultureplex Ciné-Club courses and taking its cue from the famous Parisian Ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, this incarnation of the film club will offer an opportunity not only to have a taste of what the full Cine-Club course (running throughout next year) has to offer, but it will also allow for the viewing of a Varda film, followed by detailed discussion and debate. The film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context as well as being situated within Varda’s body of work. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami became celebrated and championed internationally, at film festivals, by film critics, on the arthouse cinema circuits. He came to be seen as a director who had revitalised international cinema – Jean-Luc Godard famously quipped that “cinema began with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.” Yet, despite all this international acclaim, the deep Iranian roots of Kiarostami remain often misunderstood or even ignored. This course shall cover the long and rich career of Kiarostami, one inevitably formed by an Iranian context and set of cultural references, and closely examine the different phases of his work, the recurring stylistic and thematic concerns, and his trajectory from little-known Iranian filmmaker to global auteur director.

The oldest profession as practised among the Romans - not for the squeamish.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.