EMPIRE OF SPIES

Emeritus Professor John Higgins, senior scholar, University of Cape Town

Monday 20–Friday 24 January 5.00 pm COURSE FEES R550; Staff and students R275

If there were a collective term for spies, this course suggests the correct term would be an empire: an empire of spies. These lectures investigate the crises around imperial power and the writing of a sample of novels from the genre of the ‘spy’ or ‘espionage’ thriller. In each case, it examines the national and imperial tensions at work around the time of the novels’ writing, and how these work through into the novels’ structures and narratives. In this course we move from the period of nineteenth-century grand imperialism (Kipling) across the First World War and the aftermath of the Second World War (Buchan and Fleming) and into the beginnings of the contemporary period of neo-liberalism and globalisation (le Carré).

Lecture titles

  1. Empire of Spies
  2. Kipling’s Kim
  3. Buchan’s Greenmantle
  4. Fleming’s Live and Let Die
  5. Le Carré’s The Night Manager

Recommended reading

Buchan, John. 1916. Greenmantle. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Fleming, Ian. 1954. Live and Let Die. London: Jonathan Cape. Kipling, Rudyard. 1901. Kim. London: Macmillan and Company.

Le Carré. John. 1993. The Night Manager. London: Hodder & Stoughton

See also Edward W. Said’s now canonical Culture and Imperialism, and particularly its chapter on Kipling’s

Kim, for an excellent overarching survey of how the culture of imperialism manifests in and through narrative.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554739301

Professor John Higgins is a Fellow of the University of Cape Town, and was formerly Arderne Chair in the English Department there.  A member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, he is the author of the award-winning study Raymond Williams: literature, Marxism and cultural materialism and, most recently, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa.  His most recent publications include An Excluding Consensus? – grants and loan schemes and the need for equitable access to higher education and (with Tor Halvorsen) ‘Growth or Solidarity? The Discourse of the SDGs’.