Syllabus
Postcolonial Literature – Introduction , Major issues of postcolonial theory and the role of English
New Zealand Literature (Catherine Mansfield: "The Wind Blows", Witi Ihimaera: " The Whale", Roma Potiki: "Stolen Dreams" – extract)
Indian Literature in English (Anita Desai: "Studies in the Park", Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: "Clothes")
Teaching Practice – reading assignment, no classes
Nigerian Literature (Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart)
Nigerian Literature (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "The Headstrong Historian", "A Private Experience", Jekwu Anyaegbuna: "The Swimming Pool")
South African Literature in English (J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace; Hilda Bernstein: "Room 226")
Australian Literature (David Malouf: Remembering Babylon, Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines ex., Banjo Paterson: "The man from Snowy River", Henry Lawson: "The Drover's wife" )
Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, Samuel Dickinson Selvon: "The Cricket Match" , V.S. Naipaul: "The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book")
Annotation
I. Content of the course:
The seminars will focus on new Anglophone literatures, which have been recently referred to as postcolonial literatures. The theoretical assumptions of postcolonial criticism (Edward Said, B. Ashcroft, Homi Bhabha) and a great amount of postcolonial literature are informed by postmodern and poststructuralist strategies, namely Jacques Derrida’s understanding of western metaphysics as "white mythology" and Michael Foucault’s theory of discourse and his rehabilitation of the Other as a lost dimension of Eurocentric culture. Students will be familiarised with the postcolonial discourse by means of brief extracts but the major focus of the seminars will be an interpretation of primary sources selected from a wide geographical spectrum of contemporary Anglophone literatures.
II. Objectives of the course:
• to introduce students to the major issues of a wide range of new literatures
• to enable students to identify dominant (and distinct) themes in individual literatures
• to enable students to relate the selected texts to their (i.e., the countries’) cultural backgrounds
