English 5023x2

Postcolonial Literature, Theory, and Criticism

Course Description

This graduate course will involve intensive study of postcolonial literature, theory, and criticism. We will begin by considering the complex nature of key colonialist texts, looking at the way canonical texts participate in and buttress colonial discourses. We will then consider several responses to these colonialist texts, looking at postcolonial attempts to break down and problematise the binary relationships constructed in the service of imperial power. Finally, we will examine three national allegories, considering the emergence of hybrid, yet autonomous, narrative traditions in postcolonies, and considering in general the problems of the concept of nation for the postcolony. You should supplement primary readings with a good deal of secondary reading in postcolonial criticism and theory. ( A bibliography has been provided with this syllabus for that purpose.)

Each student will deliver three short seminar presentations of 4-5 pages (1200-1500 words) and write one 15 page research paper (6000 words). You will select topics on both the seminars and the essays, using your particular critical and theoretical interests to guide you in postcolonial readings. After the second class, which I will lead, all classes will be structured around short seminars. The week before presenting, you must provide the class with a general topic statement, a critical and theoretical bibliography, and copies of articles pertinent to your projects. In research papers, you are encouraged expand on one of your seminar presentations; if, however, you would prefer to address an entirely new topic, you are free to do so. The seminars and papers will be assessed according to several criteria: rhetorical effectiveness, level of independent thought, engagement with postcolonial theory and criticism, and negotiations of controversial issues

Required Texts

William Shakespeare, The Tempest  (Oxford)

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Norton Critical Edition)

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Norton Critical Edition)

V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (Penguin)

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical Edition)

J. M. Coetzee, Foe, (Penguin)

Samuel Selvon, Moses Ascending (Heinemann)

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Picador)

Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Pan Books)

Ben Okri, The Famished Road (Random House)

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies  (Routledge)

Mark Breakdown

Weekly Outline

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua.  Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

---.  Morning Yet on Creation Day.  New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Adam, Ian and Helen Tiffin, eds.  Past the Last Post: Theorising Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism.  New York: Harvester, 1991.

Amhad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Anderson, Benedict.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  London: Verso, 1983.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.  The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Parctice in Post-Colonial Literatures.  New York: Routledge, 1989.

---.  The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Bakhtin, Mikhail.  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.   Ed. Michael Holquist.  Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.   Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

---.  Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky.   Cambridge, MA.  MIT P, 1965.

Bhabha, Homi.  The Location of Culture.  New York: Routledge, 1994. (Pay particular attention to chapters 1, 4, and 6).

---, ed.  Nation and Narration.  New York: Routledge, 1990.

---.  "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism."  The Theory of Reading.   Ed. F. Gloversmith.  Brighton: Harvester, 1994.

Boehmer, Elleke.  Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Brennan, Timothy.  Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation.  London: Macmillan, 1989.

Brydon, Diana, ed. Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2000.

---.  "Re-writing The Tempest."  World Literature Written in English 23.1 (1984): 79-88.

---, and Helen Tiffin.  Decolonising Fictions.  Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1993.

Carter, Paul.  The Road to Botany Bay.  London: Faber & Faber, 1987.

Chatterjee, Partha.  Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.  London: Zed Books, 1986.

---.  The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.  Princeton:  Princeton UP, 1993.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Mdubuike.  Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature.  Washington: Howard UP, 1983.

Clifford, James.  The Predicament of Culture.   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

---, ed.  Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Coetzee, J.M.  White Writing: The Culture of Letters in South Africa.  Yale, MA: Yale UP, 1989.

Derrida, Jaques.  "Racism's Last Word." Trans.  Kamuf, Peggy.  In 'Race,' Writing and Difference.  Ed. Gates, Henry Louis.   Chicago UP, 1986.

Fanon, Franz.  Black Skin: White Masks. Trans. Lam, Charles.   London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968.

---.  The Wretched of the Earth.  Trans. Farrington, Constance.  New York: Grove, 1961.

Fee, Margery.  "Why C.K. Stead Didn't Like Keri Hulme's the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?"  Australia and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 11-32.

Foucault, Michel.  The Archeology of Knowledge.  Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

---.  Discipline and Punish.  Trans. Alan Sheridan.   New York: Vintage, 1977.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis, ed.  'Race,' Writing and Difference.   Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986.

Greenblatt, Stephen.  Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World.  Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988.

Griffiths, Gareth.  "The Myth of Authenticity."  De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality.  Ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson.   New York: Routledge, 1994.

Harris, Wilson.  The Womb of Space: Cross-Cultural Imagination.   Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1983.

Hobsbawm, Eric J.  Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750.  London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.

---. Nations and Nationalism since 1780.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

---, and Terence Ranger.  The Invention of Tradition.   Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Holst-Peterson, Kirstan, and Anna Rutherford.  A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-colonial Women's Writing.  Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1985.

Hulme, Peter.  Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797.  London: Methuen, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism."  Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.

JanMohamed, Abdul.  Manichean Aesthtics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa.  Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983.

---.  "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: the Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature."  Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 59-87.

King, Bruce.  The New Literatures in English. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

McClintock, Anne.  "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonialism.'"  Social Text 31-2 (1992): 84-98.

---.  Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context.  New York: Routledge, 1995.

Memmi, Albert.  The Coloniser and the Colonised.  New York: Orion P, 1965.

Min-ha, Trinh T.  Woman, Native, Other.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Mohanty, C.T.  "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse."  Boundary 2 (1984): 71-92.

---, A. Russo, and L. Torres, eds.  Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Mannoni, Octave. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. New York: Praeger, 1964.

Moore-Gilbert, Bart.  Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics.  New York: Verso, 1997.

Mukherjee, Arun. "Ideology in the Classroom: A Case Study in the Teaching of English Literature in Canadian Universities." Dalhousie Review 66.1-2 (1986): 22-30.

---.  "Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?"  WLWE 30.2 (1990): 1-9.

New, William H.  Among Worlds: An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth and South African Fiction.  Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1975.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o.  Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.  London: James Currey, 1981.

Ong, Walter.  Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.  New York: Methuen, 1982.

Parry, Benita.  "The Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse."  Oxford Literary Review 9.1-2(1987): 25-58.

Pratt, Mary Louise.  Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.  New York: Routledge, 1992.

Rushdie, Salman.  Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991.

Said, Edward.  Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.  New York: Pantheon, 1978.

---.  Culture and Imperialism.  New York: Knopf, 1993.

---.  The World, the Text, and the Critic.  London: Faber 1984.

Slemon, Stephen.  "Bones of Contention: Post-Colonial Writing and the 'Cannibal Question.'"  Literature and the Body.  Ed. Anthony Purdy.  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

---.  "Carnival and the Canon."  Ariel 19.3 (1988): 59-75.

---.  "Cultural Alterity and Colonial Discourse."  Southern Review 20 (1987):

---.  "Magical Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse."  Canadia Literature 116 (1988): 9-24.

---.  "Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing."  Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 1-16.

---.  "The Scramble for Post-Colonialism." Tiffin and Lawson

---.  "Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World."  WLWE 30.2 (1990): 30-41.

---, and Helen Tiffin, eds.  After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing.  Aarhus: Dangaroo.

Spivak, Gayatri.  "Can the Subaltern Speak?  Speculations on Widow Sacrifice."  Wedge 7.8 (1985): 120-30.

---.  In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics.   New York: Methuen, 1987.

---.  The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.  Ed. Sarah Harasym.  New York: Routledge, 1990.

---.  "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism."   Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1985): 756-769.

Suleri, Sara.  "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition."  Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 756-769.

Terdiman, Richard.  Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France.  Ithica: Cornell UP, 1985.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other.   Trans. Richard Howard.  New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

Walcott, Derek.  "The Muse of History."  Is Massa Day Dead?  Black Moods in the Caribbean.  Ed. Orde Coombes.  New York: Doubleday, 1974.

Young, Robert.  Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race.  New York: Routledge, 1995.

---.  White Mythologies: Writing History and the West.   New York: Routledge, 1990.

Journals Dealing with Postcolonial Issues

• Antipodes

• Ariel: A Review for International English Literature

• Commonwealth

• The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

• Kunapipi

• The Literary Criterion

• Mosaic

• New Literature Review

• SPAN

• World Literature Written in English (WLWE)