This course considers the major literary texts of colonial and postcolonial literature with an emphasis on the shifts of the human experience. Students will survey texts from the 19th and 20th century in order to scrutinize issues of identity, imperialism, gender, and narrative style. The aim of the course will be to bring colonial and postcolonial texts into dialogue with each other in order to think about the ways in which modernity and tradition connect in the past and present.

By juxtaposing these literary periods, the course will also position literature in its social, historical and intellectual space while allowing students to comprehensively practice reading it. We will inspect a works by Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott and others that will be used to generate critical analysis and discussion so that students can attain a better understanding of the ways in which postcolonial literature influences, rewrites, examines, and contradicts colonial readings. These texts will comment on, and often contest, the traditional historical and social representations of literature and for that reason, they serve as springboards for student discussions and papers. Course evaluation requirements include a rigorous reading schedule, short response papers, student presentations, in-class participation responsibilities, and a midterm and final paper that will require substantial revision to meet the W-course requirement.


Texts:

•Heart of Darkness – Conrad
•Things Fall Apart – Achebe
•A Passage to India - Forster
•The Namesake - Lahiri
•Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
•A Small Place – Kincaid
•English 200D Reader – Available at Ave Copy (4141 University Way)

Poetry:

•“Gunga Din” - Kipling
•“Koenig of the River” – Walcott
• “A Far Cry from Africa” - Walcott
•“The Second Coming” – W. B. Yeats
•“The Ghost of Roger Casement” – W.B. Yeats
•"Passage to India" – Whitman

Texts: