SECONDARY READING

[The list directs attention to some of the more prominent discussions of a general kind relating to the postcolonial and the postmodern. Students are expected to search out material on individual authors independently.]

   Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (eds) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 1995)

   Elleke Boehmer Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford & New York: OUP, 1995)

Diana Brydon (ed), Postcolonialism: Critical concepts in literary and cultural studies (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 5 vols.

Framing questions (for assignments)

 1    What is the applicability of terms like postmodern and postcolonial? What are their limits?

2   How do the terms relate to issues of literary writing, genres, style, technique?

3   What are the implications for culture of descriptions which include the post-colonial or the post-modern as features of writing?

3   How does the “post-” as a phenomenon relate to what preceded it?

4   What is the relation between race, colonialism, and post-coloniality?

5   How does the economic, political, cultural as well as linguistic impact of colonialism affect and shape the post-colonial?

6   What is the relation between modernity and modernism in the West and its influence and consequences for the rest of the world?

7   How does displacement and diaspora affect identity at the individual and communal levels?

8   How do the postcolonial and the postmodern interact in specific situations?

9   How do issues affecting gender figure in the post-colonial/post-modern

10  Are post-colonial/post-modern global phenomena?

11  In what sense are the values and preoccupations of contemporary societies shaped or influenced by the post-colonial or the post-modern?

12  What are the ways out of the “post-” phenomenon, for individuals and for cultures?

EN 3262 Lecture and Seminar Timetable

Lectures:  AS01/0304      Wednesdays 12-1.50pm

Seminar: AS01/0203       Fridays or Mondays

Seminar questions

Wide Sargasso Sea

  1.   What is the role of mirrors as image and symbol in the novel?

 2. How do issues of race get mixed with issues of class in the novel? And how is that reflected in the language of the text?

 3. How do issues of gender get reflected in the novel?

 4. What makes it an intertextual novel in relation to Jane Eyre? What is the significance of this intertextual relation?

 5. What is the significance of naming in the novel? and how is it related to issues pertaining to magic (literal and metaphorical)?

 6. If the protagonist and partial narrator of the novel could be said to be triply colonized (by colonialism, racism and patriarchy), how does the activity of writing narrative provide a kind of fictive redress? [Check out the implications of the notion of "redress" through Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry.]

One Thousand Years of Solitude

 1. How would you describe the chief features of the narrative technique of "magical realism"? What is "magical" about it, and where is the "realism"?

 2. In what respects does the colonial and the post-colonial history recounted in the novel share common features with that of other colonized nations? In what respects does is it unique to Colombia or South America?

 3. What is the attitude reflected or refracted in the novel towards societal modernity? How would you link that to the contemporary senses of the "postmodern"?

 4. How does the novelist weave the family-saga genre into a narrative that treats history in a "fantastical" way?

 5. What is the attitude to time conveyed by the novel? Kumkum Sangari has claimed that it is this novel sense of temporality that is unique to the novel and provides its chief post-modern attribute. How would you assess the merits of these claims?

 6. How does the novel mix the comic and the tragic? What effect does this hybridization of genre create? Does it make the novel optimistic? pessimistic?

 7. Would you regard the novel as ambitious ins cope and relevance? If so, why? If not, why?

 Shame

 1. In what ways does the novel depart from the conventions of narrative realism? How is that related to "Magic Realism" and to Postmodern narratives?

 2. Enumerate and illustrate some of the specific connotations of "shame" that the novel claims are culture-specific to Islam and/or Pakistan, and untranslatable into English.

 3. In what ways does the novel serve a feminist agenda? And in what ways does the novel reveal its own patriarchal assumptions?

 4. Rushdie deals with social institutions in a state dominated by religious fundamentalism. How do his preoccupations relate to the problems faced by post-colonial nationalism?

 5. Would you regard the assumptions, values and beliefs with which Rushdie deals with his fictional Pakistan as colonized, or post-colonial?

 6. Give a reasoned and critical response to Aijaz Ahmad's critique of Shame.

Foe

 1. Contrast the intertextual relation between Coetzee and Defoe with that between Rhys and the author of Jane Eyre.

 2. How does Coetzee's Foe differ from and defer to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe?

 3. In what sense is Defoe's novel a colonial text to which Coetzee's novel represents a post-colonial and post-modern response?

 4. How does Coetzee dramatize a blank spot as revealed by the omission of the feminine by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe? How does the narrative strategy adopted by Coetzee subscribe to a feminist agenda? How successfully, in your view?

 5. Give a critical and reasoned response to G.C. Spivak's reading of Foe.

House of Glass

 1. Show how the hunter-hunted relation between the fictional narrator Pangemanann and the nationalist leader Minke is used to exemplify the relation between two kinds of colonial subject.

 2. How would you account for a situation in which Pangemanann admires and respects Minke, and yet brings about his downfall?

 3. In what sense is History the true protagonist of this narrative?

 4. What are the various features that Pangemanann attributes to the colonizer and the colonized, and what lesson for the post-colonial nation does that carry?

 5. Comment on the self-reflexive features of the narrative with reference to the novels This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations and Footsteps, which were written by Pramoedya (the first 3 parts of the Buru quartet, with House of Glass as the 4th), but are attributed to Minke (pp. 117, 176, 297ff, 302ff).

 [more to follow]

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Poems for class discussion: Arthur Yap, the space of city trees

  location (4), old house at ang siang hill (16), in passing (17), statement (29), everything's coming up numbers" (46), inventory" (50), letter from a youth... (52), group dynamics ii (70), down the line (77), sights (98), 2 mothers in a h d b playground (101), still life iv (110)

LECTURE NOTES

Rhys

Márquez

Rushdie

Coetzee

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

(other links to follow)

POSTCOLONIAL links

POSTMODERN  links

IMPERIALISM in HISTORY

The  2  Posts

The  2  Posts: EXTRACTS