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1st 6 weeks 1st Semester

Above: British rulers in Nigeria

Above: Chinua Achebe, a Post-Colonial writer, who wrote such greats as Things Fall Apart.

Above: Nadine Gordimer. One of the most famous Post-Colonial writers.

Above: Cover of book regarding Post-Colonial Literature.

Above: the lower section of the map shows the area still owned by Britain to this day. 

Monday March 24th- Friday March 28th

(This begins our section on Post-Colonial Literature)

Due THIS lab day: Virtual Power Point tour of a city in England continued....  We will continue with the last of the presentations in class.  Please have your TYPED reports on five cities ready to turn in next week. 

In-Class: Presentations of the city you are working on. If there is time remaining, we will look at a piece of post-colonial literature so please be sure you have your Prentice-Hall book with you. 

Assignments: Read the following stories, then write up a paragraph for each story, giving a brief summary. When you have finished writing the synopses, add an additional paragraph, explaining in your own words, what makes these stories so different from other British literature you have read so far. (Hint: consider the multicultural aspect). 

• "The Lagoon", by Joseph Conrad,  p. 828

• "Shooting an Elephant", by George Orwell p. 906 (May be read in class)

Be sure to PRINT out and bring this assignment with you next week. 

TYPE up your report about the cities you "viewed" in class.  

STUDY and review pages 809-822, (20th century history), this will be your LAST history test for the year. 

Links:   The Joseph Conrad Society

           Information on George Orwell

           Info. on Nadine Gordimer

           Info. on Margaret Drabble

Background Information: 

In the course of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the demise of European imperialism, new national or so-called 'post-colonial' literatures have also emerged (e.g. in the West Indies and in Africa), a process that gathered pace as political independence was acquired and cultural decolonization intensified.  Given that writing in English by women and by non-white persons has largely flourished for obvious historical reasons only since the mid-nineteenth century or later, much emphasis is also placed accordingly on providing courses in modern and contemporary literature by writers drawn from these categories (e.g. "Black British Prose Fiction" or "West Indian literature" or "Contemporary Women Poets").  

An introduction to the historical development of the field is the indispensable pedagogical foundation upon which the study of the variety of literatures that exist in the twentieth century and thereafter must be predicated.  The relatively new literatures that have emerged especially since the demise of European imperialism and which are so often described as ‘writing back’ to the dominant English and American canon cannot be fully understood if one has little or no idea of the literary and other phenomena to which these writers are supposed to be 'writing back.'  For example, Walcott’s Pantomime or Selvon’s Moses Ascending make less or even little sense apart from the intertextual relationship which they share with Robinson Crusoe, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea from Jane Eyre.  The list of such relationships linking post-colonial literatures, not least West Indian literature, to the Canon is endless.

(http://humanities.uwichill.edu.bb/RLWClarke/Literature/StudyingLiterature.htm)

On a purely practical level, the post-colonial body of works is necessarily by a group of authors the majority of whom have grown up in the cold war era. World War II is a phenomenon that has shaped deeply the world in which they, along with the relatively newly independent countries about which they write, have developed. Concern with the WWII era is a logical phenomenon in any literature that examines the strange ways of history; thus, it is a logical preoccupation of post-colonial works.

(http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/uk/lively/livelyhist1.html)

The gradual demise of colonial empires in the course of the 20th century and the emerging cultural self-esteem of former colonies resulted in a plethora of "new literatures" in recent years. As these literatures seek to define the many voices of the previously marginalized "other" they establish a claim to cultural identity, but they also challenge the very 'identity' of the hitherto mainstream culture. Cultural critics and historians have responded to the changes postcolonialism brought about, and recent theories of postcolonialism are questioning our established concepts of cultural authority. This seminar will examine some of the theoretical responses to the rise of postcolonial cultures/literatures and it will test the validity of these theories against the backdrop of literary texts by writers from the former colonies.

(http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/nes/hsos.html)