English 605 Topic 18 - Postcolonial Rewriting of Imperial Texts

Fall 2009

Instructor:  Dr. Victor Ramraj
ramraj [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Thursday 12:00 noon - 2:30 pm

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Course Description:

This course focuses on a selection of major British and postcolonial literary texts (primarily novels and plays), approaching the postcolonial texts as rewritings, adaptations, or appropriations of the British texts.  Taking our lead from theorists on rewritings of pretexts - such as Edward Said ("original inscription to parallel script"), Homi Bhabha ("camouflage mimicry"), Linda Hutcheon ("parody is repetition with difference"), and Harold Bloom ("anxieties of indebtedness") - we shall examine closely the canonized pretexts and several of their duplications, imitations, parodies, parallels, and interpellations.

Required Texts:

Daniel Defoe's  Robinson Crusoe  (Oxford)
J. M. Coetzee's Foe (Penguin)
William Shakespeare's  Othello (Penguin)
Jean Rhys's  Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin)
Joseph Conrad's  Heart of Darkness  (Penguin)
V. S. Naipaul's  A Bend in the River  (Penguin)
Rudyard Kipling's  Kim  (Oxford)
Michael Ondaatje's  The English Patient (Random House)
William Shakespeare's The Tempest (Penguin)
Aimé Césaire's  A Tempest (Ubu Repertory Theatre)
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (Broadview)
Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (Vintage)

Recommended Additional Reading:

Christopher Hope's  Darkest England (with Conrad's Heart of Darkness)
George Lamming's Water With Berries (with Shakespeare's The Tempest)
Samuel Selvon's Moses Ascending (with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe)
E. M. Forster's A Passage to India 
Ruth P. Jhabvala's Heat and Dust 
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre 
V. S. Naipaul's Guerrillas (with Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea) 
William Wordworth's The Prelude  
Derek Walcott's Another Life
E. M. Forster's Howards End
Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart