Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- OT-ANG17-390.05
- Title
- Elective Specialisation: Race, Class and Gender in Postcolonial American Literature
- Usual semester
- Autumn
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- The Aim of the Course is to introduce students to the concept and operation of the postcolonial (relying on the intersection of race, class, and gender) in a selection of texts from American literature.
- Course content
- What is postcolonialism? What kind of literature is the staggering body of writing that we call postcolonial? How do we, at this point of juncture, in the 21st century, read European colonialism and its aftermath with an eye on first and second modernity? How can we make sense of and react, with prudence and responsibility, to major contemporary concerns issuing from our postcolonial world, such as ecological disasters, extreme poverty, food injustice, forced migration, racialization and racism – only to name a few? To sensitize ourselves to these burning concerns, we will explore major processes and terms of postcoloniality from the perspective of race, class and gender as conveyed by postcolonial scholarship, and zoom in on American (African American, Haitian-American and white woman) writers with a variety of postcolonial experiences in their ouevre, reading their respective narratives for fun and guidance. The course is a seminar, relying, as always, on class discussions.
- Assessment method
- n Oral presentation with handout (1-2 page summary of presentation with bibliography distributed to instructor + all participants), active class participation, end-term quiz with in-class essay. n Attendance: to obtain your grade, please make sure you miss no more than 3 seminars. n Evaluation/Grades: Oral presentation, class activity: 50% + final quiz and endterm essay: 50% of the grade
- Bibliography
- Compulsory Literature: Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845): Preface, Chapters I, II, III (www.gutenberg.org) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23?msg=welcome_stranger Nella Larsen, Passing (1929): Dropbox or copies in SEAS Library Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (1961): Read book to the end of the chapter titled November 10-12: Dropbox Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). Prologue, Chapter 1: Dropbox Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988): Dropbox Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” (1983): Dropbox Danzy Senna, Where Did You Sleep Last Night (2009): Dropbox David Henry Hwang-David Cronenberg, M Butterfly (1993). Movie Suggestions for Further Reading and Research: Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. (Second edition). London: Routledge, 2007. — pdf Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (1719) http://mek.oszk.hu/10300/10389/10389.pdf file:///C:/Users/admin/Downloads/feedbooks_book_102.pdf Goldberg, David Theo. ’Racial Europeanization.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2006 (29:2), 331-364. — pdf Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Literature, Animals, Environment.London: Routledge, 2010. — pdf Innes, C. L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge, New York, ect: Cambridge UP, 2007.—pdf Marzec, Robert P. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. Palgrave, 2007. — pdf Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif, 1983.” -- pdf Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2003. – pdf