123423 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2018S)

The seminar offers an introduction and critical approach to Pacific Fictions, specifically Pacific Islands Fictions. Aim is a review of the early installation, 19th-century extension and 20th-century rewriting of the periphery-center paradigm and the discourse of colonialism in works from different literary genres and epochs, with attention to the specific contributions of these genres and literary styles to the discourse. Basic methodology is from narratology, literary history, discourse theory and cultural semiotics.
The Pacific Islands as a geographical region are today called Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, including New Zealand. In Europe, Britain and North America, the region used to be called The South Seas. Continentally, it is part of Oceania.
The Pacific Islands region was explored by Europeans, Britons and North Americans since the 18th century mainly and became the object of intense imperialist division of world regions and of appropriation by colonial powers during the 19th century. Decolonization of the Pacific Islands, generally begun in the 1970s, is ongoing. The historiographic and geographic data and the changes in appellation for the region suggest the eventual de-romanticization, de-exoticization and postcolonialization of images and narratives of Pacific Islands peoples set up in the anglophone tradition since the 18th century. Ethnographic and anthropological discourses intersect with the literary and generally cultural and medial production of racisms and nationalisms.
In the seminar, we are going to begin our investigation of anglophone Pacific Fictions with early travel writing on first contact between indigenous peoples and the British on Pacific Islands, and follow the changes of images and narratives in mainly British Pacific Fictions until the contemporary period, including aspects like intertextuality. Our readings involve concepts from Culture Studies, Postcolonial Studies and theories of globalization, migration, and planetarity.