130106 PS Sozialgeschichte der Lit. (PS): Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2017S)

1) How is Aimé Cesaire responding to Shakespeare and the entire Western discourse of Enlightenment in his play Une Tempete? What myth is Cesaire trying to debunk? Apply the critique of Enlightenment of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer in Dialektik der Aufklarung (1947) to the representation of nature/culture in The Tempest and Une Tempete.

2) Compare the nature/civilization debate in Shakespeare, Defoe and Cesaire. What discourses are behind these representations? Trace the development of discourses on nature from Shakespeare (Renaissance and Romantic) through Defoe (Enlightenment) and to Cesaire (postcolonialism).

4) How is Chinua Achebe writing back to European colonial of representations of Africans, particularly those found in Conrad? Analyze various aspects of Things Fall Apart in which Achebe is asserting the value of Igbo culture and responding to the Euro-centric images of Africans. Do you agree with Achebe that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a racist work?

5) How is colonialism both present and absent in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre? How does this destroy the novel’s aspiration to freedom for the main protagonist?

6) How is the woman’s condition in British Victorian society represented in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre through various Others? The main Other is of course Bertha, but there are also Oriental women, slaves, and other women in Rochester’s life.

7) How is Jean Rhys responding to the image of Bertha in Jane Eyre (1847) in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) from a postcolonial perspective? Focus on the themes of madness, disability, death, and split identity from a postcolonial perspective (rather than a psychoanalytical perspective). How does race, gender, class and money intersect in the colonial environment? How do racism and sexism work through each other, preventing Rochester from understanding Antoinette?

8) Analyze Wide Sargasso Sea as a modernist text and explain the political meaning of modernist style in this novel that rewrites the realist novel Jane Eyre. Discuss modernist elements, such as highly subjective narrative voices, polyphony of narrative voices, free indirect discourse, flashbacks, split identity (e.g., consider the function of mirrors in the story), the subconscious, alternative states of consciousness (madness, dreams, day-dreams), the role of the imagination in the construction of identity, and others. How do all these create a tangled, unstable story with many mysteries unsolved? What is the meaning of the parallel interpretation of events? How is Antoinette a more real woman than women in Jane Eyre?

9) Analyze Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a myth of Enlightenment that expresses the ideologies of the time such as: scientific thinking (empiricism), rationalism, materialism, utilitarianism, individualism, capitalism, imperialism, nationalism and racism. Ideologies are sets of ideas that serve certain needs – for example, to conceal inequalities and exploitation based on class, race and gender, and in this way to maintain power. Analyze contradictions or silences in the text that subvert the ideas of Enlightenment (that progress and freedom is achieved through rational economic activity).

10) How is J. M. Coetzee responding to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in his novel Foe (1986)? Analyze how Coetzee is responding to several discourses at the same time: colonial, Enlightenment, Eurocentric and patriarchal, writing a novel that is at once postcolonial, post-Enlightenment, post-Marxist, postmodern and feminist. In addition, Coetzee is concerned with the idea of authorship, the author as someone who has authority to tell the story. Why is this so important in relation to colonialism, patriarchy and slavery? Why is the story narrated by Susan, rather than Friday?