ENG 427 - Empire, Revised

Semester Hours: 4

When colonies around the world gained their independence, their literatures began to express how their political, cultural and individual identities had been shaped by their experiences of colonization-by being part of the empire. Often, authors from postcolonial nations found their expression of these experiences by entering into a conversation with their literary ancestors. In other words, they wrote back … to Shakespeare, Defoe, Bronte, etc. Occasionally, these return letters have taken the form of new literary works that offered a revised, postcolonial version of an earlier story, and these are the works that we will consider. So, we’ll read Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Aimee Cesaire’s Caribbean version of the text. We’ll read Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. We’ll take a look at Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys revision, The Wide Sargasso Sea. We’ll consider these texts in light of postcolonial criticism. Graded work is likely to include two shorter papers, one long paper, and a presentation.