230622 The New English Literatures (S) (WiSe 2008/2009)

English Literature has long ceased to be an adequate term for the literature produced in the English language across the globe. Our field of studies today includes a sprawling production of novels, poems and plays which engage with the pre-colonial history as well as the colonial experience and post-colonial developments in the former Commonwealth countries.

This seminar will provide an introductory survey of the literature written in English (except US American literature). It is of course impossible to cover more than a tiny fraction of the field by reading one text each from a selection of countries or regions, and the texts should not be mistaken to be representative of the writing of that region, even if some of them are now regarded as "classics".

Still, they will serve us as touchstones for a discussion of the issues implied in colonial and post-colonial identity formation and cultural production. We will read novels by Caribbean, (West-)African, Canadian, Anglo-Indian and Australian authors, dating from, and discussing, various phases of the colonial and post-colonial encounters between Britain and other parts of the world. The seminar also aims at applying to the practice of interpretation some of the major theoretical concepts developed in post-colonial theory, such as transculturation, contact zone, hybridity, creolization, the subaltern, and alterity.
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Theoretical texts will be made available in a reader. Please buy your own copy of the following works:

George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

As a course book, I recommend Lars Eckstein (ed.). English Literatures across the Globe: A Companion. UBT 8345. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007.