230136 Great Adaptations: Dickens’s Great Expectations in the Anglophone World (S) (WiSe 2020/2021)

Rewriting is a textual strategy that features prominently in postcolonial literatures. In this seminar we shall explore how and with what effect postcolonial writers have responded to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). Starting with a thorough analysis of this canonical text of English literature, we shall then turn to postcolonial engagements with this classic, namely to Jack Maggs (1997) by the Australian author and Booker-Prize winner Peter Carey and to Mister Pip (2006), for which the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Our close readings will focus on categories such as the narrative structure, character construction, setting and themes. Scrutinizing the rewritings’ relation to Dickens’s novel, we will study their critical potential and place them in the wider frameworks of intertextuality, adaptation, rewriting and postcolonialism.

Literaturangaben

Students are advised to you have read Dickens’s Great Expectations by the beginning of the semester.

Please purchase:
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (in a well-annotated edition, preferably Penguin Classics)
Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (1997)
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (2006)
Further material will be provided.