230472 Narrating Slavery (S) (SoSe 2017)

Slavery is among the darkest chapters of human history in which Britain in particular played an infamous part. The experience of slavery is the opposite of everything we now consider the mainstays of modernity: liberty, individuality, freedom of choice, independence. Writers have struggled to render both the horrors and hardships of the phenomenon and the mentalities that make such gross violation of standards of humanity possible. They have created narratives that aim at providing sense and coherence, an in some cases closure, to the notion of slavery. In this seminar, we will trace the history of British narrative constructions of slavery from early modern conceptions to modern – or rather, post-modern - ‘neo-slave narratives’ which employ a range of fictional and meta-ficitonal devices to explore the potentials and the difficulties of narrating slavery. In the course of the discussion, we will also touch upon some fundamental questions concerning narrativity.

We will read short extracts from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688) as well as of an original slave narrative, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and four contemporary novels: Caryl Phillps: Cambridge (1991), David Dabydeen: A Harlot’s Progress (1999), Laura Fish: Strange Music (2008) and Andrea Levy: The Long Song (2010).

Bibliography

The excerpts will be made available by the beginning of the semester. Please buy your own copy of the other texts:
Caryl Phillps: Cambridge (1991)
David Dabydeen: A Harlot’s Progress (1999)
Laura Fish: Strange Music (2008)
Andrea Levy: The Long Song (2010)