Advanced seminar: US Regionen/Ethnien/Neue englische Literaturen und Themen, Motive, Autoren der englischsprachigen Literatur - Writing Back? Contemporary Caribbean American Fiction
Advanced seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date
Wednesday, 19.10.2011 16:15 - 17:45, Room: (Dachritzstr. 12, R. 215)
Studiengänge (für)
MA [neu] Themen, Motive, Autoren der englischsprachigen Literatur;
LA [modularisiert] (Vertiefungsmodul: US Regionen/Ethnien/Neue englische Literaturen);
LA [alt], MA [alt], D [alt] [wahlobl.]
The Caribbean islands form a geopolitical region that comprises many different cultures, languages, and nations. The cultural and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean is a result of the conquest of the area by competing colonial powers since the late fifteenth century. Spain, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States—all claimed Caribbean islands as part of their empire. Hence Caribbean literature frequently revolves around such themes as colonialization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, subjugation and resistance, decolonialization, migration, and nation building.
In this course, we will study how Caribbean American authors revise colonialist discourse and reimagine their cultural heritage from their U.S. American vantage point. How do they address such issues as home, sense of place, and dislocation? How does the experience of immigration and U.S. American race politics affect their portrait of the cultural hybridity and ethnic diversity of their respective Caribbean home countries? How do their texts combine African, Caribbean, and U.S. American literary and cultural traditions? Do they conceptualize identity formation and literary practice from a national, international, or transnational perspective? Drawing on postcolonial theory, we will ask which innovative formal strategies such contemporary Caribbean American and Caribbean authors as Julia Alvarez, Michelle Cliff, Junot Díaz, Brenda Flanagan, Jamaica Kincaid, and Earl Lovelace develop in their short stories and novels to portray the dynamics of intercultural contact and exchange.
Required Books:
Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume, 1996.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. London: Faber, 2008.
Lovelace, Earl. Salt. London: Faber, 1996.
A course reader with additional primary and secondary texts will be available at the beginning of the semester.
Admission settings
The course is part of admission "Anmeldung gesperrt (global)".
