MLU
Seminar: Aufbaumodul Anglistik Literatur I - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: Aufbaumodul Anglistik Literatur I
Subtitle The British Empire: Reading the Caribbean
Semester SS 2019
Current number of participants 23
Home institute Englische Literatur und Kultur
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Monday, 01.04.2019 10:15 - 11:45, Room: Seminarraum 9 (R.2.36) [EA 26-27]
Pre-requisites erfolgreich abgeschlossenes Basismodul Literaturwissenschaft
Learning organisation Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Penguin Classics No. 105: 2016.
Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. ed. Robert Murray Davis. Penguin Books.
Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Performance record Referat und Klausur
Studiengänge (für) BA Anglistik und Amerikanistik (90 und 60)
SWS 2
ECTS points 5

Topics

Introduction, Behn, Oroonoko, Thomson, Rule Britannia, Waugh, Handful of Dust, Walcott, Omeros, Exam

Module assignments

Comment/Description

In our course we will focus on representations of the British empire, centering locally on developments and situations in the Caribbean. Beginning with Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko (1688), the Caribbean features as a place of fascination (the fertile tropics! the beautiful natives! the benign weather!) and of horror (plantation slavery and slave rebellions! the killer climate! degenerate colonials!) in the British imaginary. Thomson's poem "Rule Britannia!" (1740) echoes very well the mercantile benefit seen to accrue off global luxury goods and general British trade expansion in the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the Empire, a more pessimistic view of a Caribbean Green Hell as the repository of all horrors of the British imperialist past shapes Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel, A Handful of Dust (1934), in which the Caribbean has become to place where gentlemen go to die. With post-colonialism, and the Empire writing back, Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990) presents a masterful blend of colonial past, post-colonial present, oral literature and Western literary canon into a Caribbean epos. Walcott received the Noble Prize for Literature two years later, in 1992.
Please obtain the editions listed above with the exception of Thomson's poem, which will be provided in Stud-IP for download. Primary text knowledge will be tested. Course requirements for this module will be discussed in detail in the first session!