Research Seminar for Literature Majors (397-0-20)

Topic

Postcolonial Anglophone Aesthetics

Instructors

Kalyan Nadiminti

Meeting Info

University Library 4670: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

From realism to magical realism to postmodernism, postcolonial literatures, ie writing around and after global decolonization, has been busy reinventing the axioms of European and U.S. aesthetics. This course has a simple but weighty premise: how do postcolonial writers harness canonical literary aesthetics in surprising ways? What new modes of pleasure, care, and critique do they generate in the process? Reading five South Asian and African writers Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Arundhati Roy, and Sheehan Karunatilaka, students will learn about the birth and evolution of postcolonial literatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading canonical Anglophone writing such as Waiting for the Barbarians and The God of Small Things, we will encounter how the discipline of English literature began in colonial India, how nineteenth century imperialism incubated power as Orientalism, how South Asian writers adopted Latin American Boom aesthetics in the 1980s, and finally how contemporary postcolonial writing has become imbricated in global markets and prestige culture. The seminar will culminate in a 12-15 page research paper that will emerge from short writing assignments scaffolded to help understand the evolution of postcolonial Anglophone literatures.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Department Majors/Minors Only

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Department Majors and Minors Only. No Freshmen/First Years