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Literature 592: Special Topics
Studies
in the Novel: Globalization, the Contact Zone, and Cultures in the Plural
winter 2005
Dr. acoykenda@emich.edu
Office Location: Pray-Harrold Hall 603G Wednesday ~ or by appointment ~
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Literature
592: Special Topics
Studies in the
Novel: Globalization, the Contact Zone, and Cultures in the Plural
More
than anything else, the novel serves as a means of transport: it can be a
vehicle for identification with others, differentiation from others, or even
In
order to take into account both the empathetic and ideological aspects of the
novel, we will begin with a classic colonial narrative, Robert Louis
Stevenson’s novella “The Beach of Falesá,” and thereafter focus on the
contemporary postcolonial novel, a thriving literary industry to say the
least. By the end of the class, we will
have traveled by narrative proxy through a variety of countries — the
Caribbean, Africa, Palestine, India, Australia, and Ireland — learning of and
hopefully identifying with cultures quite dissimilar from our own. Along the way, we will ask ourselves how the
cultural institutions of literary representation, especially the politics of
point of view, impact the genre of the novel as a whole, whether it be in terms
of its content, its formal structure, or its reception in different cultures.
Course
Itinerary
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Section One: Contact Zones: The |
Main Assignment: Listserv Responses & Discussion |
Selections
from and videos of Edward Said’s |
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Section Two: Diasporas: |
Main Assignment: 5-pg. Essay on a Postcolonial Theorist |
Selections
from and videos of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Ireland);
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Africa); Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (Britain); and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” (Algeria) |
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Section Three: Former Colonies: |
Main Assignment: Research Proposal & Presentation |
Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things ( |
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Section Four: Occupied Territories:
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Main Assignment: 17-20 pg. Seminar Paper |
The
“Post”-Colonial Novel in Conclusion: Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (Palestine/Israel),
Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark ( |
Texts and Materials
The
following books are available at Ned’s bookstore (http://www.nedsbooks.com/emu/;
483-6400;
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v
v
Michelle Cliff (
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Sahar Khalifeh (
v Arundhati Roy (
v
Seamus Deane (
Many required readings, if not distributed in class, will
be available online at the Halle Library’s Electronic Reserve website: http://reserves.emich.edu/. These include the selections from the other
novels that we will cover in class — Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Beach of Falesá”
(Scotland/South Seas), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Africa), and
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (England/Caribbean) — as well as
biographies, historical background, and literary criticism.
Research
materials will be available on reserve at the
Make sure to print out the Electronic Reserve materials so
that you have a copy to refer to during class discussions. If you experience difficulty printing out
these materials (e.g. they may print in a mirror image), try printing the pages
one by one, so as to not overwhelm the printer with too much memory, or
unchecking the options in the print menu, especially the “Fit to Page” box
sometimes selected by default.
Grading
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17% |
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Listserv Responses
& In-Class Participation |
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25% |
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Five-Page Critical
Essay on Postcolonial Theory Identification of the
Book for the Seminar Paper |
March
14
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15% |
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Four-Page Research
Proposal |
April
4
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3% |
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Research Presentation |
April
25
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40% |
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Seminar Paper (17-20
Pages) |
TBA |
Reading
Responses (17%)
Responses
to the readings of roughly 400 words will be posted biweekly to the class
listserv, emailed in plain text to novel@list.emich.edu and
thence dispersed to all of the members of the class at once. See https://list.emich.edu/mailman/listinfo/novel
to subscribe to the listserv, and then visit the listserv archives (http://list.emich.edu/pipermail/novel/)
to double check that your response went through or view the responses of other
class members. You can pick the readings
from either the first or second week, the third or fourth week, the fifth or
sixth week, and from one week of every other week thereafter to respond to
(biweekly sections which correspond to the folders in the Electronic Reserve),
but you must have your responses posted by Sunday 11 PM so that your peers can
benefit from your insights before class begins.
Each response must significantly engage with at least one of the primary
readings and at least one of the secondary readings assigned in the
corresponding two weeks of class.
Research
Project (80%)
In addition
to the reading responses, there will be one major research project — a
seventeen- to twenty-page seminar paper — with four elements of that project
due periodically throughout the semester.
I strongly recommend consulting with me in my office hours early in the
semester about the possible topics that you might want to pursue in the seminar
paper, as well as stopping by to see me as you reach each new stage of the
project.
Critical Essay on Postcolonial
Theory (25%)
The first
assignment will entail an exploratory five-page paper in which you will
critically examine at least one postcolonial theorist and at least one other
theorist with whom that postcolonial theorist engages: e.g. Fanon and Lacan,
Bhabha and Said, Spivak and Kristeva, and so on. These theorists cannot be from the readings
already assigned for class. For ideas
about which theorists to choose, consult the Post-Colonial
Studies Reader, Encyclopedia of
Postcolonial Studies, or other anthologies available on reserve in the
library, as well as the handout on the exploratory essay, which
is available online: http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/592/poco.htm. The point of this assignment is not to privilege the theory over
the literature, but simply to make you feel more comfortable with and
conversant in the sometimes daunting debates and terminology that inform
postcolonial studies. You can re-use and
adapt this paper for your final seminar paper, in which you will apply these
theorists — or other theorists, should you change directions mid-course — to a
novel of your choice pertaining to the themes of this class.
Research Proposal (15%)
The second assignment will entail
a four-page research proposal identifying the novel (or novels) that you will
discuss in the final seminar paper and indicating how the theorists in the
exploratory essay apply to the novel(s) that you will be examining, or
identifying two new theorists to employ in conjunction with them. The proposal will include the following: an
introductory paragraph, thesis, and outline for your research paper, as well as
a survey of the critical materials that will inform it and a brief annotated bibliography. Your essay may not be on any of the major
novels that we will cover in class (Kincaid, Cliff, Roy, Khalifeh, or Deane),
but it may be on the novels from which we will only read portions (e.g.
Achebe). A list of recommended novels,
from which you will pick at least one to investigate,
is available online at the following address: http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/592/novels.htm.
In the end, the goal is to have our discussion open up to other authors
or other countries that we do not have time to cover in depth during the
semester. Since many of the issues raised in this class pertain just
as well — if not better — to cinema, I very much recommend researching a film
together with a novel should you have any interest in film. However, if you do so, the novel must be at
the forefront of your investigation.
Research Presentation (3%)
The third assignment will simply
entail an informal in-class presentation of the research that you have done for
your final essay on the last day of class, the day otherwise scheduled for the
final exam. You will provide background
on your novel, describe the relevant history of the country from which it
derives, identify your tentative thesis, and offer a synopsis of the historical
context and critical debates pertaining to each.
Seminar Paper (40%)
The fourth assignment will of course be the seminar paper
itself. It will reference a minimum of
six outside sources — including at least one theoretical, historical, primary,
and literary critical text — as well as, should you still find them relevant,
the two theorists that you dealt with in the first exploratory essay. You can reuse any of the previous
assignments, whether responses, the essay, or the bibliography, in the final
seminar paper.
Academic Dishonesty
Plagiarism is a very serious
offense against the Code of Student Conduct.
According to Funk and Wagnalls’ New Standard Dictionary,
plagiarism is the act of “appropriating the ideas, writings, or inventions of
another without due acknowledgment; specifically, the stealing of passages
either for word or in substance, from the writings of another and publishing
them as one’s own.” The general rule is
that if you use three or more words of another writer in a row without
enclosing those words in quotation marks and acknowledging your source, you are
guilty of plagiarism. Turning a paper
in that you wrote for another class for this class, i.e. recycling the same
words for double credit, also constitutes academic dishonesty at EMU. Any academic dishonesty will result in a
failing, zero-percent grade for the assignment.
With the internet, plagiarism is quite easy and tempting to do; however,
the internet also makes plagiarism that much more easy to catch and document,
so do not even think about doing it in this class or elsewhere.
Schedule
Section One: Contact Zones — The
January 10: Introduction
to Course; Read selection from The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (“Globalization”),
providing an overview of postcolonial literature and theory; Handout from Mary
Louis Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”; Watch and Discuss Stephanie Black’s Life
and Debt (86 min.)
January 17: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, No Classes
January 24: Robert
Louis Stevenson Background in the Electronic Reserve (“ER”); Stevenson, “Beach
of Falesá” (ER 188-245); Selections from The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial
Studies (ER, “Alterity,” “Miscegenation,” “Multiculturalism”); Cynthia
Enloe, “On the Beach: Sexism and Tourism,” Bananas, Beaches, Bases (ER
19-41); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam,
“Tropes of Empire,” Unthinking Eurocentricism (ER 137-151) [57/42]
January 31: Jamaica
Kincaid Background (ER); Kincaid, A Small Place; Selections from The
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (ER, “Anglophone Literatures,”
“Nationalism”); Selections from Edward Said, “Imaginative
Geography and Its Representations,” Orientalism (ER, 4 pgs.);
Deidre Lynch and William Warner, Introduction to Cultural Institutions of
the Novel (ER 1-5); Watch Edward Said on Orientalism (40 min.) / Recommended: Complete chapter from Edward Said, “Imaginative Geography and
Its Representations,” Orientalism (ER 49-73); Edward Kamau Brathwaite,
“Creolization in Jamaica” (ER 203-5) [81/12]
February 7: Michelle
Cliff Background (ER); Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (1-99); Selections
from Mary Louis Pratt, “Arts
of the Contact Zone” (ER, 7 pgs.); Frantz
Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (ER 323-26); Watch Frantz Fanon (53
min.) / Recommended: Complete chapter from Mary
Louis Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone” (ER 33-40)
[99/10]
February 14: Michelle
Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (100-208); Selections from M. M. Bakhtin,
“Discourse in the Novel” (ER, 6 pgs.); Selections from Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities (ER 5-7, 22-26, 33-36, 204-6); Watch Imagined
Communities (39 min.) / Recommended: Complete extract from M. M.
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (ER 321-351)
[108/15]
*
Begin thinking about the research proposal and the expository critical essay
Section Two: Diasporas —
February 21: Chinua
Achebe Background (ER); Selections from Achebe, Things Fall Apart (ER
143-67); Selections from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (ER, 20 pgs.);
Ella Shohat, “Renegade Voices” (ER 82-85); Peter Hulme, “Robinson Crusoe and
Friday” (ER 101-102, 108-17); Roxann Wheeler, “‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man’: Racial
Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe” (ER 128-39); Watch clips from Robinson
Crusoe filmic adaptations [78/25]
February 28: Winter Recess
March 7: Arundhati
Roy Background (ER); Roy, God of Small Things (3-83); Akhil Gupta, “The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth
of Commodities: Representations of Time in East and West” (187-208); Homi
Bhabha Background
(ER); Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (ER
29-35) / Recommended: Edward
Said, Culture and Imperialism (ER 62-80) [80/27]
Section Three: Former Colonies —
March 14: Roy, God of
Small Things (84-164); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture
(ER 17-34, 74-78); Watch Rabbit-Proof Fence (93 min.)
[80/21]
* Five-Page Critical Essay Due
* Identification of a Book for the Seminar
Paper Due
March 21: Arundhati Roy,
God of Small Things (165-236);
March 28: Arundhati Roy,
God of Small Things (237-321); Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” (ER 119-24); Background reading on the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict (ER xi-xxix) [84/23]
Section Four: Occupied Territories
—
April 4: Sahar
Khalifeh Background
(ER); Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (5-106); Frederic
Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”
(65-69, 77-80, 84-86) / Recommended: Complete
Jameson article (ER 65-88) [101/9]
* Four-Page Research
Proposal Due
April 11: Sahar
Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (107-207); Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of
Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (3-17) [100/14]
April 18: Seamus Deane Background (ER);
Deane, Reading in the Dark (3-59, 185-246); Ian Baucom, “Among the Ruins” (ER 164-67, 172-76, 184-89) / Recommended: Complete Baucom Chapter (ER
164-89) [117]
April 25: Research
Presentations
TBA: * Seminar Paper Due (17-20 Pages)
[Syllabus last
modified January 9, 2005]