A critical survey of the relationship of techniques of literary representation to important political struggles and cultural conflicts. From 19th Century Realism and the “Two Nations”, through colonial and postcolonial struggles, into the conflicts and crises of the twenty-first century, and the modes through which they find their expression.
We will engage not just with important texts but also with theories of representation, aesthetic manifestoes, and avant-garde publications. Texts studied include both canonical novels and more contemporaray work engaging with the politics of representation in fiction, several through provocative and transgressive narrative strategies.
It will benefit students to have already read the following novels in advance of the seminar: Mary Barton (1848) by Elizabeth Gaskell, Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad, and Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf. These three texts will be the focus of the first few weeks of the course and they are all, in different ways, very challenging reading experiences. Please also note that certain important texts for later in the course also have limited availability in the library and so should also be read as far in advance as possible: the most notable ones are Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight (1980). |
