Lingue e culture moderne

English Literature --- master degree

Rewriting the Victorian novel in postcolonial times

Course objectives
This course aims at making the tools offered by cultural and postcolonial studies operative in a diachronic perspective, by focusing on the literary canon and its persistence as authoritative discourse in contemporary writing in English. Instead of focusing exclusively on contemporary works, students will be required to confront the traditional notion of ‘literary text’ and assess whether and how it has been confirmed and/or dismantled by postcolonial appropriations. Coursework will focus on novels from the Victorian period and their respective rewritings (in writing as well as on screen) by authors from the expanding postcolonial canon to explore the role of renarration in consolidating, renovating, and/or contesting literary traditions.

Content

Since Gayatri C.  Spivak’s “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), the notion of rewriting has become central to postcolonial literary theory; and while this approach has been criticized for its failure to debunk the cultural authority of the mother country, English literary ‘masterpieces’ remain a privileged source of material for contemporary productions intending to expose the central role of the Empire in received notions of British identity both at home and abroad.
Starting from arguably the first rewriting to tackle the issue of what Stuart Hall has called the “work” of the colonial moment in literature, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, students will research and analyze some Victorian novels and their postcolonial adaptations, in order to develop an analysis of the use of source material and its interaction with contemporary elements. The students will thus perfect the instruments of literary theory and criticism while at the same time articulate an original reading of the work chosen for their final presentation. The final presentation will include both a short essay and an oral presentation and discussion with the class and teacher.

PRIMARY TEXTS

1. Setting the tone for postcolonial rewritings

-       Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), any unabridged edition

-       Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, [1968] 2000)

2. The legacy of the Middle Passage

-       Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), any unabridged edition

-       Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child (Richmond: Oneworld, 2015) 

3. The land down under

-       Charles Dickens, Great Expectation (1861), any unabridged edition

-       Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

4. Explorers and migrants

-       Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), any unabridged edition

-       David Dabydeen, The Intended (London: Seeker, 1991)

REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY

This section will be updated during the program. Reading material will be uploaded here each week as course assignment. 

Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993)

Spivak, Gayatri C., “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 243-261.