ENG 612: Global Modernisms
The early twentieth-century was a period of tremendous social upheaval, political re-alignment, and demographic dislocation. In response, writers and artists crafted radically experimental works that attempted to capture the rupture between the present and the past. This art movement is generally called Modernism. Often ignored and ridiculed in their own time, European modernists like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Pablo Picasso are now household names. Yet, their lives and works only tell part of the story. The vicissitudes of modernization and globalization were not a uniquely European experience, nor were the European “innovations” in art and literature geographically singular. This course explores how authors and thinkers from around the world questioned, troubled, and, sometimes, even celebrated the frenetic pace of technological, cultural, and political change during this period. In no particular order, we will hop from China to Brazil, Japan to Egypt, Russia to Senegal, Lebanon to Bohemia, India to Portugal, and Oxford, England to Oxford Mississippi. Along the way, we will consider how global economic, social, and political change was articulated through local perspectives, and investigate what it means to be “modern.” This course will feature theoretical readings on globalization, quite a bit of fiction, some poetry, and, in keeping with modernism, strong language and adult situations.
ENG 671: Studies in South Asian Literature
Cracking India: The Partition of India in Literature and Film
The twentieth century witnessed the dismantling of the great European empires and the emergence across Asia and Africa of modern independent states. Among the most dramatic of the national liberation struggles that effected this outcome was the movement that brought to an end the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent in 1947. While this achievement is justly celebrated, the deep melancholy and ambivalence that marks the postcolonial experience was already evident in the very birth of the two most populous nation-states of South Asia, India and Pakistan. The South Asian people’s desire for political independence turned out to be possible only on the basis of the partition of the British colonial domains along religious lines. The Partition was surrounded by unprecedented violence.
While literature in the decades immediately following the Partition reflected upon various facets of this social trauma, there remained a curious silence over the event in the intervening years until Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children reopened the conversation in the 1980s. This course will examine the Partition using novels, short-stories, and films from the Indian subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora produced in English and South Asian vernacular languages. Discussions in class will focus on key themes in the texts: the breakdown of everyday life; homelessness, dispossession and migration; the construction of national identities, citizenship and belonging; communal (religious community-based) hostilities and the residues in postcolonial South Asian societies; gendered violence and women’s predicament, and issues of memory. Further, we will ask how and to what extent varying aspects of experience are available to the literary imagination at different moments in history, and how this imagination’s modalities of representation changed in the half-century following the Partition.
ENG 673: Romantic Literature and the Caribbean, 1761-1834
Starting with Tacky’s Revolt and ending with Emancipation, this seminar will explore Black resistance to plantation economies in the British West Indies, particularly Jamaica. Black abolitionist geographies will be traced through three types of primary texts: 1) life narratives of formerly enslaved people, 2) journals and histories written by European colonizers, and 3) contemporary historical fiction by Black British writers set within this period. By juxtaposing Romantic-era and contemporary texts, the seminar will focus on the role of the literary imagination, or what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” in recovering histories of Black Caribbean geographies.
