Post-Colonial Literature – I

Paper Code: 
ENG 323-B
Credits: 
04
Periods/week: 
04
Max. Marks: 
100
Objective: 

  • The course will enable the students to:

    • Identify key questions and literary forms in postcolonial literature and situate the selected texts in the larger cultural context
    • Understand the discourse of race and ethnicity as discursive constructions that intersect with class and gender as paradigms of identity
    • Develop coherent knowledge of the key historical, cultural and theoretical developments in postcolonial literature
    • Understand the politics of imperialism and trace those writings as a trajectory for reading the subaltern’s subordination to the assertion of agency
  • Course Learning Outcomes
  •  Become familiar with the historical discourses of race and ethnicity in a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts
  • Reflect on how postcolonial literature reflects on the legacies of colonialism, by interrogating the presence of colonial history and structures of domination in a postcolonial age
  •  Gain an understanding  of how to draw on diverse and relevant sources of study, beyond the prescribed texts, for the purpose of understanding the politics of race and nationalism and the questions of history, modernity, identity and language in postcolonial literature

 

12.00
Unit I: 
Mulk Raj Anand

Untouchable 

12.00
Unit II: 
Salman Rushdie

Shalimar the Clown

 

12.00
Unit III: 
Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

 

12.00
Unit IV: 
Amitav Ghosh

The Hungry Tide

 

12.00
Unit V: 
Wole Soyinka

Death and the King’s Horseman

 

SUGGESTED READINGS: 
  • Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin, 2001.
  • Hutchings, Francis. The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton UP,1967.
  • Innes, C.L., and L.B. Reinmann. eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Three Continents Press, 1979.
  • Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin, 2001.

 

Academic Year: 
2020-2021