LITR 5831 Colonial &
Postcolonial Literature
Lecture Notes
Begin Train to Pakistan
research posts due by Sunday, but if
uncertain, at least email me by Sunday to update on status, when ready,
questions
model research posts
2013
Cristen 2011
midterm review: strong set, esp. re
dialogue--b/w characters, texts, nations or peoples, lifestyles
reading
discussion lead:
review narrator / narrative + dialogue
genres
entertain & instruct
narration pp. 13, 30
77-80 narrative > dialogue > narrative
1. Review
Obj. 2a:
Can literary fiction instruct students’
knowledge of world history and international relations? Compared to nonfictional
learning through history,
political science, anthropology, economics, etc., how may colonial & postcolonial
literature
help more people learn world history, contemporary events, and the global future?
1a. How does Singh succeed (or not) in
representing great historical change as moving personal fiction?
Heather's note on
Rumi
I was first introduced to Rumi many years ago when studying Sufism in an
undergraduate humanities course that focused on texts of non-western tradition.
I learned a whole lot in that course, but I think the biggest thing I took from
it was the understanding that despite the differences among humans such a
culture, religion, gender or sex, or even the time periods in which we live, we
all share a sameness at our cores that unites us in the human experience. Or in
other words, despite our differences, we share universal human emotions such as
love that make us, simply by being human, more alike than we are different. I
think Rumi helped me to understand this because although he is from a different
century, different side of the world, and essentially “unlike me” in every way
on the surface, his work speaks to me on so many levels and I feel that he
expresses in his poetry many of my own feelings and beliefs.
So, I was attracted to the assignment because I think it’s amazing that we can
read a poem by a 13th
century Persian poet who is “unlike us,” and have a strong connection to it
based on our own human experiences, and I believe these kinds of connections
(especially through literature) are what help us break down the barrier between
the self and the other.
I was also attracted to the assignment because I love poems about love, and I
think Rumi, alongside Pablo Neruda, is one of the greatest love poets of all
time!
I wish I could be there this evening and I hope my classmates enjoy the Rumi
poems.
Big question:
How to discuss morality of
colonial-postcolonial issues without recursion to
self-other dynamics?
self / other
>
self / field of exchange or difference / other
What are advantages and risks to
villain-victim model?
Todorov 42, 75,
239 (pluralism)
What other ways are there to think,
at what costs?
Demographic
Transition 169;
x- purity > hybridity
people of color, Tiger Woods or Colin Powell or Barack
Obama or trans-ethnic celebrities, models; what are you?--an American.
Jeanette
reviews son Ryan
nation of laws, nations with treaties (Wilson,
On Human Nature
p. 120)
E. O.
Wilson: Of Ants and Men (PBS documentary 1 October 2015)
Where do ethics and morality fit in discussions of
literature or
aesthetics?
Do we learn? What do we learn?
entertain & instruct
tragedy; Tragedy and Africa
mimesis
(literature may be criticized and valued for the accuracy or fulness of its
representation of reality as we understand it at a given historical moment)
2
mainstreams of western civilization
two ways of knowing reality:
revelation or tradition
direct evidence or
empiricism
Kincaid;
millennialism 8, 72; Crusoe ch. 6; Train 1, 5, 40,
77
notes on India, partition
22 no one in Mano Majra even knows the British have left +
divided
Gandhi, Jinnah
47 Why did the English leave? Independence
step forward > economic freedom
[military challenges]
48 We liked English officers, better than the Indian
48 Freedom? Educated people will get the jobs the English
had
slaves
comrade? X-believe in God
49 All the world respects a religious man
Gandhi: Koran Sharif and Unjeel + Vedas and Shastras
44 [population] phallic worship & son cult
shiva-lingam
Sikhism
11 Juggut Singh (Singh is name associated with Sikh men,
but not exclusively--means "lion")
33 Sikh temple, yellow flag-mast
34 a Sikh symbol
34 scripture, the Granth Sahib
34 Sat Sri Akal
35 picture of the Guru
declarations
16 no one can harm you while I live
66 They cannot escape from God. No one can escape from God
comedy
51 [comic turn] dreaming of jail > next morning
arrested
51 the world will hear about it > policemen taken aback
52 civil attitude deflated Iqbal’s anger
60 [Jugga knows about Independence, Gandhi]
60 All governments put me in jail . . . 61 our fate,
written
64 pants off—Muslim League
68 karma
69 the last to learn gossip are the parties concerned
69 Bribery
69 portrait of Gandhi
70 [Jugga’s resilience]
narrative & dialogue
narrative:
4 very conscious of trains
31 10:30 slow passenger train from Delhi to Lahore
77 early Sept., time schedules going wrong, trains less
punctual
13 a shot rang through the night
30 sound of a shot
84 smell of searing flesh > [no muezzin’s call]
84 [cf. shot technique—replays flames from bungalow]
dialogue
16 no one can harm you while I live
66 They cannot escape from God. No one can escape from God
novel of manners
19 style of smoking, lower-middle-class origin
20 see everything and say nothing
22 not like a Sikh turban . . .
23 Nooran’s father = Mullah
32 peasant family, armed policemen, young man
33 urban accent
33 [manners] + foreign-educated, Communist
35 Iqbal Singh? . . . Bhai Meet Singh
x-what
Iqbal he was . . . name common to all 3 communities
70 caste > other forms of class distinction
Traditional and modern culture
35 where from? > ancestors, not himself
40 Kalyug—the dark age < robbing neighbors’ houses
they never robbed their village folk
41 code of morals < true to friends and fellow
villagers
41 projection of rural society, relation and loyalty to
village the supreme test
41 crime in his blood
42 criminals not born but made . . . pet theories
43 Uncle Imam Baksh, mullah
Question: history or novel?
Obj. 2. To theorize the
novel as the
defining genre of modernity, both for early-modern imperial culture and for
late-modern postcolonial culture.
2a.
By definition, the genre of the novel combines fundamental representational
modes of narrative and
dialogue. These modes
respectively control and decenter storytelling.
-
Alternately, narrative and dialogue respectively
foreground literate and spoken voices. Especially in postcolonial literature the
narrator may be a “literate” voice, while characters’ voices represent
unwritten, spoken, or oral traditions—another intertextuality.
-
How may literary fiction instruct or deepen students’
knowledge of world history and international relations compared to history,
political science, anthropology, etc.?
Default: To learn about “the world,”
read History? Lectures, textbooks, primary sources on actual past, biographical
figures.
What advantages to using fiction /
novels instead? (plus or minus other literary genres like poetry and drama)
What complications? How about historical
backgrounds necessary to process fiction? How much necessary? (or overload?)
Purpose for instructor: offer minimal
necessity of information to manage text.
Novels succeed without historical
comprehension as long as characters and story are compelling.
Outcomes of question:
Historical: European colonization
brought the novel with it as genre for comprehending world change; native
peoples educated in European-influenced schools read novels (Achebe wrote
Things Fall Apart in response to
Mister Johnson.)
Novel as normative, instructive device +
pleasure in storytelling (literature as entertaining and enlightening)
Formal:
Novel’s combination of narrative and
dialogue may be compatible with or adaptable to traditional story-telling
anywhere.
Transition to literacy, breakdown of
single-language world
Novel as “multivocal” permits interplay
of diverse languages or “worlds”
Bakhtin, M. M.
The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
7 The novel is the only developing genre
and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially . . . reality itself in
the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can
comprehend development as a process.
62 . . . in the process of literary
creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of
one’s own (and of the other’s) language that pertains to its world view,
its inner form, the axiologically accentuated system inherent in it.
62 . . . that which makes language
concrete and which makes its world view ultimately untranslatable, that is,
precisely, the style of the language as a totality.
6. To
register and evaluate the persistence of millennial or apocalyptic
narratives, images, and themes as a means of comprehending or symbolizing
the colonial-postcolonial encounter.
Where witnessed previously?
Apocalypse Now
Heart of Darkness
42 flight
of the last hope from the earth
Yeats's "The Second Coming" presented by Danielle
The Second Coming
1820
William Butler Yeats
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Title of Achebe's novel:
Things Fall Apart
intertextuality also with Book of Revelation,
Revelation 13
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a
beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon
his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. . . .
13
And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down
from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,
14
And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means
of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the
beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should
make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and
did live.
71
Tagore
71 Prem Chand
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