Due 28 September-2 October (send by Wednesday if ready, by Sunday if you need the weekend

No class meeting 29 September; instructor in office to confer, phone, email.

Submission format: Email attachment to instructor at whitec@uhcl.edu, or arrange otherwise. No hard copy.

Submissions are posted (as is) on course webpage by instructor.

Weight: 20-30% of final grade

Organization:

• Essay(s) on Objectives 1-3

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• Research plan (may be incorporated in essay[s])

Essay length: Write one long essay or 2-3 briefer ones

• If 1 essay, 9-12 paragraphs;
• if 2 essays, app. 5-6 paragraphs each;
• if 3 essays, app. 3-4 paragraphs each.

Research Plan Length: 2-3 paragraphs, or incorporate into essay(s) (details at link: Research Plan)

Title your essay(s).

Spacing: No need to double-space, but OK. All electronic copies converted to single-space for onscreen reading .

Prep time and writing time: Spend app. 3-4 hours writing your exam in its final form, but prepare as much as you like or can. Preparations include review of notes and texts, but also outlining and drafting, which you may use as notes when you write your final version.

Your research plan may be either a separate text or part of your midterm essay(s)--whatever works best for you.

Organization: 1-3 Essay(s) on Objectives 1-3

Write an essay describing your learning experience in the seminar, its subject, readings, and objectives . Suggestions appear below, but I'll read what you send me. Course-specific expectations:

• A member of the class would recognize what you're discussing as falling within our subject area, and find the surface style and thematic progression readable.
   

• Reference to leading aspects of objectives 1-3
   

• Examples drawn from shared texts: Crusoe, Lucy, A Small Place, poems. (You may also refer briefly to other texts beyond the course that relate.)
   

• References to class terms, ideas, discussions, issues. (Again you may also refer briefly to terms and ideas from other courses or experiences beyond our seminar.)

If you're really stumped, ask yourself some questions and start building some answers. I'm not looking for this or that particular insight as much as how you respond honestly and constructively to our shared readings and discussions with the objectives (terms and themes) in play.

Purpose of exam:

• Demonstrate comprehension & application of objectives 1-3.
   

• Working knowledge of terms & texts.
   

• Set a path of learning in new territory
   

• Attempt "dialogue" style of criticism, a.k.a. intertextuality

Questions / topics: Write your best essay about the course, its readings, and its subject and objectives.

You can't cover every aspect of Objectives 1-3

Possible Prompts:

• What did you know and have you learned about colonial and postcolonial literature?
   

• What are the field’s attractions? Intimidations? Methods or styles? Applications?
   

• Your reaction to studying texts in dialogue rather than as autonomous texts?
   

• What would you like to learn or achieve, according to what the course offers?
   

• If you were already familiar with our subject, sketch your experience and indicate how it's been confirmed or varied.
   

• Objective 3 describes most Americans' unfamiliarity with our topic. Aside from exoticism or difference, what possible gains or applications are possible for this field of study?
   

• Don't feel intimidated. Keep our materials in sight and write what matters to you. I'll read what you write and help however I can.

Overall, your task as a writer is to explain and demonstrate your understanding of our course's content and methods.

Given Obj. 1, you should consider putting our texts and concepts in dialogue:

Put yourself in dialogue with the course--self / other, known / unknown, familiar / unfamiliar, America / world

Since our course's materials may be unfamiliar, your writing strategy might personalize your essay(s).

One possibility would be to share something of your own literary background, interests, and ambitions, progressing to how this course may or may not match or extend them.

Or address a future student just beginning the course. Guide or help them anticipate the course, assignments, style.

The "path of learning" is another personalizing or humanizing approach. It may sound mickey-mouse at first, but it can take you places, and you can submerge the artificial parts.

• Several references to Robinson Crusoe, A Small Place, and Lucy
   

• References to colonial-postcolonial history and theory in class, web reviews, or other websites
   

• References to handouts or links highlighted in lecture
   

• References to objectives 1-3 (not every word or theme, but what matters and applies to texts)
   

• Optional: poems for course or paintings by Gauguin
   

• Optional: personal references to course, contents, outside texts, knowledge, experience

Evaluation standards: As in most Literature courses, quality of reading and writing is the key to judging excellent work from competent work—not just reproducing data but organizing it into a unified, compelling essay.

• "Unified": Thematic continuity and transitions are essential. Connect parts to form larger ideas. Pause between paragraphs to review what you've written or to preview what comes next. Summarize. Explain. Review and preview.

• "Compelling": Exams require comprehension and expression of instructional contents, but excellence is achieved by students extending or refreshing what they learn with new examples, insights, and expression.

• Style: At the graduate level, competence with surface issues like spelling, punctuation, and grammar is taken for granted. An occasional careless error won't kill your grade, given time pressures, but repeated or chronic errors are remarked and factored.

• Audience: Write so someone in our seminar could recognize your terms and explanations and enjoy your personal contributions and style. Future students may read your essays in our "Model Assignments." Keep the instructor in sight—connect with shared terms and texts, and "write up" in terms of organization and ambition of thought.

Instructor's Reaction & continuing dialogue:

A week or two after submission, you'll receive an email from the instructor including your grade report with a midterm grade filled in and a note responding to your effort and accomplishment.

Consider replying to instructor about your midterm note. Graduate students work with faculty somewhere between master-apprentice and colleagues. Discussing your graded work can be a starting point for learning to interact with faculty. If you don't communicate in this way, look for other opportunities before semester ends. Professors can be intimidating and unhip, but they're used to cooperating if you cultivate chances. We're just older versions of yourselves!

Objective 1.  To bring classic literature of European colonialism and emerging literature from the postcolonial world into dialogue—either conscious debates between authors or exchanges arranged by later readers.

• Essential theoretical terms: Historicism and Intertextuality.

1a. To model and mediate the “culture wars” between the “old canon” of Western classics and the “new canon” of multicultural literature by studying them together rather than separately.

1b. To extend the colonial-postcolonial transition to a contemporary third wave of transnational migration. Alternative terms: post-national, post-race, post-modern.

Objective 2. To theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity, both for colonial and postcolonial cultures.

2a. By definition, the genre of the novel combines fundamental representational modes of narrative and dialogue.

• dialogue as formal but humanizing encounter of self & other

• narrative as direction of personal and cultural history

• Can Colonizers be understood as other than villains? Does dehumanizing the other automatically dehumanize the oppressor? (Moral opposition increases drama, but moral relativism cultivates understanding.)

• May literary fiction instruct students’ knowledge of world history and international relations? Compare to history, political science, anthropology, etc.

2b. To extend genre studies to poetry and film, especially Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, West Indies (b. 1930; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1992).

Objective 3.  To account for Americans’ difficulties with colonial and postcolonial discourse—and learn from this perspective.

3a. Is America (USA) an imperial, colonial, or neo-imperial nation? Or an “empire in denial?”

• Compare and contrast "settler" and "non-settler" colonization

  • settler colonies: USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel

  • non-settler colonies: India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Philippines

  • in-betweens: Latino/a countries like Mexico

• USA as last “superpower” and previous empires like Rome and England.

• Issues of American ignorance of larger world and alternative worldviews

• What are the colonial-postcolonial experiences and literatures of the Middle East?

3b. Does American resistance to or ignorance of postcolonial criticism react to this discourse’s development from outposts of the former British Empire and French / Francophone traditions? 

3c. How may colonial-postcolonial discourse fit into American nationalist and multicultural curricula? If this is your only colonial-postcolonial course, how may it serve your scholarly or teaching interests?