Postcolonial Tales of Transition

This course focuses on postcolonial British, Caribbean, and Southern-African works that exemplify, complicate, or refashion the category of the bildungsroman, the "novel of education." Issues to be considered include the ways the texts rework archetypal tropes of initiation, rebellion, development, and the interplay of contradictory passions. We will also think about ways in which issues of race, gender, and sexuality emerge in the texts, and the connections or disjunctions between literature and "the real world." Writers will likely include Dangarembga, CLR James, Ghosh, Ishiguro, Joyce, Kincaid, Lamming, Naipaul, Rhys, Wicomb.