English 7079
Post-Colonial Studies 1: Imagining Islands
Classes: Wednesdays, 10-1
Instructor: Dr Fiona Polack
Office location: A3006
Phone: x8055
Email: fpolack@mun.ca
Figured as utopias and dystopias, paradises and
penitentiaries, islands have long proved a rich and
malleable imaginative terrain for creative writers. This
seminar course will examine how the space is constructed
both in canonical island texts including Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as
in contemporary writing by authors such as J.M. Coetzee and
Aimé Césaire. Because islands are quintessential colonial
spaces, the theoretical framework for the course will be
drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from postcolonial
studies. Our broad aim will be to focus on islands both as
sites of lived histories, as well as suggestive grounds for
shifting metaphoric constructions.
Primary texts
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Aimé Césaire, A Tempest
J.M. Coetzee, Foe
Wayne Johnston, The Custodian of Paradise
Richard Flanagan, Death of a River Guide
Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands
Julian Barnes, England, England
1
Assessment/Expectations
At the graduate level it is taken for granted you will
faithfully attend every class, always have the required
reading completed on time, and will participate fully in
class discussions. Not meeting these basic expectations
will make it exceedingly difficult for you to pass the
course. The formal component of your assessment is as
follows:
1.
2.
3.
Seminar Presentations 30% (15% X 2)
Short Paper (2000 words) 20%
Long Paper (4000 words) 50%
1. Seminar Presentations 30% (15% X 2)
Students will present two oral presentations, each of 25-30
minutes, over the course of the semester. A good
presentation melds both text and theory, and is cognizant
of the historical conditions surrounding the production of
the work it addresses. You must be original, and
especially scrupulous not to repeat work you have produced
in other contexts. Speak from notes if you wish, or
without if you feel comfortable doing so. Each
presentation will be followed by a question and answer
session.
2. Short Paper (2000 words) 20%
Within two weeks of your first seminar presentation submit
a reworked and polished copy of your original paper. This
new version should take into account the findings of other
papers presented on the text, and the subsequent
discussions in class. It should also contain a
comprehensive bibliography.
3. Long Paper (4000 words) 50%
At some point before 31 October (at the latest) you need to
have constructed a research question to address in your
major essay, and discussed it with me. In terms of broad
parameters, your long paper should compare a minimum of two
texts from the reading list, neither of which you have
presented a seminar on. Your topic should address some
aspect of the way space and or place are created in the
novels.
2
Selected List of Secondary Readings
You will find the following books and articles useful in
developing your thinking for the course. Those marked with
** have been placed on Reserve:
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso,
2006.
Appardurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
-------------Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts.
London: Routledge, 2000.
-------------The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Baldacchino, Godfrey. ‘Islands, Island Studies, Island
Studies Journal.’ Island Studies Journal. 1.1 (2006):
3-18.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge,
1994.
------------Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha.
London: Routledge, 1990.
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Blunt, Allison, and Gillian Rose (eds.). Writing Women and
Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New
York: Guilford, 1994.
Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global
Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007.
Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: an Exploration of
Landscape and History. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. [available in
electronic format through the MUN Libraries Catalogue]
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century. Harvard: Harvard University Press,
1997.
Edmond, Rod, and Vanessa Smith (eds). Islands in History
and Representation. London: Routledge, 2003.**
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans.
Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.**
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating
Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.**
_____ ‘”The Litany of Islands, The Rosary of
Archipelagoes”: Caribbean and Pacific
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Archipelagraphy.’ Ariel: A Review of International
English Literature. 32.1 (2001): 21-51.
Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent
Land, Marquesas 1774-1880. Honolulu: University Press
of Hawai’i, 1980.
Gillis, John R. Islands of the Mind: How the Human
Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York:
Palgrave, 2004.**
----------- and David Lowenthal.
‘Introduction.’
Geographical Review 97.2 (2007).
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of
Islands. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific,
1993.
Hay, Peter. ‘A Phenomenology of Islands.’ Island Studies
Journal. 1.1 (2006): 19-42.
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the
Margins. London: Routledge, 2001.**
Gillis, John R. ‘Places Remote and Islanded.’ Michigan
Quarterly Review 40.1 (2001): 39-58.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
5
Karem, Jeff. The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural
Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.
Lowenthal, David. ‘Islands, Lovers, and Others.’
Geographical Review 97.2 (2007).
Loxley, Diana. Problematic Shores: The Literature of
Islands. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.**
Marzec, Robert. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of
Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
McCall, Grant. ‘Nissology: the Study of Islands.’ Journal
of the Pacific Society 17:2-3. 74-85.
Mills, Sara. Gender and Colonial Space. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
O’Carroll, John. ‘The Island After Plato: A “Western”
Amnesia.’ Southern Review 31.3 (1998): 265-281.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
-------Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994.
Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies
of Modernity.
London: Routledge, 1990.
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Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. Empire Islands:
Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest.
Castaways,
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007.**
Woods, Gregory. ‘Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of
Marooned Masculinity.’ Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine.
London: Routledge, 1995. 126-148.
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Draft Schedule
Part one:
Contexts
10 September
Introduction
17 September
Reading Island Spaces:
D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who
Loved Islands’
Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith,
‘Introduction,’ Islands in
History and Representation
Diana Loxley, ‘Introduction,’
Problematic Shores: The
Literature of Islands
Michel de Certeau, extracts from
The Practice of Everyday Life
Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of
Islands’
Part two:
Ur-texts
24 September
The Tempest
1 October
Robinson Crusoe
8 October
Treasure Island
Part three:
Rewritings
15 October
A Tempest
22 October
Foe
Part four: Case studies
29 October
The Custodian of Paradise
5 November
Death of a River Guide
12 November
Books and Islands
19 November
England, England
8
26 November
Conclusions
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