Reconfiguring Landscapes
HUM 3285: British and American Literature
Spring 2011
Dr. Perdigao
April 1-4, 2011
Intersections
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Both Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize
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Ireland, St. Lucia
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Postcolonial attitudes and ideas
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“responsibility” of poet
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Division, recovery
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Inheritance—what is given and received can be imagined
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Inheritance as burden and source
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
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Born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, family farm called “Mossbawn” to Roman
Catholic parents; Northern Ireland predominantly Protestant, Irish Republic (south)
largely Catholic
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1947 UK Education Act made education more accessible to poorer families,
specifically Catholics
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1953 While Heaney was at St. Columb’s College, Derry, his 4-year-old brother was
killed in road accident
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1957-1961 Attended Queen’s University, Belfast, majoring in English Language
and Literature; urged to do postgraduate work at Oxford but decided to become a
teacher
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1961-1963 Postgraduate teacher’s training diploma; part-time postgraduate work at
Queen’s
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1965 Published Eleven Poems
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
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1966 Published Death of a Naturalist, won Geoffrey Faber Prize, Gregory Award
for young writers
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1968-1969 renewal of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland
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1969 Door into the Dark published; discovered P. V. Glob’s The Bog People
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1970-1971 Guest lecturer at UC-Berkeley
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1971 Conflict in Ireland; Heaney returned to Northern Ireland
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January 20, 1972 “Bloody Sunday”: British paratroopers fired on unarmed civil
rights demonstrators and killed thirteen; Heaney resigned from Queen’s; family
moved to Republic of Ireland
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1973 Visited Aarhus, Denmark to see the Bog People
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1975 North published
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1979 Field Work published; spent term at Harvard
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
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1980 Preoccupations, collection of essays, published; Selected Poems, 1965-1975
published
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1980-1981 Nationalist prisoners in Northern Ireland staged hunger strikes; Heaney
took five year contract at Harvard
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1983 wrote An Open Letter, an objection to inclusion in anthology as a British poet
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1984 Station Island published; Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvaard;
mother died
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1986 Father died
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1987 The Haw Lantern published; received Whitbread Award
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1988 The Government of the Tongue, second collection of essays, published;
Professor of Poetry at Oxford
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1990 The Cure at Troy and New Selected Poems published
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
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1991 Seeing Things published
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1995 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; The Redress of Poetry, third
collection of essays, published
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1996 The Spirit Level published; awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Award
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1998 Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 published
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1999 Translation of Beowulf published; awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year
Award
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2001 Electric Light
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2006 District and Circle (won T. S. Eliot Prize)
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2010 Human Chain
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
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“bog” as “‘memory bank,’ or unconscious, that preserves everything thrown into it,
including the victims of ritual killings” (2823).
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Poet of earth and poet of air
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Space for the marvellous as well as the murderous
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Private and public
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Poet’s complicity in the violence, “beauty and atrocity” (2823)
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
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Derek Walcott (and twin brother Roderick) born in Castries, Saint Lucia in British
West Indies; Methodist upbringing in largely Roman Catholic society (2586)
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Grandmothers African descent; grandfathers white, Dutchman and Englishman
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Grew up learning Standard English, official language of Saint Lucia, and French
Creole (patois)
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St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and University of the West Indies in Jamaica on
Colonial Development and Welfare Scholarship
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Moved to Trinidad, worked as book reviewer, art critic, playwright, artistic director
of a theater workshop
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Boston University professor
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Nobel Prize in Literature (1992)
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English literary tradition and the history of a colonized people
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
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Published first poem “1944” in 1944
Writes first plays between 1946-1947
25 Poems printed in Trinidad in 1948
1962 In a Green Night published
1964 Selected Poems published in the U.S.
The Castaway and Other Poems published in 1965
1967 premiere of play Dream on Monkey Mountain in Toronto
1969 The Gulf published
1970 Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays published
1976 Sea Grapes published
1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom published; election to the American Academy and
Institute of Arts
1981 Founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
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Collected Poems, 1948-1984 published (1984)
1990 Omeros published
1992 awarded Nobel Prize for Literature; first Caribbean writer
1998 What the Twilight Says (essays)
Tiepolo’s Hound (2004)
The Prodigal: A Poem (2007)
2007 Selected Poems
2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for White Egrets
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
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Calls self “schizophrenic,” “mongrel,” “mulatto of style” (2586)
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Island “traded hands fourteen times in colonial wars between the British and the
French” (2586)
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“cross-cultural inheritance,” source of “pain and ambivalence” (2586)
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Use of “multiple forms, visions, and energies” (2586)
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Connections to Yeats and Joyce as colonials, with worship of English language and
hatred for British Empire
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Asks “how the postcolonial poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of British
colonialism and appreciate the empire’s literary gift” (2587)
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Cites Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Lowell as influences
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
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“I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited
by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a
society of style” (2587)
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“A Far Cry from Africa” (1956, 1962): “how choose / Between this Africa and the
English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give? / How can
I face such slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live?” (2588)
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“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” (1981): “Then all the nations of birds lifted
together / the huge net of the shadows of this earth / in multitudinous dialects,
twittering tongues, / stitching and crossing it” (2590)
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Omeros (1990): Ma Kilman, No Pain Café, as sibyl and obeah (2591)
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Story of Philoctetes
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
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Stories of “magic, suffering, and the vitality of human beings in the grip of history”
(Norton 2852)
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Literary renaissance in India
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Rushdie self-identifies as coming from Bombay but being from a Muslim family
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“‘My’ India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity”
(2852).
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Educated at Cathedral School, Bombay (Mumbai) and King’s College, Cambridge
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Lived in Pakistan, England, working as actor and freelance advertising copywriter
(1970-80)
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Grimus (1979) followed by Midnight’s Children (1981), those born around
midnight on August 15, 1947, when independent state of India was formed (2852)
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“we’re all radio-active with history” (2853)
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
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Magical realism, influence of Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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“political-historical storm” with publication of The Satanic Verses; riots in India,
Pakistan, South Africa; senior religious figures in Iran accused him of blaspheming
Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Muslim faith; fatwa calling for his death (2853)
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Went into hiding for a decade under protection from British Secret Service
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“vulnerability of the intellectual in the face of fundamentalism” (2853)
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Fatwa lifted in 1998, allowed him to reappear in public but life still under threat
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His claim the text shows the uprooting, disjuncture, and metamorphosis of the
migrant condition, metaphor for all humanity (2853)
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Problems of hybridization and ghettoization, reconciling old and new
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
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Says novel “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that
comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas,
politics, movies, songs” (2853)
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Exile, outsider, immigrant
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)
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Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria
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Educated in English, church schools and University College, Ibadan before joining
Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, director of external broadcasting from 1961-6
(2622)
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After Nigerian civil war (1967-70), Achebe taught in the US, returns to University
of Nigeria; distinguished professor at Bard College
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Things Fall Apart (1958), role in African fiction; protagonist Okonkwo; set in late
19th century, before arrival of Europeans, during British imperial “pacification” of
southeast Nigeria from 1900-1920 (2623)
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Economic trade, missionary religion, political control as power of British; reactions
by villagers “puzzled, intrigued, co-opted, enraged, divided against themselves, or
killed’ (2623).
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“challenged many of the West’s entrenched impressions of African life and culture,
replacing simplistic stereotypes with portrayals of a complex society still suffering
from a legacy of Western colonial oppression” (2622).
Framing
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Adrienne Rich’s “Frame”—multiple points of view; insider vs. outsider; witness vs.
participant; silence vs. voice
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Complicity in violence
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Power over another; disempowerment