Aufbauseminar I Thought I'd Try to Write Her a Life Postcolonial Rewriting Di 12.30

There is a large body of fiction describing the native inhabitants of British colonies or other overseas territories from the point of view of the colonial masters. In these texts, non-European characters are given (or, more often, denied) a voice by European authors with very limited knowledge of (and, in some cases, very limited interest in) indigenous societies and their traditions and customs. For a long time, readers of novels such as Robinson Crusoe took it for granted that -savage- characters like Friday whose actual name we never learn have no backstories and no identities of their own. This situation changed with the rise of postcolonial literatures, when writers from former colonies began to revisit canonical European texts and to re-imagine their characters, plots, and motifs from different perspectives, thereby increasing awareness of the gaps and biases in the original texts. The quotation in the title of this course comes from Dominica-born writer Jean Rhys, whose 1966 novel Wide Sargossa Sea is a prequel to one of the best-loved and most widely read of English classics: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë's novel, Bertha Mason, the first wife of Edward Rochester, remains a shadowy presence. We are told little more than that she is -Creole- (that is, the daughter of a white settler in the West Indies, possibly of mixed racial ancestry) and that she is violently insane. Bertha Mason -seemed such a poor ghost,- Rhys explained in 1967, -I thought I'd try to write her a life.- In this course, we will examine several instances of such postcolonial rewriting. We will engage in close, contextual, and comparative readings of (among other texts) Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Robinson Crusoe and Foe, as well as the New Zealand stories of Katherine Mansfield and Witi Ihimaera's Dear Miss Mansfield. While analyzing the complex and multifaceted relationships between these various works, we will discuss the potentials and limitations of the -writing back- paradigm as well as of other, related theoretical concepts from the field of postcolonial studies. As we shall see, postcolonial rewriting can take many forms, and it cannot be reduced to its oppositional and revisionist attitude towards European -master texts,- which provide productive departure points for new creative endeavours. Books to be purchased : (1.) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (Norton Critical Editions, 2001), ISBN: 978-0393975420; (2.) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargossa Sea (Penguin Student Editions, 2012), ISBN: 978-0140818031; (3.) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (Norton Critical Editions, 1993), ISBN: 978-0393964523; (4.) J. M. Coetzee, Foe (Penguin, 2012), ISBN: 978-0241950111. All other course reading will be made available electronically on ILIAS. Anglistik V - Anglophone Literaturen/Literaturübersetzen Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2016 Dr. Frank Michael