Seminar Islands and Exiles Caribbean Writing in English Mi 8:30-10:00

This course will trace the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean writing in the twentieth century. (It should be noted that the phrase -Anglophone Caribbean writing- refers to English-language texts by poets, playwrights, and novelists from though not necessarily in the West Indies, as opposed to texts by British explorers, settlers, and historians about the West Indies, some of which go back to the early modern period.) Our point of departure will be the pioneering poetry of Jamaican writers Claude McKay and Una Marson. After the completion of his first two verse collections in 1912 (including Songs of Jamaica, which we will discuss in class), Claude McKay emigrated to the USA, where he would go on to become a popular novelist and a key protagonist of the Harlem Renaissance. By contrast, the majority of Una Marson's work is either unpublished (her plays survive only in manuscript form) or out of print, even if her poems especially the pieces collected in The Moth and the Star (1937) have recently received more critical attention. The second section of the course will be devoted to the path-breaking early fiction of George Lamming and Sam Selvon, who emigrated to England in the post-war years. Here, they helped to create the -phenomenon- of West Indian literature (as Lamming would later describe it) by using their position as émigré writers championed by London publishers to write some of the first widely circulated narratives about life in the colonial West Indies and/or about West Indian migrants in Britain. In our readings of In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and selected stories from Ways of Sunlight (1957), we will focus on some of the recurring features of Anglophone Caribbean writing (such as the use of dialect forms) which these writers helped to establish. In the third section, we will investigate how West Indian writing has repeatedly drawn on, and critically engaged with, canonical English texts about the Caribbean. We will consider three examples: Derek Walcott's complex reinterpretations of the figure of Robinson Crusoe (from Daniel Defoe's eponymous 1719 novel) in several poems, in a lecture, as well as in the play Pantomime (1978); Jean Rhys's -writing back- to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) in her celebrated novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); and, finally, Pauline Melville's playful incorporation of parts of Walter Raleigh's The Discovery of Guiana (1596) into her short story -Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water- (1990). Books to be purchased : (1.) George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Longman Caribbean Writers, 1979), ISBN: 978-0582642676; (2.) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargossa Sea (Penguin Student Editions, 2012), ISBN: 978-0140818031. All other course reading (poems, short stories, excerpts from novels, and Walcott's play) will be made available electronically on ILIAS. Englisch (MA, PO 2013) Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2016/17 Dr. Frank Michael