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ENG-414 Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

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WELCOME MESSAGE Welcome to Semester - IV ! It gives me immense pleasure to welcome you to PG English Semester - IV. We started our journey together in 2018 when you enrolled for PG English Programme. After the semester IV end examination and declaration of result you will earn your M.A. English Degree. Do study hard and prepare well for the semester end examination and put in a little extra effort to prepare the Internal Assessment Assignments. You are advised to visit DDE Library regularly and make the best use of the books available to prepare notes. You can also prepare simultaneously for the NET/SET/SLET examination and the study material of Course Code : ENG-414 has been prepared keeping in view your syllabus and also your preparation for NET/SLET/SET examination. Do work hard. With best wishes! Dr. Anupama Vohra Course Co-ordinator 1 UNIVERSITY OF JAMMU Course Code : ENG-414 Duration of Examination : 3 hrs. Title : Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Total Marks : 100 Credits : 5 (a) Semester Examination : 80 (b) Sessional Assessment : 20 Detailed Syllabus for the examination to be held in May 2020, 2021 & 2022 OBJECTIVE : The objective of the course is to give the learner a broad perspective on colonial and postcolonial writings in English. It will take into account the ideology of the colonizers and its impact on the culture and traditions of the colonized nations and their desire to create new national literatures. This will constitute the focus of the study. Unit - I Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Unit - II Bapsi Sidhwa Ice-Candy Man Unit - III Chinua Achebe A Man of the People Unit - IV Khalid Hosseini The Kite Runner Unit - V Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children Unit - VI Amitav Ghosh The Shadow Lines 2 Mode of Examination The paper will be divided into sections A, B & C. M.M. = 80 SECTION A Multiple Choice Questions Q. No. 1 will be an objective type question covering the entire syllabus. Twelve objectives two from each with four options each will be set and candidates will be required to write the correct option and not specify by putting a tick mark (√). Any ten out of twelve are to be attempted. Each objective will be for one mark (8 × 1 = 8) SECTION B Short Answer Questions Section B comprises short answer type questions covering the entire syllabus. Four questions will be set and the candidate will be required to attempt any two questions in 80 - 100 words. Each answer will be evaluated for 6 marks (2 × 6 = 12) SECTION C Long Answer Questions Q. No. 3 comprises long answer type questions the entire syllabus. Six questions will be set and the candidate will be required to attempt all the questions in 300 - 350 words. Each answer will be evaluated for 12 marks. (5 × 12 = 60) SUGGESTED READINGS M.M. Mahmood The Colonial Encounter Bill Ashcroft, ed The Empire Writes Back 3 Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth ...... Black Skins, White Masks ...... Studies in Dying Colonialism Ashcroft Griffths and Tiffin, eds. The Postcolonial Studies Reader B. Anderson Imagined Communities Gayatri Chakravorty The Other Worlds Homi Bhabha Nation and Narration Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason : A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar, Status, Giroux, 1984. Wagenbach, Klaus, Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life. Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 4 M.A. ENGLISH COURSE CODE : ENG-414 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page No. Unit - I Joseph Conrad : Heart of Darkness 6 -36 Lesson No. 1 to 4 Unit - II Bapsi Sidhwa : Ice-Candy Man 37-139 Lesson No. 5 to 8 Lesson Writer : Dr. Sunita Jakhar Unit - III Chinua Achebe : A Man of the People 140-246 Lesson No. 9 to 12 Lesson Writer : Dr. Manisha Gangahar Unit - IV Khalid Hosseini : The Kite Runner 247 -317 Lesson No. 13 to 16 Lesson Writer : Dr. Madhu Sharma Unit - V Salman Rushdie : Midnight’s Children 318-383 Lesson No. 17 to 20 Lesson Writer : Dr. Garima Gupta Unit - VI Amitav Ghosh : The Shadow Lines 384-443 Lesson No. 21to 23 Lesson Writer : Dr. Sunita Jakhar 5 COURSE CODE : ENG-414 LESSON NO. 1 COLONIAL & POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE UNIT-I JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) STRUCTURE 1.1 Objectives 1.2 Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) 1.3 Examination Oriented Questions 1.4 Suggested Reading 1.1 OBJECTIVES The objective of this lesson is to introduce to the learner the life and the works of Joseph Conrad to help the learner to prepare for the semester end examination. 1.2 JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) Life and Works of Joseph Conrad Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who later on adopted the simpler pen-name Joseph Conrad, was a Pole and was born to aristocratic parents in 1857 at Berdichev, a town in the Polish Ukraine, then a part of Russia. He spent the first thirteen years of his life here. His family was of land owning gentry, various members of which had fought in the long and intermittent struggle with Russia. His father was an exiled Polish patriot who struggled for Polish independence and was imprisoned by the Tsar’s officials and sent to a concentration camp in Vologoda, North Russia, for his part in the rising of 1863. His mother, a woman of equally exalted character, was also banished. She 6 accompanied her husband, but being a person of weak health, died there after three years. Conrad’s father was a learned man who was revered by his compatriots for his idealism and devotion and adored by his only son. He translated the works of Victor Hugo and Shakespeare into Polish. After completing his sentence, he returned to Poland. He was already a shattered, weak and bitter man. He could not survive for long and died when Conrad was just eleven years old. Conrad was educated at Cracow and being the child of his father he was a great reader, always dreaming of himself enacting what he read. The incident is well known and it has been recorded by him and all his biographers. The boy of nine or so one day, reading the map of Africa, put his finger on a spot in the middle of the still dark continent and said to himself, “When I grow up I shall go there.” He intended to join the university but his fate decided things for him differently. As an orphan, he was placed under the care of his uncle for not less than six years where he used to spend time in educating himself reading in French and German. It is a fact that he knew French from his childhood and always spoke it fluently; but of English not a word till he was sixteen. He was specially influenced by his French tutors, from whose Gallic vanity he got the idea that “French is the only modern language fit for literature.” His chosen masters were French − Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France and Daudet. When he thought of writing the novel of adventure, he combined with it the objective spirit of French naturalism. It was at the age of nineteen that Conrad decided to become a sailor though he was totally ignorant about the life of the sea as there was no seafaring in the family. Probably its appeal was due to the romantic ideas which he gathered from his reading of French books. It is pertinent to remember that he was Slavic and uncommonly introspective, perhaps being lonely from his childhood. When he spoke of “the loneliness that surrounds every human soul,” he unconsciously told what manner of man he was and what he must write. Among other yearnings it was the desire for freedom in the heart of this young boy which prompted him to take this decision to leave for Marseilles in 1874 to become a sailor where he joined the French Mercantile Marine. Conrad’s sense of adventure made him 7 develop another hobby, that is of a gun runner. He took part in several gun- running expeditions on behalf of Don Carlos, a preacher to the Spanish throne. He used his experiences of the adventures as a sailor and gun-runner in his stories and novels, which are largely a reflection of his own personality, which was solitary and shadowy as that of a stranger in a foreign port. It is true also of his character and the human events and the scenes which he describes. Conrad had a background of Slav sensibility and the spirit of Russian novelists, which adds a special quality to his perception of the mysterious and his philosophy of life. After serving for four years in the French Merchant Navy, he landed at Lowestoft and joined the British merchant service. By 1885 he had his master mariner’s certificate. Conrad got a job on a British ship named the Mavis in 1878 though he did not know English language then at all. He decided that if he was to remain a sailor, he would be a British sailor. He became a naturalized British citizen and remained a man apart, a fellow separated from his own people. It took eight years for him to obtain a third mate’s ticket, then a mate’s and finally a master’s. He made several voyages to the Far East notably to Singapore, Borneo and the Gulf of Siam, all of which provided the material for his novels. These places are more than the backdrop of his stories; they provide characters and real situations and their attitudes and value patterns affect their course of action. For instance, Conrad’s short novel, Heart of Darkness is the by - product of his trip to the Congo.
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