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Postcolonial Literature and Film Criticism

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Postcolonial Literature and Film Criticism UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD University Offices, Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JD Ref. FOI/20190205/5 07 February 2019 Reply to request for information under Freedom of Information of Act Your Ref Email of 5 February 2019 Address [email protected] _ I would like to request reading lists and lecture notes for the FHS special options: Post- Request War British Drama, Postcolonial Literature and Film Criticism. Dear Farrah I write in reply to your email of 5 February requesting the above information. The special options referred to in your request are taught in seminars rather than lectures, so there are no formal lecture notes for them. However, there are overviews of the special options provided to students which include a reading list, and I have attached the relevant overviews in the annex to this letter. I hope that is of help. Yours sincerely, FOI OXFORD Film Criticism Dr Andrew Klevan Course Description: The option will examine film criticism and the principles and methods that underpin it. Firstly, it will teach how to analyse the form and style of a film closely, and how to articulate in words the experience of moving images and sounds. Secondly, it will examine and explore critical concepts in relation to film. Thirdly, it will reveal how interpretations of films may be developed and sustained. Fourthly, it will show how we can sensibly evaluate a film’s achievement. Each week there will be a film screening (in a lecture theatre), a lecture explaining the themes of the week, and a seminar where sequences will be examined in detail and in relation to the claims made in the critical literature. The films on the option are all English language films from Hollywood’s “Golden Age” (1920s-1960s) which have generated an unusual amount of serious, precise and seminal criticism. Course Syllabus and Primary Reading: 1) What is Film Criticism?/Choice and Constraint Screening: Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, US, 80mins) 2) Prominence Screening: In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950, US, 94mins) 3) Relation and Containment Screening: Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948, US, 90 mins) 4) Rhyming, Patterning and Point of View Screening: You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937, US, 86mins) 5) Convention Screening: It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, US, 1946, 129mins) Preliminary Reading: •John Gibbs: Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London : Wallflower Press, 2002); (first three chapters) •V.F. Perkins: Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972) (a key text on the course and should be read by week three). POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE The special option will examine postcolonial (sometimes also called world) writing in English in some of its national and trans-national contexts, including India, the Caribbean, Nigeria, South Africa, and the UK. Different postcolonial writers and texts will be discussed under a range of interpretative headings, including: what is the postcolonial?; nation, narration and life-writing; land and environment; the politics of space; multilingualism, translation, and global English. It is important to note that the course works cumulatively, introducing students to a range of historical, theoretical and literary material in an incremental way, so that it will be possible to cross-refer theoretical and fictional texts across the different weeks of the course (for example, bringing Fanon into dialogue with Gandhi or debates about land). WEEK 1 Postcolonial Issues and Debates An introduction to the diverse histories and contexts of postcolonial reading, writing and study, with particular focus on the meanings of the ‘post’ in postcolonial, identifying particular preoccupations within the theoretical literature, and engaging with current debates about world literature. The seminar will be organised around a discussion of a few key theoretical texts that may include: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (2006) Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) Shapiro, Parry, Mukherjee, Macdonald, Lazarus, Lawrence, Deckhard, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (2015) Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, ed. Institutions of World Literature (2015) *Everyone should read the Introduction to Helgesson and Vermeulen, and as many as possible from the essays by Brouillette, Ducournou, McDonald, Sapiro, and van der Vlies.* Further reading: For a useful guide to the historical development of the field of postcolonial studies, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) WEEK 2 Race and Resistance Taking Fanon’s writings on race, anti-colonial resistance and national liberation as a point of departure, this seminar will focus on questions of race and politics in South Africa considering the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the work of South African writers, artists and activists. A selection of shorter texts will be circulated. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1965) Athol Fugard, The Island (1973) Zoe Wicomb, Playing in the Light (2006) Extracts to be circulated: from Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1978) and Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories (1985) Peggy McIntosh, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ https://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible %20Knapsack.pdf WEEK 3 Postcolonial Life-Writing Life-writing is one of the major genres in postcolonial literature: autobiography, biography, autobiographical fiction, and Bildungsromane play a major part not only in reflecting upon colonial and postcolonial situations, but also in actively reimagining the self. This seminar will consider the place of life-writing in the development of postcolonial critical issues and debates, focusing on three very differently-situated writers. M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927-29; trans. 1940) V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987) Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) WEEK 4 Land and Environment This session will explore some of the ways in which ‘the land’ has featured in postcolonial writing – as a contested and idealized space subject to mapping, appropriation and expropriation; its role in the construction of the nation; as the territory on which the encounter between tradition and modernity is enacted. Our aim will be to bring various modes of writing about the land into discussion with current critical debate around ecology, environment and resources. Seminar texts are: Caryl Phillips, ‘Northern Lights’ (from Foreigners, 2007) J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (1983) Henrietta Rose Innes, ‘Poison’ (2008) Ben Okri, ‘What the Tapster Saw’ (1988) Teju Cole, Every Day is For the Thief (2007) WEEK 5 Language and Translation This seminar will confront directly the linguistic richness of postcolonial and world literature, thinking across the varieties of multilingualism, translation and code- switching that characterise much of the literature. This will be brought into dialogue with debates around the categories of postcolonial and world literature. Seminar texts are: Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Ngugi wa Thiongo, ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ (will be circulated) Yasmine Yildiz, ‘Introduction’ to Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012) Emily Apter, ‘Introduction’ to Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) Post-War British Drama Dr Sos Eltis and Dr Sophie Duncan This course will explore a range of topics in post-war British theatre, covering playwrights from Osborne, Beckett and Pinter through to Ravenhill, McDonagh and Kane. Each seminar will concentrate on a range of core texts in order to examine the key issues shaping the development of contemporary theatre and performance, including the concept of theatrical revolution (e.g. “angry young man” movement, Absurdism, “in-yer-face” theatre), feminist theatre, the treatment of race and empire on stage, and the transgression of taboos regarding violence and sexuality. The course will approach the plays not just as texts but through performance, critical reception and a wide range of theoretical frameworks. Week 1: New theatres for old Revolutions and continuities in post-war British theatre. Which theatre is the absurd one? Examining essential stage conventions and structures, and how “revolutionary” playwrights challenged these. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and selected shorter plays Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop, O What a Lovely War! Week 2: Petrol bombs through the proscenium arch Theatre as social activism, agit-prop, verbatim and political confrontation. John McGrath et al, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil Caryl Churchill, Top Girls David Hare, Stuff Happens David Hare and Howard Brenton, Pravda Richard Norton Taylor, The Colour of Justice Lucy Prebble, Enron Week 3: Sex and Violence How post-war British theatre challenged the limits of representation in terms of taboo subject matter as well as theatrical forms, helping to bring about the end of theatrical censorship as it broadened the palette of
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