Since the end of the Second World War, the British literary canon has enlarged its ambit to include a variety of literary voices coming from marginal social positions. Drawing on the Marxist tradition of ideological critique, this course aims to complement existing critical discourses grounded in postcolonial theory, gender studies, and queer theory, and help students understand the relationship between the (self)representation of otherness and the material conditions of labour and production. The course will focus on a selection of fictional texts that cover the period between 1945 and the present, texts which are also representative for the various stages in the development of post-1945 global capitalism.
Primary bibliography:
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
- Wole Soiynka, The Interpreters (1965)
- Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (1974)
- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1989)
- Ben Okri, In Arcadia (2002)
- Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
- Isabel Waidner, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019)
Secondary bibliography (TBA)
Andrei Nae. Lecturer, University of Bucharest 