User:Bd1896/course wizard/Course description

ENG 295: WORLD LITERATURES IN ENGLISH Section 0960 / Fall I 2014

From the course catalog:

This capstone course introduces students to postcolonial literatures of the Anglophone diaspora. Texts may include literary works from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Ireland, and New Zealand. Students will examine world literatures in their historical and cultural contexts. In some semesters, the course may focus on one particular geographical region and/or ethnic group.

In our section of ENG 295, we will explore postcolonial adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies. What happens when some of the canonical works of Western culture are revised? How is this canon created and maintained? What national, cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, and political identities are troubled or claimed in these adaptations? How is the language of the colonizer used and/or manipulated in these plays? Our course will include three different adaptation clusters:

Sophocles' Oedipus, Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth & Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame Sophocles' Antigone, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island, & Fémi Òşófisan’s Tegonni Euripides' Medea, Marina Carr's By the Bog of the Cats, & Wesley Enoch's Black Medea

We'll intersperse our play readings with work by theorists like bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Edward Said, and others. For our final project, students will collaboratively draft a Wikipedia entry on at least one of the adaptations we've read. Visit our course blog for more info.

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