World Literature- Spring 1998

This Senior Seminar will examine a range of literary works that use linguistic techniques to subvert the cultural hegemony of English in its "standard" form. Texts by English, Irish, Scottish, African, Caribbean, African-American and Chicano authors.

Week 1 Standard English and its Discontents

• Introduction to notion of "standard English," background for Pidgin, Creole, Caló. Readings: Book of Genesis (Tower of Babel excerpt), Joyce's Ulysses (excerpt), Shaw's Pygmalion, Brathwaite's "Letter SycoraX" from Middle Passages.

Week 2 "Mute inglorious Miltons" (Thomas Gray)

• Focus on Tony Harrison and Northern English Dialect.
• Readings: Permanently Bard and v. Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Week 3 "The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine." (James Joyce)

• Focus on Ireland
• Reading: Friel's Translations, excerpts from Synge's Playboy of the Western World, Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Week 4 "And Scotland followin' on ahint" (Hugh MacDiarmid)

• Focus on the (re)invention of "Scots" and its twentieth-century impact.
• Reading: Poetry Selections from Burns, MacDiarmid and others; Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting.

Week 5 "Sozaboy's language is what I call 'rotten English.'" (Ken Saro-Wiwa)

• Focus on the case of African authors educated in England
• Reading: Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, Ngugi's Decolonizing the Mind. Video interview with Achebe.

Weeks 6 and 7 "Inglan is a bitch / Dere's no escapin it" (Linton Kwesi Johnson)

• [Individual conferences with each student these 2 weeks on research topics]
• Focus on Kamau Brathwaite and Caribbean poetry.
• Readings: Brathwaite's Trenchtown Rock; Philip's She Tries Her Tongue; selections from Voiceprint (anthology of oral and related poetry from the Caribbean) and the Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature.

Week 8 "What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing." (Ishmael Reed)

• Focus on African-American writers
• Reading: Hucklebery Finn (excerpts), Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo; Amiri Baraka's Transbluesency .

Week 9 "Libre and whistling&emdash; / My cockroach integrity / Intact!" (José Montoya)

• Focus on Chicano bilingual poetics and on Caló as subversive linguistic strategy
• Readings: selections of 19th-century bilingual satire; Montoya's Information; Cruz's By Lingual Wholes; Zamora's Releasing Serpents.

Week 10 "They are digging the pit of Babel." (Franz Kafka)

• Focus on Finnegans Wake as subversive transformation of Standard English.

Primary texts will include:

• George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
• Brian Friel, Translations
• Tony Harrison, Permanently Bard and v.
• Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poems
• Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
• Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy
• Ngugi Wa-Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: Politics of Language in African Literature
• Marlene Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
• Kamau Brathwaite, Trenchtown Rock
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
• Amiri Baraka, Transbluesency
• José Montoya, Information
• Victor Hernandez Cruz, By Lingual Wholes
• Bernice Zamora, Releasing Serpents
• James Joyce, selections from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

These will be accompanied by a xeroxed reader which will include additional poetry texts from various authors and critical and theoretical selections from the following works:

Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language; David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Signifying Monkey; Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voiced and Roots; Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood; John Guillory, Cultural Capital and There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack; Shelley Fishkin, Was Huck Black?; R. D. Grillo, Dominant Languages; Alfred Arteaga, An Other Tongue; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back; Cordelia Candelaria, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction; Rosaura Sanchez, Chicano Discourse: Socio-historic Perspectives.

Attendance at class and participation in discussions, will be required. Writing requirement will be a final research paper, topic to be submitted and approved by the seventh week of the quarter.

NB: some readings may be have to be changed due to unavailability of texts.

Revised 7/13/04.