The scourge of postcolonial studies, V.S. Naipaul, recently wrote, "In one
Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance...the
extraordinary distress of India was like something given, eternal, something to
be read only as background." How is difference represented in modern European
writings about alien peoples and practices, and what is its value? How can
literary analysis be brought into dialogue with contextual issues that seem
opaque (if not opposed) to the concerns of the main story? We will read novels
and short stories by, Conrad, Forster, Achebe, Devi, Ishiguro, Kincaid,
Coetzee, Pramoedya, Kipling, Forster among others. Requirements include oral
presentations and two essay length papers.