Department of English

With the rise of the powerful British empire came the dispersion of the English language into the literatures of its colonies. The political unrest associated with decolonization has had the beneficiahe ground for James Joyce's *Ulysses* while the problem of Indian tradition in English. For example, the movement for Home Rule in Ireland provides the ground for James Joyce's *Ulysses* while the problem of Indian independence is foregrounded in both Salman Rushdie's *Midnight's Children* and Bapsi Sidhwa's *Cracking India*. In Southern Africa colonial rule lingered well into the latter part of the century and spawned enduring structures such as apartheid and the home land system. Bessie Head's troubling novel *A Question of Power* translates the ideologies of this political domination into the complex privacies of the psychological space. This class will follow the dispersion of the English language in the literatures of three colonial regions (Ireland, India, and Southern Africa) in order to examine the relations between literary representation and political investment in this postcolonial era. The course will also focus on the writing of a lengthy research-intensive 20-page paper with assignments through the semester that build toward a final thesis project. There will be no exams.

Note: Students may take this course--*and* either English 45 or 55--to satisfy the usual English 203 requirement.