ENG 291, 292 - Caribbean Writing

1 course unit

Nobel-prize laureate Derek Walcott has called Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad, a “babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, and a writer’s heaven.” Martinican writer, Edouard Glissant, speaks of the Caribbean itself as “a multiple series of relationships, a sea that exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands.” This course will explore this range of differences and relationships as they are represented in the work of English, French, and Spanish-language writers from St. Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Antigua, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, and Martinique, concentrating on the work of Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Jamaica Kincaid. Efforts will be made throughout both to untangle and respect the “polyglot” nature of Caribbean experience.
Meets general academic requirement D or L and effective Fall 2013 DE and HU (and W when offered as 292).