Laura Selph , Ph.D.

Instructor

Education

Ph.D. University of Oregon, 2007

Field of Interest

Postcolonial literature and theory, Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature, performance studies, and the construction of national and diasporic identities

Courses

COLT 211 Comparative World Literature: Scenarios of Encounter

• In 1611 William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the story of Prospero’s shipwreck on Caliban’s island, was first performed. In 1719 Daniel Defoe published the story of Robinson Crusoe’s shipwreck and his encounter with the savage Friday. These early modern imaginings have offered an influential script for Europe’s imperial project, and the repeatedly enacted scenario of encounter between civilized Europe and the savage native has played an important role in Europe’s understanding of itself and its colonies. This course will begin with Defoe’s novel and Shakespeare’s play, reading them along with several anti-colonial and post-colonial revisions of the encounter scenario. Throughout the course, we will look at a variety of ways that authors have rewritten the colonial encounter, considering the continuing power of inherited cultural scripts and imagining the possibility for new forms of encounter in cultural situations which have been so thoroughly scripted. Primary texts will include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone.[Fall]

COLT 211 Comparative World Literature: Scenarios of Encounter

• Like narrative, maps offer an interpretive structure for understanding one’s world and a means of asserting control in that world. Maps have been central to narratives of empire, as the development of modern cartography has been closely linked to the rise of European colonialism. They have also been important to narratives of independence, as colonized societies have used maps to assert their cultural identity and autonomy. In a postcolonial context, writers are exploring the impact of these maps on the societies that have inherited them, and they are attempting to map cultural spaces in new ways. Written from a variety of postcolonial situations in Africa, India, Australia, and North America, the novels we will read for this course have in common a linking of narrative and cartography through which the authors explore the relations between cultural identity, political power, and the production of knowledge. Primary texts may include The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Maps by Nuruddin Farah, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee. [Spring]