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 360 Gender & Identity in Literature: Women and Empire

• While the business of building and managing Europe’s empire has been understood as solidly within the masculine domain, the textual work of anti-colonial critique has often focused on the figure of the woman in the colonies. In this course we will look at the intersecting questions of gender and colonialism, considering the ways in which women’s ambivalent position within the masculine quest narrative of empire has offered a productive space for reading the power relations encoded in that narrative. Canonical novels of the British empire will be paired with twentieth century responses. Readings will include Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe along with J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and M. Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone. [Winter]