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Reconfiguring LandscapesHUM 3285: British and American
LiteratureSpring 2011Dr. Perdigao
April 1-4, 2011
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Intersections• Both Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize
• Ireland, St. Lucia
• Postcolonial attitudes and ideas
• “responsibility” of poet
• Division, recovery
• Inheritance—what is given and received can be imagined
• Inheritance as burden and source
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)• Born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, family farm called “Mossbawn” to Roman
Catholic parents; Northern Ireland predominantly Protestant, Irish Republic (south) largely Catholic
• 1947 UK Education Act made education more accessible to poorer families, specifically Catholics
• 1953 While Heaney was at St. Columb’s College, Derry, his 4-year-old brother was killed in road accident
• 1957-1961 Attended Queen’s University, Belfast, majoring in English Language and Literature; urged to do postgraduate work at Oxford but decided to become a teacher
• 1961-1963 Postgraduate teacher’s training diploma; part-time postgraduate work at Queen’s
• 1965 Published Eleven Poems
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)• 1966 Published Death of a Naturalist, won Geoffrey Faber Prize, Gregory Award
for young writers
• 1968-1969 renewal of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland
• 1969 Door into the Dark published; discovered P. V. Glob’s The Bog People
• 1970-1971 Guest lecturer at UC-Berkeley
• 1971 Conflict in Ireland; Heaney returned to Northern Ireland
• January 20, 1972 “Bloody Sunday”: British paratroopers fired on unarmed civil rights demonstrators and killed thirteen; Heaney resigned from Queen’s; family moved to Republic of Ireland
• 1973 Visited Aarhus, Denmark to see the Bog People
• 1975 North published
• 1979 Field Work published; spent term at Harvard
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)• 1980 Preoccupations, collection of essays, published; Selected Poems, 1965-1975
published
• 1980-1981 Nationalist prisoners in Northern Ireland staged hunger strikes; Heaney took five year contract at Harvard
• 1983 wrote An Open Letter, an objection to inclusion in anthology as a British poet
• 1984 Station Island published; Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvaard; mother died
• 1986 Father died
• 1987 The Haw Lantern published; received Whitbread Award
• 1988 The Government of the Tongue, second collection of essays, published; Professor of Poetry at Oxford
• 1990 The Cure at Troy and New Selected Poems published
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)• 1991 Seeing Things published
• 1995 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; The Redress of Poetry, third collection of essays, published
• 1996 The Spirit Level published; awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Award
• 1998 Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 published
• 1999 Translation of Beowulf published; awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Award
• 2001 Electric Light
• 2006 District and Circle (won T. S. Eliot Prize)
• 2010 Human Chain
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)• “bog” as “‘memory bank,’ or unconscious, that preserves everything thrown into it,
including the victims of ritual killings” (2823).
• Poet of earth and poet of air
• Space for the marvellous as well as the murderous
• Private and public
• Poet’s complicity in the violence, “beauty and atrocity” (2823)
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Derek Walcott (b. 1930)• Derek Walcott (and twin brother Roderick) born in Castries, Saint Lucia in British
West Indies; Methodist upbringing in largely Roman Catholic society (2586)
• Grandmothers African descent; grandfathers white, Dutchman and Englishman
• Grew up learning Standard English, official language of Saint Lucia, and French Creole (patois)
• St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and University of the West Indies in Jamaica on Colonial Development and Welfare Scholarship
• Moved to Trinidad, worked as book reviewer, art critic, playwright, artistic director of a theater workshop
• Boston University professor
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1992)
• English literary tradition and the history of a colonized people
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Derek Walcott (b. 1930)• Published first poem “1944” in 1944
• Writes first plays between 1946-1947
• 25 Poems printed in Trinidad in 1948
• 1962 In a Green Night published
• 1964 Selected Poems published in the U.S.
• The Castaway and Other Poems published in 1965
• 1967 premiere of play Dream on Monkey Mountain in Toronto
• 1969 The Gulf published
• 1970 Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays published
• 1976 Sea Grapes published
• 1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom published; election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts
• 1981 Founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University
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Derek Walcott (b. 1930)• Collected Poems, 1948-1984 published (1984)
• 1990 Omeros published
• 1992 awarded Nobel Prize for Literature; first Caribbean writer
• 1998 What the Twilight Says (essays)
• Tiepolo’s Hound (2004)
• The Prodigal: A Poem (2007)
• 2007 Selected Poems
• 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for White Egrets
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Derek Walcott (b. 1930)• Calls self “schizophrenic,” “mongrel,” “mulatto of style” (2586)
• Island “traded hands fourteen times in colonial wars between the British and the French” (2586)
• “cross-cultural inheritance,” source of “pain and ambivalence” (2586)
• Use of “multiple forms, visions, and energies” (2586)
• Connections to Yeats and Joyce as colonials, with worship of English language and hatred for British Empire
• Asks “how the postcolonial poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of British colonialism and appreciate the empire’s literary gift” (2587)
• Cites Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Lowell as influences
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Derek Walcott (b. 1930)• “I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited
by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style” (2587)
• “A Far Cry from Africa” (1956, 1962): “how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give? / How can I face such slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live?” (2588)
• “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” (1981): “Then all the nations of birds lifted together / the huge net of the shadows of this earth / in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, / stitching and crossing it” (2590)
• Omeros (1990): Ma Kilman, No Pain Café, as sibyl and obeah (2591)
• Story of Philoctetes
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Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)• Stories of “magic, suffering, and the vitality of human beings in the grip of history”
(Norton 2852)
• Literary renaissance in India
• Rushdie self-identifies as coming from Bombay but being from a Muslim family
• “‘My’ India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity” (2852).
• Educated at Cathedral School, Bombay (Mumbai) and King’s College, Cambridge
• Lived in Pakistan, England, working as actor and freelance advertising copywriter (1970-80)
• Grimus (1979) followed by Midnight’s Children (1981), those born around midnight on August 15, 1947, when independent state of India was formed (2852)
• “we’re all radio-active with history” (2853)
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Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)• Magical realism, influence of Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• “political-historical storm” with publication of The Satanic Verses; riots in India, Pakistan, South Africa; senior religious figures in Iran accused him of blaspheming Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Muslim faith; fatwa calling for his death (2853)
• Went into hiding for a decade under protection from British Secret Service
• “vulnerability of the intellectual in the face of fundamentalism” (2853)
• Fatwa lifted in 1998, allowed him to reappear in public but life still under threat
• His claim the text shows the uprooting, disjuncture, and metamorphosis of the migrant condition, metaphor for all humanity (2853)
• Problems of hybridization and ghettoization, reconciling old and new
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Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)• Says novel “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that
comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (2853)
• Exile, outsider, immigrant
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Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)• Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria
• Educated in English, church schools and University College, Ibadan before joining Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, director of external broadcasting from 1961-6 (2622)
• After Nigerian civil war (1967-70), Achebe taught in the US, returns to University of Nigeria; distinguished professor at Bard College
• Things Fall Apart (1958), role in African fiction; protagonist Okonkwo; set in late 19th century, before arrival of Europeans, during British imperial “pacification” of southeast Nigeria from 1900-1920 (2623)
• Economic trade, missionary religion, political control as power of British; reactions by villagers “puzzled, intrigued, co-opted, enraged, divided against themselves, or killed’ (2623).
• “challenged many of the West’s entrenched impressions of African life and culture, replacing simplistic stereotypes with portrayals of a complex society still suffering from a legacy of Western colonial oppression” (2622).
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Framing• Adrienne Rich’s “Frame”—multiple points of view; insider vs. outsider; witness vs.
participant; silence vs. voice
• Complicity in violence
• Power over another; disempowerment