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Yale College Seminar
Fall 1993
"Poetry and Decolonization"
Linn Cary Mehta
This course will look at poets writing in English, French
or Spanish whose work is caught up in the struggle for independence
from colonial rule and, later, with the formation of a post-colonial
literary voice. Many poets writing outside of Europe in the first half
of the twentieth century shared a concern with common problems of national
and racial identity, with place and displacement, and with decolonization
and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. The course will
consider the two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold
Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African and American
literature including the Harlem Renaissance (Nicolas Guillén, Claude
McKay, Langston Hughes); Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral,
Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; and English-language poets including W.B.
Yeats and William Carlos Williams. We will attempt to evolve a theoretical
framework within which to address the comparative and interdisciplinary
issues raised by the poems.
Syllabus:
Requirements: One five-page paper due Week 7; one oral
report; one fifteen-page paper due the last week of classes, the topic
to be selected in consultation with the instructor.
Week 1: Introduction
Nativist poets: the poetic creation of a native identity.
"Yeats and Decolonisation" in Edward Said,
Culture and Imperialism
,
pp. 220-238, sets forth a context for poetry and decolonization which
we will begin by discussing.
Week 2: William Butler Yeats and independent Ireland
(1921);
Readings from
The Collected Poems
, especially:
Selections from "
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
" (1921):
"Easter 1916"; "The Second Coming";
and "
The Tower
" (1928): "Sailing to Byzantium", "Meditations
in Time of Civil War", "Nineteen hundred and Nineteen", "Leda and the
Swan", "Among School Children".
We will look at these poems in the context of Yeats's
development as a poet and the historical situation of Ireland.
Week 3: Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengali language
movement:
Introduction to
Gitanjali
by W.B. Yeats;
"Nationalism" in
A Tagore Reader
(181-204);
Selected Poems
(Penguin, 1987; tr. W. Radice), especially "Africa"
(102-3), "Leaving Home" (108-9), "New Birth" (111-112), "Recovery" (121-3),
"On my Birthday" (124-5)
Week 4: Léopold Sédar Senghor and negritude:
Introduction to
Anthology de la nouvelle poésie nËgre
et malgache de langue française
(1948) by Jean-Paul Sartre, available
in an English translation entitled "Black Orpheus."
The Collected Poetry
(Charlottesville, Va.: University
Press of Virginia, 1991), especially "In Memoriam" (3), "Letter to a
Poet" (5), "Black Woman" (8), "Snow in Paris" (12), "Blues" (14), "To
the Music of Koras and Balaphon" (17-24) from
Chants d'ombre
(1945) and selected elegies ("Elegy for Martin Luther King" and "Elegy
of Carthage", pages 211-223);
Week 5: Aimé Césaire in the context of Paris in the 1930s:
"
Cahier d'un retour ý mon pays natal
" in Aimé Césaire,
The Collected Poems
(tr. Eshleman and Smith, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983, pages 34-85.)
Week 6: The french-speaking Caribbean; discovery of ethnography:
Selected poems from Jacques Roumain and St.-John Perse;
Jean Price Mars,
Ainsi parla l'oncle
Week 7: Claude McKay and the english-speaking Caribbean;
the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on negritude:
Selected poems from Claude McKay;
Langston Hughes,
Harlem Shadows
.
Week 8: Nicol·s Guillén and afro-cubanismo:
Summa Poetica
(Madrid: Ediciones C·tedra, 1980),
especially "Mulata" and "Hay que tener volunt·" from "Motivos de Son",
"CaÒa" from "SÛngoro Cosongo", and "Balada de los dos abuelos", "Sensemay·"
and the title poem from "West Indies, Ldt."
Week 9: Gabriela Mistral's
Poema de Chile
; women
poets in Latin America and Chile's early literary history (to 1920s):
Readings from
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral
(translated and edited by Doris Dana, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1971.)
Week 10: Pablo Neruda and the Spanish Civil War; Chile
and the writing of the
Canto general
:
"The Heights of Macchu Picchu" from the
Canto general
,
available in a separate translation by Nathaniel Tarn (New York: Noonday
Press, Farrar Straus, 1966) and in a complete translation of
Canto
general
by Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1991)
Week 11: Octavio Paz and Mexico; uses of mythology.
"Piedra de sol " in
Configurations
, (New York:
New Directions, 1971, 2-38)
Week 12: Williams,
Paterson
and
In the American
Grain
Reconsider the intersection of the European avant-garde
in the '20s with the evolving "Americanism" also apparent in Eliot and
Pound.
Week 13: Theory and comparative analysis: Tiffin et.
al.,
The Empire Writes Back
The reading packet includes extracts from the following:
Europe
Hannah Arendt,
Imperialism
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities
Elizabeth Cullingford,
Yeats, Ireland and Fascism
Terry Eagleton,
Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature
(with
Edward Said and Frederic Jameson, Field Day Press, 1989)
Asia
Ahmad, Aijaz,
In Theory
Bhabha, Homi K.
Nation and Narration
Salman Rushdie,
Imaginary Homelands
(Granta, 1991)
Edward Said,
Orientalism
(Vintage, 1989)
Africa
Chinua Achebe,
Hopes and Impediments
Abdul JanMohamed,
Manichaean Aesthetics
(Amherst: U.Mass., 1983)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
Decolonizing the Mind
Wole Soyinka,
Myth, Literature and the African World
(CUP, 1978)
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Black Orpheus
(Présence Africaine, 1976; trans.
S.W. Allen) - Introduction to Senghor's 1948
Anthology
.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Arnold, A. James,
Modernism and Negritude
Edward Kamau Brathwaite,
History of the Voice
Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
Fernandez-Retamar, Roberto,
Caliban
C.L.R. James,
The Black Jacobins
George Lamming,
The Pleasures of Exile
(Allison & Busby, 1984)
Rodo, Jose Enrique,
Ariel
North America
Baker, Houston,
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
"Race", Writing and Difference
LaCapra, Dominick,
The Bounds of Race
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
In Other Worlds
Said, Edward.
Culture and Imperialism
(Knopf, 1993)
The following books have been ordered, and multiple copies
are available on college reserve:
-
W.B. Yeats,
Collected Poems
(MacMillan, 1956)
-
Rabindranath Tagore,
Selected Poems
(Penguin, 1987)
-
Gitanjali
(Introduction by W.B. Yeats, 1913)
-
L.S. Senghor,
The Collected Poetry
(Caraf Books, 1991)
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nËgre et malgache de langue française
(Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). Sartre's introduction, "Black
Orpheus," is available separately in English.
-
Aimé Césaire,
The Collected Poetry
(U. of California Press,
1983)
Cahier d'un retour ý mon pays natal
is also available in separate
editions by Présence Africaine (1983) and Penguin (1969)
-
Nicolas Guillén,
Summa poética
(Ediciones C·tedra, 1980)
-
Claude McKay,
Selected Poems
(1953), and
Banjo
.
-
Langston Hughes,
Harlem Shadows
-
Gabriela Mistral,
Selected Poems
(tr. Langston Hughes)
-
Pablo Neruda,
Canto General
(U. of California Press, 1991)
The Heights of Macchu Picchu
is also available separately from
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1966; sixteenth printing, 1990.)
-
Octavio Paz,
Configurations
(New York: New Directions, 1971)
-
William Carlos Williams,
Paterson
and
In the American
Grain
(New York: New Directions)
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