Syllabus

ENGLISH 360L: Colonial Education and Global English

#34905

MWF 11-12
PAR 105
snehal.shingavi@mail.utexas.edu

Description:

This course examines the encounter between cultures and societies during the process of colonization. Our texts are Nigerian, Zimbabwean, Indian, Irish, and Kenyan and their encounters are primarily with twentieth-century English and American powers as they are seen in schools, colleges, and educational networks, but also through industry, bureaucracy, police forces, and legal authorities. We will be interested in this class to ask how it is that the mind of a colonized person is shaped through the encounter with colonialism, how the language of colonialism creates patterns of subjection as well as opportunities for resistance, and why the fact of colonial education became a repeated theme in the imaginative writing produced by colonized peoples. There is one central question that this class will ask (though most of the texts will answer in the negative): does the fact that colonialism manages to educate some who would likely never have any access to education otherwise redeem it? The same question asked another way: how responsible is colonial education for the fact of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance in a colonized society? Alongside this inquiry we will map the ways that English becomes simultaneously a national and a global language.

Required Texts:


Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Dangarembga, The Book of Not
Desani, All About H. Hatterr
Gandhi, Autobiography
Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Narayan, Swami and Friends
Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind
Soyinka, Ake
Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Graded Assignments:

Midterm paper (5-6 pages)—25%
Final paper (6-8 pages)—30%
Participation—15%
Course blog—15%
Presentations –15%

Assignments:

• Midterm paper and final paper: students can select from a few prompts that I will provide or come up with a topic of their own. This should be a demonstration of literary analysis that engages with one of the main themes of this course. Papers should be in polished collegiate prose, MLA style, double-spaced, one-inch margins, in 11 or 12 point Times or Times New Roman font ONLY.
• Participation: students are expected to be able to engage with another in classroom settings. This requires at a minimum having read the necessary material and having thought about how it relates to the course. To receive full credit, students should have germane, insightful and engaging things to say either in response to lecture or to one another.
• Course blog: You will be asked to contribute to the course blog at least once a week. Your contributions will include both an original post (200 words) and a response to a classmate’s post (50-100 words). Topics for posts can be: issues not raised by class, alternative directions that a question raised in class could have gone, passages from texts (with commentary) that are intriguing but not raised in class, and disagreements born out of class discussion. The course blog should be seen as a way to continue the discussion in class, especially those ideas and issues that are left underdeveloped in classroom conversations.
• Presentations: each week, students will present on the readings for that day and come up with questions to stimulate conversation. Beginning the second week of class, I will pass out a sign-up sheet and students can volunteer to present on texts of their choice. Presentations can be done individually or in groups.

Grading Policy:

Final grades will be determined on the basis of the following rubric.Please note: to ensure fairness, all final grades will be rounded to the nearest whole number (so 89.5 is an A- while an 89.499 is a B+). The University of Texas does not recognize the grade of A+

A= 94-100
A- = 90-93
B+ = 87-89
B = 84-86
B- = 80-83
C+ =77-79
C = 74-76
C- = 70-73
D+ = 67-69
D = 64-66
D- = 60-63
F = 0-59

Schedule:

January 20,22: Introductions and Ngugi
January 25-29: Ngugi and Achebe
February 1-5: Achebe and Dangarembga (NC)
February 8-12: Dangarembga (NC)
February 15-19: Dangarembga (BN)
February 22-26: Dangarembga (BN)
March 1-5: Soyinka
March 8-12: Soyinka
MIDTERM PAPER DUE on MARCH 8th, no later than 5 PM
March 22-26: Tutuola
March 29-April 2: Joyce
April 5-9: Joyce
April 12-16: Narayan
April 19-23: Gandhi
April 26-30: Desani
May 3-7: Desani
FINAL PAPERS DUE on MAY 7th, no later than 5 PM