ENGL 4570 - Africa Writes Back

(crosslisted) ASRC 4570, COML 4571
(GB) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

M. Ngugi.

What happens to the truth of fiction when two authors, each with a unique and sometimes opposing cultural and historical perspective, write about the same events? What if the two novelists are writing for different audiences and even different nations? In African literature one often finds African writers responding to European writers about their portrayals of colonialism and resistance. In this course, we shall be considering the “she said, he said” of African colonial and anti-colonial literature. For example, we shall look at the ways in which Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and at the treatment of William Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by J.M. Coetzee in his novel, Foe.