Overview
This course looks at plots of empire in the British novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines not only how empire was represented but also how the novel form gave visibility to the strategies of empire and also showed the tacit purposes, contradictions, and anxieties of British imperialism. The course is structured around the themes of: the culture of secrecy; criminality and detection; insurgency, surveillance, and colonial control; circulation and exchange of commodities. Specifically, the course will focus on how the culture of secrecy that accompanied imperial expansion defined the tools of literary imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Objectives:
(1) Examine the impact of colonial expansion on the geography of narrative forms.
(2) Analyze the language of indirection in English novels and trace metaphors and symbols to imperialism’s culture of secrecy.
(3) Develop interpretative tools for reading the imperial novel.
Number of participants for the course will be limited to twenty-five. Course participants will learn the following module through lectures, seminars and presentations.
Modules Literature of Empire: 26th Dec – 31st Dec 2017
Focal Modules:
- “Mysticism and Espionage: The Great Game” - Rudyard Kipling, Kim.
- “Detection and Knowledge of the Other”- Arthur Conan Doyle, Sign of Four
- “Detection, Imperialism, and Family Secrets” - Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
- “Decryption and Detection” - Richard Marsh, The Beetle
- “Devolution and Degeneration” - Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- “Empire and the Enigma of Antiquity” - H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
- “Imperial Gothic”- H. Rider Haggard, She
- “Messianic Messages”- Rudyard Kipling, Selected Short Stories
- “Insurgency and Colonial Control” – Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug
- “Prophecy and Political Violence” - Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
You are eligible to attend If…
- You are a graduate or post graduate in English or / and Comparative Literature.
- You are doing project or research in the filed of postcolonial studies / literature
Fees Participants are supposed to remit the fee as follows after they receive the selection letter from the course coordinator based on their submission of the statement of purpose for attending the course.
Participants from abroad: US $ 500
Participants from South Asia and Africa: $ 300
Student Participants from India: Rs. 3000/-
Student participants from host institution: Rs. 1500/-
The above fee is towards instructional materials, lunch, tea, snacks etc. Expenses for accommodation and the travel should be met by the participants.
The Faculty
Prof. Dr. Gauri Viswanathan
Prof. Dr. Gauri Viswanathan is Director, South Asia Institute,and Class of 1933 Prof. in the Humanities, Dept of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, USA.
She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; Oxford, 1998) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998). She also edited Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001). Prof. Viswanathan is coeditor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was recently an
Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town.
Dr. Prasad Pannian
Dr. Prasad Pannian is currently Associate Professor in Department of English & Comparative Literature, Central University of Kerala, India where he served as the founder Chair during 2009-2011. He is the author of Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan ), 2016. He has been a fellow in the the prestigous Critical Theory Schools at Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK (2012), School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University,Ithaca, New York, (2013) & The New School for Social Research’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry , New York City,US (2016).
Course-Cordinator
Dr.Prasad Pannian
Associate Professor, Department of English & Comparative Literature
CentralUniversity of Kerala,Vidyanagar
Campus,Vidyanagar PO, Kasaragod,671123
E mail:prasadpannian@cukerala.ac.in
Registration Form
1. Name ( in Block Letters):
2. Designation & Institutional Affiliation:
3. Qualifications:
4. Address:
5. Email:
6. Mobile number:
7. Statement of Purpose for attending the course Literature of Empire : ( in not more than 1000 words)
( The filled up registration form should be sent to the Course Co-ordinator & Host faculty,Dr. Prasad Pannian’s email: prasadpannian@cukerala.ac.in , on or before 30th September 2017)
