Wednesday, December 1, 2010

For Tomorrow: Gracefully (or not) Wrapping Up the Course

Instead of reading more of Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, let's end at Chapter 7 and use tomorrow's class to wrap-up some of the course's ideas.  While I can't hope to provide a last word to the colonial/postcolonial debate, I want to suggest a general sense of what we can take away from the readings and where the issues of a postcolonial society remain to be explored.  I hope to avoid the common misconception that classes are taken "for a grade" and are simply a series of questions and answers; this class, like many of your English classes, is real...the ideas literally shape who writes and how they write, and how other people (in this country, in others) understand what is read.  Any book written in the 21st century can be arguably considered a 'postcolonial' text, as issues of identity, nationality, and power run through every word, character, and chapter.  So we'll do our best to sum up this immense and never-ending debate. 

REMEMBER: your paper is due on Friday IF you want comments by our final exam date; otherwise, it's due ON the Final Exam day, next Tuesday. 

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