Postcolonial Literature

Singapore recently hosted the IMF and World Bank meetings. It has started to call itself a Global City of Excellence. As it wrestles with competing versions of cosmopolitan, regional and nationalitarian identity, knowledge of the increasingly significant category of New Literatures in English will help to enrich that discussion. This course aims to engage that process through a survey of important works by Malaysian and Filipino authors. Among other things, it examines the stylistic and cognitive responses made by these writers to certain pressing challenges. These include the search for an idiom and imagery appropriate to a Southeast Asian locale, the need to fashion a usable past from disparate material, and the pressure to address existential issues raised by urbanisation and industrial development. Students will be encouraged to formulate a first-cut analysis of where they place themselves with regards to these questions and issues.