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Seminar: 10-76-4-D2/WD2-08 Key Topics in Literature: Pacific Fictions, Pacific Literatures - Details

Seminar: 10-76-4-D2/WD2-08 Key Topics in Literature: Pacific Fictions, Pacific Literatures - Details

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General information

Course name Seminar: 10-76-4-D2/WD2-08 Key Topics in Literature: Pacific Fictions, Pacific Literatures
Subtitle
Course number 10-76-4-D2/WD2-08
Semester SoSe 2025
Current number of participants 15
expected number of participants 35
Home institute Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Teaching
Next date Tuesday, 17.06.2025 12:15 - 13:45, Room: GW2 B1400 NUR Mo. + Di.
Type/Form
Englischsprachige Veranstaltung Ja

Module assignments

Comment/Description

In the 1990s, Pacific Studies scholar Epeli Hau’fa postulated a reimagining of Oceania from 'islands in a far sea' to 'a sea of islands’. More recently, these very islands have reappeared in global affairs in the course of debates ranging from geopolitical shifts and power play between China and the US to climate change and the rise of sea levels. The goal of this seminar is to familiarize students with the historical and cultural contexts of such discussions and the discursively constructed identity of ‘the Pacific’ in literary representations from the 19th to the 21st century. We will focus especially on literary negotiations of encounters between colonizers and colonized, on Pacific islands as anthropological laboratories and their relevance for the 'cultural turn', as well as on the work of 'writing back' to Western fictions of a highly sexualized 'paradise' and re-imagining Oceania as home in the ‘new Pacific literatures’. The course comprises in-presence meetings with group presentations, reading weeks and online research, as well as a planned visit to the Übersee Museum Bremen.
Please, buy and read the following novels:
• Herman Melville. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846]. Ed. John Bryant. London: Penguin Classics, 1996. [978-0-14-043488-0]
• Lily King. Euphoria. London: Picador, 2014. [978-1-5290-9265-3]
• Sia Figiel. Where We Once Belonged [1996]. New York: Kaya, 2007. [978-1-885030-27-6]

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