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
First date	Tuesday, 08.04.2025 12:15 - 13:45, Room: GW2 B1400
Type/Form
Englischsprachige Veranstaltung	Ja

Lecturers

Dr. Anna Auguscik (LB)

Rooms and times

GW2 B1400: Tuesday: 12:15 - 13:45, weekly (14x)

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]

Registration mode

After enrolment, participants will manually be selected.

Potential participants are given additional information before enroling to the course.

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