16450a

WiSe 21/22: Derek Walcott’s Caribbean Poetry

David Wachter

Information for students

Co-Teaching with Thomas Rommel. Our first class will take place on October 20th from 10:15-11:45 am online via Webex Meetings. Those officially registered via Campus Management will receive a link for this meeting beforehand. Students without an official place at Campus Management but with an interest in participating are asked to kindly signal your interest via email to David.Wachter@fu-berlin.de by October 19 and will then receive this link as well. Please make yourself acquainted with the Webex software; more information can be found at https://wikis.fu-berlin.de/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1037667239. At this first meeting we will decide – with regard to several criteria – whether our course will take place online or (partially) in place on campus. Those officially registered via Campus Management are allowed to stay in the room J 30/109 for this meeting (if you are already physically on campus), on condition that all students use a personal smartphone, tablet or laptop with headset to log in and participate at the meeting. Please document your attendance by checking in via the barcode at the door J 30/109. Due to room capacities, those who are not yet registered are not (!) allowed to enter this actual room, but are welcome to our first virtual meeting. We will put you on a waiting list until the final number of participants and our mode of teaching are settled. Registered students who decide not to participate are requested to officially sign off at Campus Management, so we can pass your place on to people on the waiting list. close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Modes of Participation: Regular attendance and active engagement in seminar discussions; participation in collaborative commentary on the digital platform “Perusall”; two reading responses over the course of the semester. close

Comments

This seminar examines aesthetic and postcolonial issues in the work of St Lucian poet and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. Through close readings of his writings (e.g. his famous poem “A Far Cry from Africa”) in relation to post-colonial theory (Édouard Glissant’s “Caribbean Discourse”), we will address topics such as the remains of empire, the relation between home and diaspora or challenges of cultural hybridity. In an intertextual perspective we will explore his re-writing of literary traditions from Homer’s epic (“Omeros”) to Defoe’s colonial imagination of the West Indies (“Crusoe’s Island”), and we will look at his engagement with Creole Speech poetry (“The Schooner Flight”) or popular Calypso music (“The Spoiler’s Return”). Additional topics include performance and ritual in Walcott’s plays (“Dream on Monkey Mountain”) and traumas of the Middle Passage in Contemporary Caribbean poetry (NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong”). close