About
In Charlotte Brontë’s seminal novel Jane Eyre (1847), the character Bertha is hidden in the attic, only appearing to interrupt the plot and cause destruction. However, Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) returns to this text over a century later to write the story before Brontë’s narrative, in which we learn who Bertha is, where she comes from, and even her real name, Antoinette. Similarly, Albert Camus’ first novel L’Étranger [The Stranger] (1960) is interrupted when Algerian journalist and novelist Kamel Daoud re-writes the story in Meursault, contre-enquête [The Meursault Investigation] (2013). Daoud and Rhys’ texts each present themselves as “co-texts” to the author that precedes them, while simultaneously using their entrance into or addition to the first story as a means of critiquing the story itself. Furthermore, they invoke questions regarding author and narration in their colonial and postcolonial contexts of Dominica and Jamaica (for Rhys) and Algeria (for Daoud). This course will analyze the aforementioned novels and their (post)colonial contexts, in which one author has written themselves—or their story—into the story of another author.
This website will serve as a sort of extension of our Canvas page, while simultaneously showing you a template for how to create your own website. On this website, you can find our course readings and due dates on the home page. On the Course Documents page, you can find the syllabus and detailed explanations about how to complete each assignment. To find more information on citation, podcasting, and other resources, check out the Resources page. For a possible template to help you set up your podcast assignment, check out the Podcast Template page. My hope is that over the course of the semester, our discussions of course themes will help you (re)consider questions of voice and authorship in (post)colonial contexts, while our discussions and your assignments will help you grow your own voice and understanding of authorship.
It seems that the ideas of beaches, coasts, and bodies of water have run throughout our work, and I think that we could think about them thematically to connect all of the readings and topics we have done. Whether the migrations between Britain and the Caribbean for Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea or the significance of the beach in The Stranger and the Meursault investigation, beaches serve as sort of liminal spaces where ideas can converge, and new discussions on the difficulty of a (post)colonial context can emerge.