Learning Outcomes:
At the conclusion of this module students should be able to demonstrate:
• A critical understanding of settler colonial studies and the criticism it has generated
• A familiarity with a range of literary forms and genres in settler and Indigenous writings
• A knowledge of the impact that emigration, settler colonialism, and frontier violence had on the formation of the national literary cultures and foundation myths of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and South Africa
• An increased understanding of how literature can be complicit in imperial expansion, settlement and the dispossession of Indigenous land, but can also be used to create forms of resistance to settler narratives of land possession and nationhood
• An ability to write critically about a range of texts from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century
Indicative Module Content:
Examples of potential authors include: Evelyn Araluen, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tony Birch, Katherine Mansfield, Susanna Moodie, Ellen Van Neerven, Thomas Pringle, Zoë Wicomb, and Alexis Wright.
Topics may include: 19th-century settler colonial literature, emigration and settlement, decolonial poetics, frontier violence, extractivism and ecocriticism