World Literatures

 

Cover of A Bend in the River

Cover of Staging Coyote's Dream

-Brian Mendonca

When it comes to literature that exists in the world, which texts would you choose as representative?  Which themes will you choose to highlight? Which writers would make the cut?

Firing the canon has been one of my favourite pastimes. Nevertheless here are some of the texts prescribed at the final year for a B.A. programme. 

To better navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of selecting appropriate texts, GU has narrowed down its focus to 'new socio-cultural voices in literatures in English; those that have not been explored as part of mainstream literature.' The second course outcome is 'to analyze the influence(s) of the socio-political and cultural milieu of the time on literary expression.'

NOVEL

It is debatable whether V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979) can be categorized as mainstream or not but there it is. Kara  (2021) offers a post-colonial analysis of the novel. As she puts it,  '[It] shows us how rootless people of the ex-colonies feel. These colonized people suffer from a sort of social genocide. They cannot use their languages; even people from two different ex-colonies use their colonizers’ languages instead of learning and communicating with one another’s.'

DRAMA

The only selection from drama comes out of the collection called Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English. (2002) Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Woman is about the understanding of Indigenous Knowledge Systems(IKS). It takes its title from the misogynistic reporting of deaths of middle-aged native women in Vancouver, Canada by a serial killer in the 1980's. Wikler (2016) has done a flipbook reimagining Clements' play. The themes reverberate in Stieg Larsson's Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The Little Prince is a novella by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It is ostensibly for children but on another level it is a metaphysical meditation about life itself. 

SHORT STORY

'Blow Up' (1963) is a short story by Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar.  Blow Up (1966) is also a film by Michelangelo Antonioni inspired by the story. 

POEMS

In 'Bora Ring' Judith Wright laments the erasure of Australian aboriginal culture.  Gabriel Okara is a Nigerian poet who voices similar apprehensions about indigenous African culture in 'The Mystic Drum'. Witness to the excesses of Partition, Kishwar Naheed from Pakistan sees affinity in nature in her short poem 'The Grass is Really Like Me. Shu Ting's 'Assembly Line' is a comment on the dehumanization of mass production in China. 'Two Dead Soldiers' is an epitaph on the dead by Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam.
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Pic courtesy Open Library; Playwrights Canada Press. Updated 27/4/24.