English 90ew. The Empire Writes Back: Contemporary Fiction and the Booker Prize

Instructor: Duncan White
Mondays, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: Barker 269
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Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.

In 1982 Salman Rushdie contributed an editorial to the Times of London, signaling a change in literary power relations. "English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots," he wrote, "and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back." With the empire shrinking fast and British culture being reinvented by postcolonial immigration, a more expansive understanding of "British" literature began to emerge, a change embodied in the founding the Booker Prize in 1969, which soon became the most prestigious literary award in the country. That writers from "Commonwealth" countries were eligible for the award resulted in the valorization of writing that confronted Britain's history as an empire and explored the legacy of imperialism in those countries that had gained their independence. In this course we will consider how novels that won the Booker questioned ideas of identity, nation, literariness, and prestige, reading a range of novels, including by Kiran Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Marlon James, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and Rushdie. In the final weeks of the class we will reflect on what it means that the Booker Prize has recently opened itself up to all literature in English, including by American writers, at the very moment when nationalism and Brexit has led to a resurgence of imperial nostalgia.