South Pacific Literature

Honors Seminar 2011

Instructor: Dr Sandra Tawake
English Department
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858
Email: TAWAKES@MAIL.ECU.EDU

Up until 1960 most of the written literature about the Pacific and about Pacific islanders was written by outsiders, Melville, Maugham, Michener. These writers tended to focus on their own exploits and activities among Pacific Islanders rather than on the Islanders themselves. Since the 1960s, Pacific Island writers have indigenized and enriched the language of their colonizers and used it to explore colonialism and its effects on the indigenous peoples and to declare their independence from colonial mythologies. The literature now being written in English in the Pacific tells a story of enormous suffering, endurance, the absorption of foreign influences, adaptation, and survival. This seminar will focus on recent works written by Pacific Islanders and use a reader-response based approach to make those works meaningful to class participants. A secondary aim in this course is to promote a process of reading that is intrinsically motivated and characterized by some of the following behaviors:

• participating in the experiences depicted by the texts;
• identifying with characters depicted in the text, adducing similar situations from person experience, thus adopting an "insider" perspective;
• distinguishing between literal metaphoric comparisons used in the texts and developing awareness of characteristic responses to each type;
• recognizing culturally conditioned attitudes and behaviors as they are manifested in each of the texts;
• exploring such issues as cultural and gender chauvinism, obscenity, and justice that are posed by the texts and moving toward resolution of conflicts raised by such issues.

Class Meets: TTH, 11:00–12:15

Reading List:

Literature as Exploration - Louise Rosenblatt
Sons for the Return Home - Albert Wendt
Leaves of the Banyan Tree - Albert Wendt
The Bone People - Keri Hulme
Once Were Warriors - Alan Duff
Tales of the Tikongs - Epeli Hau'ofa
The Contemporary Pacific, vol 6, no 2, 1994 - review essay by Christina Thompson
The Contemporary Pacific, vol 7, no 2, 1995 - interview with Alan Duff
Metaphors and Symbols: Forays Into Language - Roland Bartel
Reader Response in the Classroom - Nicholas Karolides
Selected short stories and handouts

Requirements and Grading:

Schedule and Assignments

[Subject: Literature; Pacific/Comparative]

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