HENK00020U English, 2013 curriculum - Free topic 10: Narrating the Nation

In this course we will look at how a selection of literary texts (novels, poems, short stories and tales) engage with the vexed question of the nation in terms of individual attachment and belonging. What goes into the making of ’nation’, how it is imagined, bordered, and gendered and, most importantly, who is included and excluded from its realms? And how do the myths of the nation sustain or obstruct individuals / characters in their desire for recognition and agency? The texts we will study range from troubled family stories as national allegories to outsider stories that further complicate the idea of the nation as a provider of stability, safety, and secure identity. We begin in Ireland and end in England and in-between visit the so-called postcolonial world. This will enable us to investigate the many different ways in which literary texts point to the nation as (once) liberating and empowering but (now) also outmoded in a global world that cultivates mobility and cosmopolitan interaction across borders. Paradoxically, in the contemporary moment, many nations close in on themselves and vehemently patrol their borders as national communities become increasingly suspicious of the pressures that ethnic heterogeneity and cultural diversity are seen to impose on the very idea of nation as a sustainable imagined community. A selection of theoretical and critical texts will provide us with a background to the issues at stake in the literary texts.