EN220: Moral Choices

Africa Writing Europe offers critical readings of the meaning and presence of Europe in a variety of African literary texts. The first of its kind, it shifts the focus from questions of African identity to readings which delineate ideas of Europe also in texts written specifically in an African context.

On publication in 1899 Heart of Darkness was hailed as an indictment of European imperialism. In recent years it has been denounced as racist and imperialist. Firchow counters these claims by contrasting the meanings of race and imperialism in Conrad's day to those of our own time.

Since its publication in 1958, Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" has won global critical and popular acclaim. Offering a hitherto unlimned picture of a traditional culture, it is both a moving story of the coming of colonialism and a powerful and complex political statement on the nature of cross-cultural encounter.

Ever since it was first published in 1999, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has provoked controversy. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it follows Prof. David Lurie as he encounters disgrace through his sexual exploitation of a student and then through the shocking gang-rape of his only daughter. The novel's uncompromising portrayal of the "new" South Africa outraged many, who found the book regressive, even racist. It also challenged readers worldwide to confront its hard questions. This first book of essays devoted to the novel ambitiously brings together criticism and pedagogy.

In Narrating from the Margins, Nagihan Haliloglu casts a discerning look at Jean Rhys's protagonists and the ways in which they engage in self-narration. The book offers a close reading of Rhys's novels, with particular attention to the links between identity construc-tion and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom.