ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2026/27b: Literature & Settlement. In her 1780 elegy on the death of Captain James Cook, the British poet Anna Seward describes the famed explorer arriving in New Zealand, to “[pour] new wonders on th’ uncultur’d shore.” In a similar vein, in 1817 Barron Field imagines Cook—”our Columbus of the South”—with musket in hand, facing down the lances and spears of “the simple race / Of Austral Indians” he has encountered in Botany Bay, Australia. Of course, neither shore was in fact “simple” or “uncultur’d,” and the arrival of Europeans like Cook brought more horrors than “wonders” to the indigenous peoples who lived there. But the myth of origins captured by these two Romantic-era texts cast a long shadow over the literary cultures that developed in the wake of Cook’s voyages, as subsequent generations of authors—both settler and indigenous—reinscribed, revised, reimagined, or rejected it, in their efforts to tell their own stories.

Taking these two former British colonies as case studies, this course investigates the relationship between settler colonialism and modern culture, in works of fictional and non-fictional prose, poetry, visual art, and film. Across the semester, we explore a number of settlement’s most significant symbolic spaces—beginning with the unknowable place as it was before colonial contact. From this impossible starting point, we proceed through the settler topoi of terra nullius (“nobody’s land”) and the bush to the urban and suburban landscapes of the new nation states, asking how literary and other artistic texts work both to construct and to undermine colonial ideals of nationality and race, selfhood and property, gender and sexuality. The course concludes with a visit to what Māori filmmaker and critic Barry Barclay calls the “fourth world”: a space carved out by first peoples within the confines of the settler state. Here, we see how Māori and Australian Aboriginal writers both made use of and creatively transformed literary forms and genres for a variety of anti- and/or decolonial projects. Mark Taylor.

This course satisfies the REGS requirements for the English major.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS