Terms and dates
Renaissance Period
Armstrong’s negative portrait
of the early modern period: death of myth
Early Modern
Protestant Reformation
Heresy and Orthodoxy
1543 Church of England, Henry
VIII
1517 Martin Luther
1452 Guttenburg
Murasaki Shikibu – Genji
Novel – traits of
Genji
Basho
Haiku, Haikai
Zen Buddhism
Industrial Revolution, 1770
ff
1776, 1789, 1798 –
Romanticism
Romantic versus Neoclassical
outlook, aesthetics
Rousseau’s Confessions
Autobiography as Romantic
European Realism, Naturalism
“To the Reader”
Carcass
Ivan Illyich
Impressionism, Expressionism,
Absurdism, Existentialism
Gregor Samsa, Greta Samsa
Modernism
1922
“
Multi-culturalism
Zaabalawi
Postcolonial Studies
Subaltern
Western Grand Narrative;
Western Canon
Whale Rider,
Things Fall Apart
Pacification of the Native Tribes of the
Some larger concerns:
Hamlet as a
text about political intrigue in the Renaissance.
Hamlet as a
representative of the Renaissance and Renaissance self-fashioning?
Discuss the concept of
religion and Hamlet as a possible
close Catholic text.
How are the roles of love and
madness mixed up in Hamlet?
Tale of Genji as a novel – something on verisimilitude and
psychological realism.
What makes Genji a more interesting character than some of the others
in the novel?
Buddhism in Genji and Basho
Romantic elements in Basho
Rousseau’s Romantic traits
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as an example of Romanticism
Wordsworth’s environmentalism
Tolstoy’s story as
representative of realism
In what ways does it violate
tenets of strict realism
Kafka’s
story as an example of modernism, of absurdism.
In ways does Baudelaire’s
poetry reveal the influence of realism and naturalism?
How does Eliot’s The Waste
Land make use of the myth of the Fisher King?
How is it representative of
modernism?
Is the ending hopeful or
despairing?
Discuss Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart as a postcolonial novel.
How does Achebe’s novel work
stylistically?
How is Okonkwo’s
story a tragic one in the Aristotelian sense?
In what sense does Achebe’s
novel achieve the goal state in the quote about “his readers”?
Whale Rider
as postcolonial, of course, and as a celebration of the feminine.
Read the use of myth in Whale Rider and read Whale Rider as a myth.
Why does the grandfather, Koro, resist Pai so much?
Why does Koro
worry so much about the old ways, the traditions, of his people?