This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies ― one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots ― from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.
Author(s): Ana Cristina Mendes
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 257
City: Cham
Contents
About the Author
Contents
Introduction
References
Part I: What Decolonisation Is and Why English Studies Needs It
Decolonising the University: A Turn, Shift, or Fix?
Decolonising Factories of Knowledge
Portugal’s Semi-peripherality
From the Universal to the Situated, Towards Pluriversality
References
Excavating the Imperial History of English Studies
Knowledge, Power, and Selection
Literature and the “Globalectical Imagination”
References
Interrupting How the Literary Canon Is Taught
Dialogue, Relationality, and Emancipatory Politics
Against Deficit and Accommodation Approaches
The Aftering and Presentism of the Literary: A Radical Historicist Approach to the Canon
References
Part II: What a Decolonised Curriculum for English Studies Can Look Like
Beyond Stasis: Intertextuality, Spreadability, and Fandom
References
Adaptation Case Studies: Wuthering Heights and Home Fire
The Hypertextualities of Wuthering Heights
Inter-imperial Encounters in the English Literature Semi-peripheral Classroom
A Hypertextuality Perspective to Teaching Wuthering Heights
“Nelly, Make Me Decent, I’m Going to Be Good”
“Always Historicize!”
Antigone Among British Muslims—Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
References
Course Descriptions: English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) and English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries)
Learning Outcomes
Learning-Teaching Methodologies
Coherence of Learning-Teaching Methodologies with the Learning Outcomes
Notes on Online and Blended Classroom Learning-Teaching
Syllabi Coherence with the Learning Outcomes
Conceptual and Methodological Coordinates
Historical-Cultural Coordinates and the Politics of “English Literature”
Socio-aesthetic Worldviews and Literary Adaptation
The Creative-Critical Multimodal Project
Syllabi for English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) and English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries)
English Literature (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)
English Literature (Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries)
References
Concluding Notes
References
Index
