EN4435 Writing the Pacific

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Module description

This module introduces students to a range of writing in English about Oceania by British, American and Indigenous Pacific authors. It considers texts in a variety of genres including travel writing, fiction, and poetry from eighteenth-century to contemporary writing. The texts considered include creative and critical works about the Pacific by British, American, Hawai‘ian, Sāmoan, Tongan, Papua New Guinean, Marshallese and Māori writers. Beginning with British accounts of ‘first encounters’, the module considers some of the important formal tropes and ideas that recur in representations of the region and its peoples, such as mapping and landscape, oral vs. written authority, gender and sexuality, custom and modernity, and questions of pan-Pacific and regional identity. Students should be aware that several of the texts include words or passages in Pacific languages; support and guidance on appropriate dictionaries will be provided.

Intended learning outcomes

• Students will gain familiarity with a selection of writing in English about the Pacific/Oceania by Pacific islanders, Europeans and Americans.
• They will consider some of the theoretical, aesthetic and political issues at stake in studying literary representations of the Pacific/Oceania by Western and indigenous Pacific writers. These will include questions such as: the representation of cross-cultural encounters; the roles and relative status of oral storytelling and writing within literary texts and critical methodology; and the use and decolonization of Western literary tropes and genres (such as the sublime, the Bildungsroman and the epic poem) by Pacific writers.