The Caribbean and the Modern Narrative

Catalog description

The Caribbean has experienced enormous political and social shifts in the past century. Since the end of the first World War, patterns of revolution, intervention, migration, modernization, and natural disasters have contributed to the region’s strange modernity. That is to say, because of heightened conditions, operations of the everyday seem to border on the surreal. This seminar explores how some of the region’s most important authors try to capture this everyday through storytelling. Instead of making any definitive claims about a distinctive form from the region, however, the course is more interested in studying the various forms and techniques writers have marshaled in response to the shifting realities around them. We will therefore engage with authors from a range of Caribbean islands to get a scope of the region’s diverse histories and heritages. We will also examine how global movements such as modernism operate alongside indigenized forms of the gothic, the folk, and the marvelous real within the literature.