Prequels, Sequels and Adaptions

Catalog description

What if Charlotte Bronte's eponymous character Jane Eyre wasn't actually all that nice? While readers and critics have often accepted the narrator's account of the "madwoman in the attic," we never actually hear Bertha Mason's side of the story--at least not for another eighty years when in 1966 Jean Rhys writes a prequel to the canonical British text and gives Bertha (there Antoinette) a voice of her own. In similar ways, other postcolonial writers have tried to flip famous French and British texts to give voices of resistance to characters and stories that were otherwise silenced or erased. in addition to studying some canonical European texts, we will look at prequels, sequels, reimaginings, and adaptions by twentieth- and twenty-first century postcolonial writers and filmmakers as we analyze how these writers have responded to the experiences of colonization in film and literature. Prerequisite(s): WRT 101 and ENG 218 (or ENG 210 with permission of department chair).