CSP 68 Rewriting Literature, Remaking the World: New Narratives of Social Justice

Although classic literary texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible continue to be read in high school and college classrooms year after year, they have also inspired important literary rewritings that radically re-envision these stories and the characters who populate them. This course will shift the conversation surrounding these canonical works of American and British literature by examining how they have been reshaped in the hands of Caribbean writers. In reading Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Miller alongside newer novels by Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé, we will have the opportunity to consider how literary rewritings shed new light on social injustice, from abuses of power in colonial Jamaica to racial and gender inequality in the contemporary United States. In addition to exploring how content changes have shaped subversive rewritings like Rhys's and Condé's, we will also analyze how formal innovations and shifts in genre contribute to the power of these texts. Ultimately, this course will help you develop your own ideas about how a new re-envisioning of an old narrative can bring about social change.