ENG 482 - Poetics of Relation: Wole Soyinka & Derek Walcott

This seminar examines the aesthetics in poems, plays, and essays written by two Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott. “Aesthetics” is a rather expansive term that  will allow seminar participants to closely examine the relationships between the works these writers have produced, and its relationships to culture, space, and history. What, for example, are we to make of the speaker’s claim in Walcott’s Names, that ,

                          I began with no memory,

                          I began with no future,

                          but I looked for that moment

                          when the mind was halved by a horizon

as we study the national character of  a Caribbean persona? We may ask of Soyinka how and where his deviates from the limits he sees in Fanon’s writings.

This is a seminar for students interested in provocative discussions of literature, who are serious about reading, and developing fresh insights about the work of two intriguing writers.