English 210 - Winter, 2014

Readings in English & American Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Roy, Parama
CRN: 62856
Time: M 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later British
Focus: Interdiscipline, Other National

Description

The Commodity Cultures of British Colonialism

This course will examine the rhetoric and ideology of consumption and commodity culture made possible by colonisation/global capitalism from the early modern period onwards. Focussing for the most part on Britain and its colonies, it will take up questions of mercantilism and free trade; slavery and indenture; taste and consumption; it-narratives; commodity fetishism and thing theory; luxury and connoisseurship; gifts, commodities, and loot; exhibitions, zoos, and museums; the circulation, propagation, transculturation, and vernacularisation of objects; drugs, medicines, and magic; gender and domesticity; waste and decay; and boycott and abstention. It will examine a range of commodities: spices, indigo, tobacco, potatoes, sugar, rum, opium, tea, coffee, cacao/chocolate, ivory, oil, gold, textiles, jewels, nonhuman animals, and human bodies and organs. Readings include the following texts: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Jonas Hanway, “An Essay on Tea”; Helenus Scott, Adventures of a Rupee; Samuel Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”; Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four and “The Man With the Twisted Lip”; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Ben Okri, “What the Tapster Saw”; Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies; Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; and essays by Arjun Appadurai, John Barrell, Jean Baudrillard, Bill Brown, Laura Brown, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Lamb, Bruno Latour, David Lloyd, Marcel Mauss, Anne McClintock, Sidney Mintz, Timothy Morton, William Pietz, John Plotz, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Georg Simmel, Peter Stallybrass, Charlotte Sussman, Michael Taussig, and Jennifer Wenzel.

Grading

An annotated bibliography; weekly posts to an online forum on Smartsite; a 15-page seminar paper.

Texts

Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-13: 978-0393970142. , Aphra Behn
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ed. Barry Milligan. Penguin. ISBN-13: 978-0140439014., Thomas De Quincey
The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland. Oxford UP., Wilkie Collins
The Sign of Four, ed. Shafquat Towheed. Broadview., Arthur Conan Doyle
Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong. W. W. Norton & Company, 4th edition. ISBN-13: 978-0393926361., Joseph Conrad
Sea of Poppies. Picador. ISBN-10: 0312428596, Amitav Ghosh
Adventures of a Rupee, Helenus Scott