CLCS 275 Literature and the Land: Aotearoa-New Zealand
It seems almost a cliché to say that the literature of New Zealand feeds off its often wild and varied landscape. And yet - from the Māori creation narrative to Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-winning novel "The Luminaries" the ideas that define New Zealand's literary history are built around and shaped by the land. Against the backdrop of the narrated landscapes themselves, this course will draw on short and longer texts by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, Owen Marshall, Hone Tuwhare, Catton and Kapka Kassabova, as well as on related visual culture (e.g. work by filmmaker Jane Campion), to explore the relationship between humans and the environment in New Zealand literature, focusing particularly on the central South Island and its East and West Coasts. How does this relationship negotiate notions of belonging and a "place to stand" in a postcolonial country where land is symbolic not only of internal, but also of external conflict? How do more recent migrants make critical use of these ideas (Kassabova)? How do the sharp edges and isolated spaces of the landscape convey the "small violences" of rural New Zealand (Mansfield, Frame, Marshall)? And how does literature raise the bigger questions about the destructive power of humankind (Tuwhare)?