The following topics are some of the possibilities for brief contextual presentations (5-10 minutes) in Term 2, keyed to each week’s reading. (Note: please focus your presentation on only one of the topics listed under the weekly heading.) Feel free to suggest alternatives to your tutor if you wish. You should submit your presentation outline (in the form of structured notes, listing sources for your research in MLA format, as well as, e.g., any slides, powerpoints you might have) to your tutor directly after your presentation (either as hard copy or via email).

Week 1 (Tagore):

Bengal Renaissance
Second Swadeshi Movement
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress

Week 2 (Kafka and Lu Xun):

Surrealism
Modern allegory
Yiddish theatre
May Fourth Movement

Week 3 (Apollinaire, Eliot):

Cubism
Anglo-American modernism
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Week 4 (Porter):

Literary stream of consciousness
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
1918 influenza pandemic

Week 5 (Brecht):

Epic theatre
Verfremdungseffekt
C17 Thirty Years’ War/1914-1945

Week 7 (Césaire):

Négritude
Surrealism in the Caribbean
Colonization/assimilation and language politics in Martinique

Week 8 (Lispector):

Brazilian modernism
Nordeste region of Brazil
uneven and combined development

Week 9 (Armah):

Decolonization / post-independence Ghana
'Pitfalls of national consciousness' (Fanon)
Existentialism

Week 10 (Cliff):

Postcolonialism
Post-independence Jamaica
Black feminism
Tourism and uneven development