Hebdomadal topics (week 11)

Topic: The country, the city, and the colony

The trajectory of English literature we have traced so far this semester has moved roughly from the country (the Romantics, Middlemarch) to the city (Tennyson, Browning, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dubliners). How, though, do we deal with the colony, a third category of space that is at once as depopulated as the country and as dark and unknowable as the city? Use a close reading of a passage from one of the Dubliners stories, or Heart of Darkness to illustrate exactly how colonial space differs from the national spaces of country and city. What is the significance of this difference?