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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2018
This essay proposes V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas for study in an undergraduate class in Ghana. It addresses some of the particularities inherent in treating a Caribbean text in a West African context. Focusing on how characters read can encourage students to re-examine their own approaches to a text. To a large extent, the class is based on textual analysis, which is useful for bringing the various layers of the book to life.
1 Naipaul, V. S., A House for Mr. Biswas (New York: Vintage, 2001)Google Scholar.
2 This class is geared toward upper-level undergraduates with a background in English and African literatures, as well as some knowledge of concepts in postcolonial literature.
3 Though each group will have a specific portion of the novel, I will not ask their members to work together on a group assignment, which few students appreciate.
4 Quayson, Ato, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
5 Quayson, Ato, “Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman in Comparative Frameworks,” in Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.2 (2015): 287−296 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 I am referring to Things Fall Apart, which students will likely have read in senior high school as part of their core English classes.
7 That being said, it has been pointed out that the defense of Naipaul’s more polemical statements seems to have come from Indo-West Indians, while the detractors have been Afro-West Indians: Mann, Harveen Sachveda, “V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (review),” in Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (1990): 590−591 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We can acknowledge the potential confusion arising from the term “West Indian.” One of Naipaul’s early essays, “East Indian, West Indian,” can provide insight from the point of view of a Trinidadian.
8 See for example Sareil, Jean, L'écriture comique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984)Google Scholar.
9 Naipaul, V. S., in Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Connie Robertson (Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth, 1998), 302 Google Scholar.
10 Kortenaar, Neil ten, “Oedipus, Ogbanje, and the Sons of Independence,” in Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 181−205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Things Fall Apart in History,” in Interventions 11.2 (2009): 166−70.
11 For instance, in Bolfarine, Mariana, “Literacy, Imagination and Autonomy in A House for Mr. Biswas ,” in Acta Scientiarum: Language and Culture 34.1 (2012): 103−106 Google Scholar.