(S) Shadows of War, Echoes of Hope: New Perspectives on Sri Lankan Literature and Culture

This seminar is intended for students who are interested in reading fascinating novels and short stories, in bridging the gulf between literary and cultural studies and in learning about Postcolonial and South Asian Studies. “Sri Lanka, the Civil War and its Aftermath” does not only serve as a critical introduction to Sri Lankan literature and culture and to the major tenets of postcolonial studies; it also enables students to put this knowledge into practice and discuss their findings in joint sessions with colleagues and students from Sri Lanka. At the centre of this seminar are three different literary genres – a novel, a novella and a collection of short stories –, all of which demonstrate literature’s ability to deal with the uncanny remnants of the past, to live through conditions of war, diaspora and migration, but also to reconcile and create a new (national) community. 
The first novel we read is Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors, a book that won the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region and brilliantly contrasts the experience of emigration to the US with life as a female Tamil Tiger and suicide bomber during the Sri Lankan Civil War. It “completely sweeps the reader away into a world known little to outsiders” and gives “a glimpse into the world of forbidden love, prejudice, and arranged marriages as a civil war begins to simmer in the background” (A. Gomenyuk). Our second text, Anuk Arudpragasam's novella The Story of a Brief Marriage, also focuses on the civil war, but takes place over the course of a single day at a displaced persons’ camp and can be read as ‘a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence (…) that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses’. In comparison to this, Romesh Gunesekera’s short story collection Noontide Toll, shows Sri Lanka in a much more positive light; a Sri Lanka in which the reader follows the adventures of ‘"Vasantha the van man" as he transports tourists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, aid workers and exiles to the ravaged north and the renewed south’, thus reconnecting and re-thinking a country the name of which signifies no less than ’Resplendent‘ or ’Shining/Brilliant Island’. 

A lecture series (Vorlesung) on Postcolonial Studies (Wednesday, 3.DS; 11.10-12.40) and a series of Exchange Sessions (Wednesday, 6. DS; 16.40-18.10) with Sri Lankan and international students accompany this seminar. However, attendance in the Vorlesung or in the Exchange Sessions is not mandatory.

An extensive bibliography will be handed out in the first session.