D. H. Lawrence: "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)

1. To the extent that we could say Dr. Ferguson chooses Mabel Pervin, and Mabel chooses him, what factors contribute to the individual's selection of a mate in this narrative?

2. Compare the process of selection here to the same kind of process in Austen's Persuasion a century earlier. As you make your comparison, try to avoid treating difference as “progress” (the Modernist as better than its Romantic predecessor) or “regress” (the Austen narrative of “love” as more appealing than the Lawrentian), attending instead to what precisely generates the difference.

... AND ABROAD? COLONIZING IN ENGLISH AND ENGLISH COLONIZED

Ngugi Wa Thiongo of Kenya
John Agard of Guyana
Salman Rushdie of "the World" (b. Bombay, India)

1. Compare the very real violence experienced by Kenyan schoolchildren when learning English in colonial schools (like the young Ngugi) with the comic violence, performed by John Agard when apostrophizing "Mr Oxford don" and “mugging de Queen's English” in an Afro-Caribbean suburb of London. What might native English speakers and scholars learn from each kind of response to the violence perpetrated in the name of "proper English"?

2. In the third paragraph of his discussion “English is an Indian Literary Language,” Salman Rushdie, himself a product of a colonial world, uses a metaphor of colonization to suggest that writing can be a way of creatively negotiating colonial rule (both linguistic and more directly material) in a way liberating to the colonized country. Study this metaphor closely: the English language is being compared to a huge territory (perhaps a vast continent like India that is difficult to rule with a centralized government), yes? And what happens as a result? In other words, to what effect does Rushdie's comparison work?

3. His short story, “The Prophet's Hair” (1981), can be read as practicing the very invention of “world literature” that Rushdie describes in his critical prose. What qualifies this short fiction for inclusion in an anthology entitled East/West ?

4. What words and phrases used in the opening of this short story suggest that it will not belong to the genre of Realism, or that perhaps it is colonizing and reworking this genre in a new post-colonial mode?

5. What kind of power is represented by the prophet's hair, and by what alternative kinds of power is it threatened?

6. One might argue that the common link between Agard and Rushdie as post-colonial writers is the comic spirit in which they approach the laws of the English language and its literature. One might even say that they display the “innovative wit and cunning” of Hare (p. 2536), the hero of Ngugi's Kenyan childhood. What do you think?