Unit Code: LIT611
Unit Title: South Pacific & Solomon Islands Literature
This unit will introduce you to our Pacific and national literature. Up until now most of the written literature about the Pacific and islanders was written by outsiders. These writers concentrated more on their own experiences as outsiders looking in for what they wanted to find about the Pacific islanders rather than by islanders about themselves. Since 1960s, Pacific writers have indigenized and enriched the language of their colonizers and used it to explore colonialism and its effects on their very own people and to begin to mentally declare their independence from colonial mythologies. The literature written now in English in the region speaks of suffering, the loss of identity, endurance, the absorption of foreign influences, the adaptation to powerful changes that are rushing into the rim and the search for survival and life. This unit will focus on recent genres written by the Pacific writers and Solomon Islanders and use a reader-response based approach to make those genres become more meaningful to you, teacher trainees. A secondary aim is to promote a process of reading that is intrinsically motivating and characterized by the following behaviours: participate in the experiences in the genres; identify with characters in the genres experiencing similar situations from personal experience, thus adopting an ‘insider’ perspective; distinguish between literal metaphoric comparisons used in the genres and develop necessary responses; recognize and understand culturally conditioned attitudes and behaviours as they are manifested in each genre; explore issues as culture, ethnic, gender, identity, social, political, leadership, land, foreign interventions, relationships, violence, health, peace, reconciliation, and economic ones posed by the genres and then moving toward resolution of conflicts raised by these issues.