Singapore University of Social Sciences

The course ELT381 Singapore Literature offers an opportunity to approach Singapore Literature in English through a Cultural Studies framework, where the production of literary meanings will be located within larger discourses spoken in national social, cultural, and political spaces. Literary texts will be studied across genres and media in terms of their representation of Singaporean identities and their construction of Singaporean subjectivities. Readings will be provided that position literary texts in relation to state/political discourses. Comparative study of texts across generations and by current and ex-Singaporeans will surface tensions in the production of locality, especially within the era of globalisation. The theme of Singapore’s quest for an Asian modernity is selected for special study so as to illustrate how ideologies of history/heritage, politics, gender, race, and ethnicity have fed into a key cultural discourse in which Singapore literature has participated. In aiming to teach Literature in a culturally meaningful manner, the course has also pushed its reach into the study of texts produced in transnational spaces, employing some salient concepts of Cultural Globalisation theory to examine the new local projects of imagining cosmopolitan identities.