B2. Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights

With the publication of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Percival Everett’s James, which revisit masterpieces by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn), the concept of postmodern versions of beloved classics has generated a certain amount of critical attention, as if the phenomenon of literary revisions were a new and previously unheard-of enterprise. Yet Maryse Condé’s La Migration des Coeurs, in which the native of Guadeloupe transposes the plot and characters of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights from Yorkshire to the Caribbean, was published nearly thirty years ago. While the francophone version of the British classic augments the essential concerns of the original by including themes of race and gender, while also underscoring the complexities of multicultural society and modern perspectives on the psychology of abuse, Condé is on record as regarding her work a tribute to Brontë, recalling that Wuthering Heights inspired her with passionate admiration when she first read it at the age of fourteen. In this course, we will read Windward Heights, the English translation of Condé’s La Migration des Coeurs.

Required Text:

Maryse Condé, Windward Heights, trans. Richard Philcox, (Soho Press, 2003).

Background Reading—Recommended, not required:

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (any edition).

A.O. Scott, “‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction,” NYT, April 22, 2024.