Convener: Dr Bernard Fortuin
Lecture Times: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Period 2, 09:00-09:45.
Timetable, tutorial times and tutorial sign-up are published on Amathuba once you have registered for the course.
Entrance requirements: None.
DP requirements: All written work to be handed in and at least 75% attendance at tutorials.
Assessment: Continuous assessment (essays, projects, tests, etc.) counts 100%.
Course Outline:
As an introduction to cultural and literary studies, this course examines various modes of expression as we seek to understand how texts of multiple kinds accomplish their acts of meaning-making and persuade their readers. We will focus on the impact of a text’s form and context in shaping its message and content. In trying to understand the rhetorical effects of any text, we will examine examples from various genres that use words, images, and even sound to engage their audience or readers within different historical and political contexts. Objects of study will include texts that use sound as well as words (such as contemporary ballads, performance poetry and hip hop, or contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays), visual images (such as posters in protest action, photographs that document war and suffering, and historical maps that retraced the shape the world), and words collated and presented in particular ways on the page (such as the archived documents from the apartheid censors, the published journal of a fugitive slave, the extended prose of a stream-of-consciousness novel). By drawing on vital theoretical insights into the politics of representation, we aim to develop the critical skills needed to become savvy readers of contemporary culture and politics. The course aims to build upon the critical reading and writing skills taught in ELL1013F.
Prescribed Texts, 2024
The Critical Image:
Cole, Teju. “A Crime Scene at the Border”. New York Times (July 10, 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/drowned-migrants-photo-us-mexico-border.html (Available on Amathuba as .pdf, but without images.)
Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life”. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. 128-151.
McClintock, Anne. “Paranoid Empire: Spectres from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib”. Small Axe 28 (2009): 51-74.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, Picador, 1993.
Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag”. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. 63-100.4.
McClintock, Anne. “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice”, e-flux. (Accessed 9 August 2020). https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/331865/monster-a-fugue-in-fire-and-ice/
Poetry and Performance: To be supplied on Amathuba and YouTube.
The Essay: To be supplied on Amathuba.
Visual Poetics: To be supplied on Amathuba.
Franz, Kafka. The Metamorphosis (1915)
Short Fiction:
“The Suit” by Can Themba was published in The Will to Die (1972). An electronic
version of the collection is available electronically through the library.
The stories below were published in Running and Other Stories (2013) by Makhosazana
Xaba:
“Behind The Suit”
“The Suit Continued: The Other Side”
The collection is available electronically through the library.
The following stories were published in Queer Africa: New and collected fiction (2013),
edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin.
“Pinch” by Martin Hatchel
“Poisoned Grief” by Emil Rorke
“Impepho” by Roger Diamond
“The Big Stick” by Richard De Nooy
“Sethunya Likes Girls Better” by Wame Molefhe
The collection is available electronically through the library.
The NYC Public Theatre’s Radio Production of Shakespeare’s Richard II: NYC Public Theatre’s ‘Free Shakespeare on the Radio’ 2020 production of Richard II