Course convenor: A/Prof Peter Anderson
This course examines key theoretical questions within the history of literary and cultural studies. It considers these in their complex relationships to the political movements that sought to reshape the world. It is focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the accelerated movement of people, goods, and ideas across the globe led to the emergence of a world considered 'modern', and at the same time the inequalities that make it impossible to think of 'modernity' as a single, coherent idea. The primary aim is to introduce senior undergraduates in ELL to the frameworks, vocabularies, and animating ideas of literary and cultural manifestos, a form always at once political and aesthetic, and to work to improve core skills in analysis, exposition and argument.
Course entry requirements: ELL2000F and ELL2001S, or at the discretion of the Head of Department
Lecture times: 6th period, Monday and Tuesday.
DP requirements: All written work to be handed in and at least 75% attendance at seminars.
Assessment: Continuous assessment (essays, projects, tests etc) counts 100%.
Prescribed Texts, 2024
Selection of manifestos (to be provided on Amathuba)
Alice Walker, Meridian
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Maryse Conde, Land of Many Colours/ Nanna-Ya
Steve Biko, I Write what I like
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
The library has copies of some of these texts, and supplementary texts will be provided on Amathuba by your lecturers, so pay attention to notifications during the semester.