Course convenor: Ms Sindiswa Busuku

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: 6^th 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)

Lauretta Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die 

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own 

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 

Steve Biko, I Write What I Like 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 

Alastair MacKay, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

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.