The following electives are offered within each of the streams of enquiry:
Stream 1: Black Literary and Intellectual Traditions
- SEMESTER 1: ELL4080F Black Aesthetics and the Deep Ocean (Mapule Mohulatsi)
- SEMESTER 2: ELL4074S Modern African Literature (TBC whether this will be offered in 2025)
Stream 2: Gender and Sexuality in African Literature
- SEMESTER 1: ELL4066F/ELL5066F: Gender and Literature: African Feminist Thought (Barbara Boswell)
- SEMESTER 2: ELL4078S/ELL5078S Towards an African Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Bernard Fortuin)
Stream 3: World Literature in English
- SEMESTER 1: ELL4035F/ELL5043F: Debates in World Literatures: Perspectives from the Global South (Kate Highman)
- SEMESTER 2: ELL4036S/ELL5044S: Literary Cities / Cities of Literature (Polo Moji)
Stream 4: Literary Engagements with the Past
- SEMESTER 1: ELL4079S Early Modern Racecraft (Hassana Moosa)
- SEMESTER 2: ELL4075S/ELL5040S: Memory, Trauma and the Limits of Language (Sandra Young and Hedley Twidle)
Stream 5: Between the Critical and Creative
- SEMESTER 1: ELL4077F/ELL5077F: Wayward Experiments and Hybrid Genres (Sindiswa Busuku)
- SEMESTER 2: ELL4076S/ELL5046S: Writing Workshop: Cultural Criticism, Non-Fiction and the Essay (Hedley Twidle)
HONOURS CORE COURSES
ELL4061F Theory in Practice
Convenors: Dr Kate Highman and Dr Hassana Moosa
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for the English honours programme.
Course outline
Reading Contemporary Theory
Reading Contemporary Theory is the Honours core course which introduces students to key topics in contemporary literary theory through the in-depth analysis of a range of essays by a selection of the most significant figures in the field. It is a team-taught seminar that concentrates on building students’ skills as close readers and critical thinkers by engaging with diverse strands of literary and cultural theory. It focuses on theorists who have developed an understanding about the potential violence of the relation between self and other, following their incisive attention to language and positionality in the scene of address. It also explores theories of archive, history and memory, considering how variegated these multiple ways of remembering are, and how they may impact and form and inform our own research.
Term 1: Theories of Archive and Memory (Dr Kate Highman)
Term 1: Self and Other (Dr Hassana Moosa)
Set works
- Extracts of relevant theoretical texts will be made available on VULA
Assessment
- TBC
- Total word count: 6000 words
ELL4062S Literary Criticism and the Archive
Convenors: Ms Mapule Mohulatsi and A/Prof Polo Moji
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for the English honours programme.
Course outline
Debates in African Literature and Critical Thought
Debates in African Literature and Critical Thought is the Honours core course which develops an understanding of some of the major debates and issues within the field of African literary and cultural studies. It is a team-taught seminar which engages critically with terms such as Afropessimsm, Afrosurrealism, Afrocosmopolitanism and Afrofuturism, as well as concepts such as extroversion. Students encounter African archival practice and popular cultures; aesthetics and materiality, as well as the spatial and temporal dimensions of the African literary imaginary, developing the necessary skills to undertake literary criticism, synthesise their thinking and conduct independent archival research.
Term 3: African archival practice and popular cultures (Dr Mapule Mohulatsi)
Term 4: Critical Debates in African Literature (A/Prof Polo Moji)
Set works
- TBC
Assessment
- Including (but not limited to) group or individual presentations, a literature review essay, reading response exercises and an archival research essay / project.
- Total word count: 6000 words
HONOURS ELECTIVES
ELL4080F Black Aesthetics and the Deep Ocean (Semester 1)
Convenor: Ms Mapule Mohulatsi
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme
Course outline
This course aims at exploring the ways contemporary black writing has contributed to the imaginaries of the deep ocean. Working with the black aesthetic as well as questions of ocean waste, the course looks into the deep ocean as an avenue to think with the aquatic environment’s emergent future, and past, as well as the ways in which perceptions of the marine environment are influenced in turn. In the course we set out to complicate simplistic received ideas of black intellectual traditions being cast as nationalistic, territorial or ‘landlocked’ modes, and to draw out the range of cultural, historical and artistic encounters with the sea, as both physical entity and mythic force. The course moves from historical analysis (particularly with regard to the mapping of the ocean floor), decolonial studies, feminist epistemologies and cultural / oceanic materialism (in drawing attention to the ‘agentive’ character of the oceans) towards a more fine-grained, open-ended and literary / art-historical mode of interpretation in considering the work of Claudette Schreuder, Neliswe Xaba, Wangechi Mutu, Nalo Hopkinson, Koleka Putuma, Nnedi Okorafor, Romesh Guneskera and Kei Miller. The course treats these various materials sensitively, drawing out their often-ambivalent reactions to the ocean with care. At its heart, the course explores the extent to which different cultural mediums (from poetry to visual art to the novel) are able to acknowledge or honour forms of agency where these have often been overlooked or denied by certain kinds of environmentalist, or even postcolonial, discourse.
Set Works:
Extracts and secondary texts will be provided on Vula.
- The Lost Girl art installation series by Claudette Schreuder
- The Urban Mermaid art installation series by Nelisiwe Xaba
- Nguva sculptures by Wangechi Mutu
- The Salt Roads novel by Nalo Hopkinson
- Lagoon novel by Nnedi Okorafor
- “Water” poem by Koleka Putuma in her collection Collective Amnesia
- Black Venus short story collection by Angela Carter
- Reef novel by Romesh Gunesekera
- The Same Earth novel by Kei Miller
Students are not required to purchase The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson.
DP Requirements: None
Assessment: TBC
ELL4066F Gender and Literature: African Feminist Thought (Semester 1)
Convenor: A/Prof Barbara Boswell
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
This seminar explores women’s literary history in Africa and the theorisation of gender through literature. Drawing on transnational feminist literary theory, while centering feminist theory from the African continent, it will historically locate women’s literary production in Africa. The course traces a lineage of African feminist literary criticism and thought, showing how the history of such knowledge production finds resonance and articulation in contemporary writing around race, sexuality and representation.
Students will be enabled to recognise the African continent as a site of feminist knowledge production; be familiarised with imperial feminism and African feminists' attempts to produce theory grounded in local specificities amd with the broad body of African feminist literary theory and criticism. This course will enable students to read critically, and engage critically with African feminist theory in writing and verbally, and conduct research on feminist African literature and African feminist theory. The course aims to help students situate and integrate African feminist epistemology into larger bodies of feminist criticism.
Set works
Texts include excerpts from Ifi Amadiume’s Reinventing Africa (1997), Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Societies (1987); Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English” (1985), Molara Ogundipe’s Recreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (1994), Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi’s Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (1997), Yvette Abrahams’s “Images of Sara Baartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early 19th Century Britain” (1997), Desiree Lewis’s “Representing African Sexualities” (2011) Pumla Dineo Gqola’s Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015), Makhosazana Xaba’s Running and Other Stories (2013), and Floretta Boonzaier’s “The Life and Death of Anene Booysen: Colonial Discourse, Gender-based Violence and Media Representations” (2017).
DP requirements: None.
Assessment:
5 x 800-1000 word reflection papers on readings covered, synthesizing different articles or chapters while inserting students' own scholarly “voice” into analysis of the texts. Assessment will be based on the rigour of engagement with writers’ ideas, as well as student ability to articulate scholarly/activist responses to the ideas presented. (45%)
Final research essay of between 3500 – 4000 words, synthesizing and expanding on one or more themes of the course. (55%)
ELL4035F Debates in World Literature: Perspectives from the Global South (Semester 1)
Convenor: Dr Kate Highman
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
This elective will give students an overview of the current conversations and contestations around the idea of World Literature. It will explore what perspectives from Africa, the postcolonial world and the global south can contribute to these debates by troubling and unsettling the themes, conceptual frameworks, theories, genealogies, etc. currently dominant within the field and thus map new directions. The questions we will explore in this seminar include: what is the state of current debates in World Literature? How are these debates shaping the field at the moment? What is the place of voices from Africa, the postcolonial world and the global south in these debates? How do literatures in the ‘minor’ languages of the world count? Can we think World literature outside of capital and/or imperial or global languages? We will read a substantial amount of scholarly work, but also creative work that has been taken up as ‘World Literature’ or offers interesting perspectives on its theorization. In considering debates about World Literature, and how texts come to circulate as such, our focus is not only on individual texts, but also on various literary institutions, for example English departments, libraries, writers’ organisations, literary prizes and publishing networks.
Set works
The titles that are starred, you will need to source for yourselves. The others will be provided.
1. Adichie, C. ‘Jumping Monkey Hill’. 2006.
2. Cole, Teju. Everyday is for the Thief. 2007.
3. Mda, Z. The Heart of Redness. 2000.
4. p’Bitek, O. Song of Lawino. 1967.
5. Extracts from Staffrider and damn you
DP requirements: None
Assessment
Two essays of 2500 words (80%); class participation and tasks (20%).
ELL4079F Early Modern Racecraft (Semester 1)
Convenor: Dr Hassana Moosa
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme
Course Outline
This seminar will offer students an introduction to Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) – a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field that is concerned with manifestations of race and modes of race-making that prevailed in the premodern world (± pre-1750). PCRS is an intellectual tradition that developed from, and continues to be shaped by, scholars of colour who seek to resist the historical erasure of Black persons and other marginalised groups from premodern European literary archives. It also strives to counteract the denial that persists in literary and historical criticism, of the long-standing reality of racial ideology and its destructive effects.
In exploring PCRS, we will take as our focus race in literature and culture from the early modern period (1500-1750): a historical moment marked by heightened levels of global encounter and exchange; the emergence of capitalist frameworks; and a steady increase in imperial activities, like colonial settlement and slave-trade, amongst many of the world’s small nations and superpowers. Over the course of the semester, students will examine formative scholarship alongside recent debates and new directions in the field. To facilitate a multi-layered and intersectional engagement with premodern conceptions of race, our learning will be organised into blocks that examine race’s entanglements with (1) Gender, (2) Class, (3) Religion, and (4) Nationhood. We will attend to four primary texts, which we will read together with a selection of critical material, as well as supplementary literature from a variety of non-fictional genres such as travel writing and political publications.
By way of cultural-historical studies, this seminar aims to provide students with an understanding of the complexities of racial ideology, the historical role of literature as a vehicle of racial-fashioning, and methodologies for exploring the literature of the past to make sense of the present.
Set Texts
Literature:
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (1590)
Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness (1605)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
Robert Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612)
Selected excerpts from the anthology Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, ed. by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (2007)
Theory:
Students will be provided with articles as well as excerpts from a range of scholarship, including:
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1997)
Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009)
Bernadette Andrea, The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (2017)
Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018)
Matthieu Chapman, Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern Drama (2016)
Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021)
Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (2022)
DP requirements: None
Assessment:
Participation and Presentation (20%)
Critical Responses, 3x 800-1000 words each (20%)
One essay of 2500 words (60%)
ELL4077F Wayward Experiments and Hybrid Genres (Semester 1)
Convenors: Ms Sindiswa Busuku
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
What are hybrid genres? What does it mean to write and experiment from ‘in-between’? This elective b(l)ends both ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ writing practices. This interdisciplinary elective oscillates, at all times, between theory and practice. It is writing-intensive and demands lyrical richness and theoretical depth. This elective combines research, critical theory, fictional narrative and poetic language. Students will explore and experiment with form, genre and narrative techniques in a variety of ways. The elective, through selected readings, will explore the questionable dynamics of power that create and uphold boundaries around the so-called ‘critical imagination’ and the so-called ‘creative imagination’. How might we disrupt such boundaries within the academy? How might hybridity reshape the academy? The course exists at the intersection of the lyric essay, various poetic forms and is deeply rooted in advanced scholarly work. Through a mixture of seminars and writing workshops, students will explore a range of prescribed reading as a means of developing their style and technique. Students will engage with authors such as Yvette Christiansë, Saidiya Hartman, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Hélène Cixous, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Michael Ondaatje, Trinh T. Minh-ha, John D'Agata, Annie Dillard, Gloria Anzaldúa, and so on.
DP requirements :None
Assessment: TBC
ELL4074S Modern African Literature (Semester 2)
Convener: TBA
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
This seminar will revisit debates that dominated discussions of the category ‘Modern African Literature’. The seminar will engage with how sub-categories such as 'Oral Literature' or 'Orature' evolved into the development of the broader field of postcolonial theory and criticism, as African identities came to terms with the structural legacies of colonialism, which overdetermined the experiences of ‘citizenship’ in the new era of political freedom. In the background of these debates was an effort at canon-formation, which was articulated by a number of important conferences, events and publications – the Makerere Conference of 'Writers of English Expression' was one such event that fronted the question of language as central to the trends of thinking about what Modern African literature meant. In revisiting these debates the seminar seeks to ask what the category ‘postcolonial’ means today, in relation to categories such as ‘diaspora’ and in the context of South Africa the category ‘post-apartheid’. Where are the lines of solidarity, and of flight amongst these categories? The seminar will therefore look at a range of ‘archival’ material such as documents related to the Makerere Conference, theoretical and critical material related to debates on ‘Modern African literature’ as well as the broader field of imagination that emerged to provide a critical platform of practice.
Set works
TBC
DP requirements: Submission of all written work and at least 75% of seminar attendance.
Assessment: Assessments totalling 6,000 words for the semester.
ELL4078S Towards an African Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Semester 2)
Convenor: Dr Bernard Fortuin
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
This seminar engages African scholars’ contribution to the theoretical and literary discussion around sexualities and gender in Africa. Given its colonial history, performances of gender and sexuality on the continent became viewed through a homogenising lens. This view constructed African sexualities and gender performances as antithetical to northern-based western understandings and theorising thereof. It also suggested that African sexualities and gender performances are primarily heteronormative. The historical trajectory of African theories that engage gender and sexualities will be mapped and critically evaluated. The theoretical aspect of the course is supported by the reading of a variety of creative texts that seek to represent gender and sexualities performed in Africa from an African perspective. The course aims to provide students with an understanding of the relevant theories currently circulating about gender, gender identities and sexualities on the continent.
DP requirements: None
Assessment
Two essays of 2500 words each.
Set works
Theoretical and literary readings will be provided on VULA.
Literary readings will primarily be in the form of short stories and poems. Some photographic work will also be discussed.
ELL4036S Literary Cities / Cities of Literature (Semester 2)
Convenor: A/Prof Polo Moji
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course outline
This course addresses the intersections of the literature and the African urban, examining the affective, aesthetic and material dimensions of African visuality, spatiality and temporality in literary imaginaries of the African city. It addresses the discursive anxiety produced by an African urban that imagined as a being characterised by excess, abjection and precarity. Combining urban theory, black geographies and cultural theory, it delves beneath spectacular imaginaries of the African city through narratives of "of ordinary citizens in ordinary cities". Adopting a comparative approach, the course problematises the circulation of terms of 'Afropolitanism', 'Afro-polis', 'Afro-modernity', exploring questions located in the tension created by urban narrative forms as ones that not only document and comment on the development of cityscapes but are implicated in changing urban cultures. It is equally weighted between literary and theoretical texts, equipping students develop critical perspectives on urban literary genres, urban flânerie, performative streetscapes and gendered imaginaries of the African city.
Set works
Extracts and secondary texts to be supplied on Vula
- The Akashic Noir Series (short story collections) : Nairobi Noir, Marrakech Noir, Lagos Noir, Accra Noir and Addis Ababa Noir
- Jo’burg Noir (2020), edited by Niq Mhlongo
- Oxford Street, Accra: City Life the Itineraries of Transnationalism – Ato Quayson (Accra, Ghana)
- Broken Glass (2005) Alain Mabanckou: ISBN 978-1-84668-815-7
- Zoo City (2014), Lauren Beukes ISBN 9781770098183
Students are not required to purchase the Noir Series Books
DP requirements: None.
Assessment
Project work with a write up in the first term, followed by an essay in the second term.
- Honours assessment: Submissions totalling 6000 words for the semester, with more varied formats for project related tasks
- Master's assessments: Submissions totalling 8000 words for the semester, with more varied formats for project related tasks
ELL4075S / ELL5040S: Memory, Trauma and the Limits of Language (Semester 2)
Convenors: Prof. Sandra Young and A/Prof Hedley Twidle
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours / MA programme.
Course outline
The field of memory studies has been preoccupied with a paradox about the work of memory: traumatic experience seems to defy representation, while intensifying the imperative to bear witness. Moreover, the dependence of history on testimonies, life narratives, visual art, documentary filmmaking, museum curation, and even fiction has turned the work of private mourning and survival into a matter of public importance. In this course, we will consider literature that wrestles with such questions, exploring the role of what seems intimate and personal (stories of the body, grief, pain, attachment, subjectivity, ageing) in the making of history and a public archive.
The course materials move across a wide variety of global contexts and literary genres: both fiction and non-fiction, as well as performance art, documentary film, curated museum spaces and various forms of public remembrance. We will consider the work of narrative in giving shape to memories of war and the Holocaust and reflect on the way that the landscape itself might be said to remember, or made to forget, in Palestine. Documentary film will ask us to imagine a just future for the ‘stolen generations’ of Australia; and fiction will invite us to imagine the refugee experience on the Mexico-United States border. We will explore questions of truth, reconciliation and their limits in societies emerging from political repression: Soviet Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and post-apartheid South Africa. We will trace how the psychological and neurological basis of identity and memory is represented in narrative. Via memoir, poetry, visual art and music, we will consider the relation between (damaged) memory and selfhood in literatures of ageing, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Participants will have an opportunity to do independent research into specific acts of memorialisation by engaging a particular archive, all as part of our wider engagement with cultural production as a form of remembrance.
Primary texts:
You will need to source copies of the starred texts. Please note that the reading load is quite heavy for this course, so you are advised to find and read the book-length works prior to the semester. You will also need to visit the District Six Museum, prior to Week 10.
Term 1
· Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (2009). Excerpts provided.
· Gerda Saunders, Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia (2017). Excerpts provided.
· Nostalgia for the Light. Dir. Patricio Guzman, Icarus Films, 2010.
· Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019).*
· Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (1994. Trans. Stephen Snyder, 2019).*
· The Act of Killing. Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012.
Han Kang, We Do Not Part (Trans. e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, 2025).*
Term 2
· Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War (1985; trans. 2017). Excerpts provided.
· Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory (1985). Excerpts provided.
· Primo Levi, If This is a Man (1965). Excerpts provided.
· The Village Under the Forest. Dir. Heidi Grunebaum & Mark Kaplan (Journeyman, 2013). Available
· After the Apology. Dir. Larissa Behrendt (Ronin Films 2017). Available for streaming, UCT Primo
· The District Six Museum: to visit in your own time.
· Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019).*
Assessment:
Weekly reflections / response papers collated into work journal (Term 1 and Term 2).
Two essays (each essay: Honours 2,500 words, Masters 3,000 words).
ELL4076S Writing workshop: Cultural Criticism, Non-Fiction and the Essay (Semester 2)
Convenor: A/Prof Hedley Twidle
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours / MA programme.
Course outline
This is a writing-intensive seminar for both ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writers – a division that we will try to unravel in interesting ways as we explore how critical, academic and intellectual work can take shape in more creative forms and public voices. We will use contemporary essays, creative criticism and literary non-fiction to generate our own writing tasks. Students will also be required to write two stand-alone essays (on subjects of their own choice) and to keep a semester-long reading journal. Some writing exercises might include: reviewing imaginary books; using ‘found’ materials and tracing the lives of objects; working within artificial constraints; linking image, music and text; walking in the city and representing space; interviewing and telling the stories of others; researching biographical profiles and portraits; writing art and music journalism; exploring filmic, photo and documentary ‘essays’. The primary aim of the seminar is to prepare students to write for a wider audience than that of conventional academic writing, and to allow them the space to experiment with ‘voice’ in this sense. It aims to foster a public kind of criticism, and to train students to become reviewers, cultural commentators and arts journalists both within and beyond the 21st-century academy.
Course aims and concepts:
- Wide exposure to forms of cultural criticism and creative non-fiction from around the world.
- Knowledge of the history of the creative, critical or personal essay as a form.
- Familiarity with a range of genres within the public humanities: profiles, reviews, review essays, creative criticism, comparative and cross-platform approaches to cultural texts.
- Intense immersion in skills of editing and preparing one's own writing for a wider audience.
- A substantial portfolio of creative and critical work.
- Skills of peer review and being able to respond constructively to the work of others.
DP requirements: None
Assessment
1. Process work: weekly tasks, drafts and reading journal (50%)
2. Essay (3000-5000):(50%)