120058 PS Literature: Proseminar = Introductory Seminar (2010W)

This course will introduce students to the works of francophone (post)colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe who share a deep interest in the nature and psychological effects of colonial violence on the body-soul of the colonised. In particular, we will investigate the inner splits and different temporalities caused by traumatising events. Students will learn to apply theoretical concepts to contemporary South African novels but also to non-fictional post-apartheid texts and will examine how different narratives try to scrutinise the psyche of the perpetrator, notions of complicity, and the effects of violence that reveal themselves only through paradoxical symptoms, at the interstices between the ‘body in pain’ and its related silences.