140058 VO African Literature: Past and Present (2019W)

AIMS:
• Identify, analyse and understand key political, aesthetic and philosophical issues in modern African literature
• apply theory to a variety of literary texts and reflect critically on the relations between primary texts and relevant secondary texts
• discriminate between ideas, define personal positions and justify them intellectually

CONTENT: This introductory lecture series will trace the birth and development of modern African literature (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry), exploring a wide range of political, aesthetic and philosophical issues. The political issues include for example:
• language choice
• literature as an instrument of anti-colonial resistance and decolonization
• the construction of ethnic and national identities in literature
• the clash between tradition and modernity
• the representation of women and feminism
• the criticism of African literature
• the process of canonization and the material aspects of publishing
The aesthetic issues include topics such as:
• the influence of African orality and Western genres on postcolonial African literary aesthetics (appropriation vs. abrogation)
• social realism versus modernism
• writing back
• the Black writing model
• the influence of African orality and Western forms on the African novel
• the representation of trauma
• the style and function of popular literature
The philosophical issues to be explored include:
• African identity and the postcolonial self
• the position of African literature in world literature
• the “Afropolitan” and diasporic identities versus Afrocentric and local ones
• the influence of liberal humanist, feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, postcolonialist and postmodernist discourses on African identities and literatures

METHOD: Lecture