140208 SE Advances in African Linguistic and Literary Studies (2018S)

In this advanced seminar course, participants will be given the opportunity to explore in-depth a particular African linguistic phenomenon that has implications for African literary studies and a particular African literary device, tool, or style that derives from African language structures. Examples that come into mind readily are ideophones, proverbs, and idioms. This semester’s course offering focuses on the concept of ideophones, expressions encoding iconicity that are so pervasive in many African languages and that often appear in many African literary works, especially in African poetry, African drama, and general African oral literary practices, such as folksongs and lullabies.
Method: Lectures, guest appearances, discussions, debates seminar presentations by course participants towards writing a term paper of up to 44.000 characters.