Form, Time & Feeling in Contemporary South African Fiction

7.110102

Dozenten

Beschreibung

In this course, we examine the entangled nature of form, time and feeling in three recently published novels. We use these concepts as a point of departure to think about the South African socio-political sphere three decades after the formal end of apartheid. Literary fiction is one of the cultural forms that is negotiating an increasingly widespread sense of disenchantment with post-apartheid public life, in which the aftermaths of the colonial-apartheid past remain visible and the hopefulness that accompanied the attainment of democracy in 1994 has itself become another “ghost” that haunts present.

We will be considering these ideas through three novels:
CA Davids’ How to be a Revolutionary (2022) ISBN/EAN: 9781839760877,
Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2019) ISBN/EAN: 9781909762954,
and Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021) ISBN/EAN: 978152911387.

The selected novels function in different ways, and from different perspectives, as national allegories, drawing on some key conceptual, and formal, tropes of contemporary South African fiction. Among the questions we will ask of these novels are:

For what visions of the present are the novels a staging ground? How do they relate to the past, and which past - colonialism, apartheid, 1994? What future horizons are being imagined in the novels? How do they emplot these temporal relations/ imaginaries? From what genres do the novels draw? How do they stretch these forms? To what ends? What are the “structures of feeling” (Williams) that the novels foreground, what affective orientations?

Students taking this class will be asked to hold a short presentation on a topic of their choice regarding one or more of the three novels. A list of prospective themes will be handed out in our first session. If you already have a particular topic in mind, feel free to send me an email or come to one of my office hours.

If you require a Prüfungsnachweis for this class, you will need to write a term paper based on your presentation. Please refer to your specific Studienordnung to make sure you fit the requirements for this course.

Copies of the books are available for you to buy online at the bookstore InterKontinental. You may also acquire the novels elsewhere - but please do try to purchase the editions listed above, for the purpose of easier reference to page numbers. Please aim to have read the novels before the start of class. We will discuss the books in the order listed above, so at the very least you should have finished How to be a Revolutionary by the start of our first class (02.04.2024)

Weitere Angaben

Ort: 22/105
Zeiten: Di. 14:00 - 16:00 (wöchentlich)
Erster Termin: Dienstag, 02.04.2024 14:00 - 16:00, Ort: 22/105
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar (Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen)

Studienbereiche

• Veranstaltungen > Anglistik; Englisch > Kulturwissenschaft > Bachelor
• Courses in English > Language and Literary Studies
• Veranstaltungen > Anglistik; Englisch > Literaturwissenschaft > Bachelor