THEORY OF AFRICAN LITERATURE

AFRICAN 406

Provides a conceptual focus for the study of various forms of literature from around the African world. Literary forms studied may include novels, drama, poetry, short stories, cinema, and more. Depending on the conceptual focus, texts from a particular region, period, or language may be stressed, or they will coalesce around certain themes, such as modernity, cultural identity, nation building, ideology, globalization, and more.

AFRICAN 412

A critical study of the major works.

AFRICAN 403

A study of culture and cultural production, circulation, consumption, and meaning making in Africa. Discussions foreground material and imaginative cultural forms and practices-their origins, languages, contents, forms, functions, genres, and audiences. Examines the uses to which particular meanings of culture and its forms are put, by whom, and to what purpose, and how meanings are fought over, reshaped, and reconstituted, and under what conditions those are or can be possible. Surveys the entrenched modes of both conceptual and critical apprehension of the cultural forms and practices (from Negritude to postcolonialism and postmodernism), explores their methods of reading, raises the issue of their linkages to sources in Euro-America, and assesses the extent to which the unique concerns of the biography of culture in Africa (expressed by its creators and scholars) have tried to tame and refashion what are now globally shared critical tools of cultural reading.

AFRICAN 201

Survey of African literary traditions and introduction to literary analysis.

AFRICAN 901

Special topics in modern African literature, covering various genres (prose, poetry, drama).