This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

This course will introduce students to the literary and artistic landscape of the African city. Witnessing rapid economic and political transformations, large-scale infrastructural expansion, and unprecedented population growth, African metropolises are sites of immense complexities and contradictions. In this course we will explore how the African city becomes a site where class, gender, sexual as well as national and tribal identities are re-negotiated and imagined anew. We will consider works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, and visual arts that historicize, speculate, and contest Africa’s place in the world. We will pay special attention to the creative modes of world- and self-makings that African urbanites employ in order to make sense of their experience of a present defined by multiple intersecting crises, including the neoliberal re-making of the economic world order, climate change, mass migration, and the weakening of the nation-state. As we engage with these texts, we will explore and experiment with the forms our own writing can take in response.

Requisites

• Students with 1-6 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills