MASTERS IN ENGLISH IN LITERATURE AND MODERNITY

This programme focuses on the theory, historical contexts and literary expression of the concept “modernity” from Renaissance to Postmodernism.  It covers both metropolitan and South African and African expressions and developments of modernity, thereby allowing students to study a broad range of historical conditions and literary and philosophical texts through the focus provided by a single, key concept.  There are three compulsory courses, one elective and a dissertation.  The coursework counts 50% and the dissertation counts 50% of the final mark. For information on Masters electives, please click here.

COMPULSORY COURSES

ELL5032F THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF MODERNITY (Semester 1)

Convenors: Dr Sandra Young and Dr Peter Anderson
Schedule:
Monday 6 & 7, 14.00
Venue: A116 

---

Course Outline:
This course investigates the concept of modernity from the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. The object of the course is to develop a sense of the historical development of modernity and to consider the impact of modernity on knowledge, subjectivity, literature and politics. The course is a precursor to the second semester inquiry into the literature and thought of high modernism.

TERM 1 (WEEKS 1-6):
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
Lecturer: Dr Sandra Young: Sandra.Young@uct.ac.za

Outline:
The aim of this first module is to reflect on the major shifts in thought in the early modern period and its literature. In what sense could the ideas circulating during the sixteenth and seventeenth century be said to be ‘modern’? How did the writers and philosophers themselves think of themselves as ‘modern’? What were the terms they used, what debates were presented as most compelling and what literary forms were available to these writers as they carved out the terrain of the ‘modern’?

Recent scholarship has invited us to reflect on the idea of the ‘Renaissance’ as a phenomenon that emerges out of global circuits of exchange. Jerry Brotton, for example, asks, ‘whose Renaissance was it anyway?’ We begin reading Othello in light of these challenges to more traditional interpretations. We go on to examine the emergence of a new philosophy of learning, in particular about the natural world. We will read Francis Bacon’s utopian tale The New Atlantis before considering how Bacon’s empirical method, favouring sensory experience over elegant argument, rendered the natural world intelligible and established a relationship of mastery for even the ‘gentleman’ scientist. We will consider how Thomas Jefferson (1787) deploys ‘natural facts’ (to use Bacon’s terms) along with a literary eloquence to write America into existence. Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things will give us a critical vocabulary with which to examine some of these epistemological developments and their effects.

We go on to consider what it means to be ‘human’ in this age of reason. We examine how the philosophical writings of Descartes (1637) and John Locke (1690) conceptualise in particular ways the relationship between the body and reason. The directive towards self-consciousness, that is, to ‘know thyself’ emerges at a time when European traders and would-be colonialists are exploring previously unknown territories. We read some of the literature of this age of discovery and beyond – Christopher Columbus (1493), Amerigo Vespucci (1504), Michel Montaigne (1598), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1725), Benjamin Franklin (1747, 1790) – and some secondary material to think through how the encounter with the ‘other’ compels and shapes the self-consciousness that characterizes modernity.

We end by studying the development of the genre that gives particular scope to literary explorations of subjectivity and the individual: the novel. Students who intend to register are encouraged to begin reading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as soon as possible. Secondary readings on the novel as a genre and on Robinson Crusoe specifically will be made available as photocopies or posted on Vula.

---

TERM 2 (WEEKS 7-12):
HUMAN NATURE, OR, LIGHT IN DARK PLACES: ROMANTICISM AND NATURAL HISTORY

Lecturer: Dr Peter Anderson: Peter.Anderson@uct.ac.za

Outline:
The discovery of nature and the place of the human in nature are preoccupations of modern thought begun in the cosmological models of the Renaissance and culminating in Darwin’s biology. Romanticism is often portrayed as a reaction to the rational strictures of the Enlightenment, but, insofar as this is true, it was very much a reaction within the Enlightenment rather than against it. One of the central intellectual enthusiasms of the Romantics was the discovery of nature, and of humankind’s place in nature, and much of this enthusiasm sprang from the insights of science. The drive towards integrated and universal descriptions of nature, founded on human science - (Copernicus, Brache, Kepler, Galileo), anchored in the great physical system of Newton, expressed in the liberated natural forces that drove the Industrial Revolution, – is the story of Human Nature. As Wordsworth put it: ‘nature then to me was all in all’. This seminar is about the Romantic enquiry into nature and marks an attempt at situating Romantic philosophy within the broad current of thought about nature and the place of humanity. We will look at English and continental society from the English revolution, through the French and the Industrial, considering religious dissent, the rise of parliamentary democracy and radicalism. We will discuss the development of natural history and its manifestation as modern science in the physics of the 17th century, the chemistry of the 18th and the biology of the 19th. We will consider the place of the colonial encounter, in both directions, and the emergence of a modern anthropology and sociology. Our focus on the Romantics expects their texts to shed darkness on enlightenment science, and light on the dark truths of modernity they anticipate or propel.
We’ll take Romantic poetry generally as a ‘text’ and a detailed reading list will be supplied before the second term.
Preliminarily, make sure that you have read:

Blake,	Jerusalem (most collections give ‘Extracts’, this will do)
	‘Auguries of Innocence’
	‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’
	‘The Tyger’
Wordsworth,	‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey…’
Coleridge,	‘The Eolian Harp’
	‘Frost at Midnight’
	‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’
Shelley	Prometheus Unbound (which’ll take a couple of hours – but essential)
	‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’
	‘Mont Blanc’
Jonathan Swift,	Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope,	An Essay on Man
Mary Wollstonecraft,	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
William Godwin,	Caleb Williams

The library appears to have no stock of Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, which is a great pity as he was Shelley’s route into science (besides being intriguing in himself). I will put a copy of Carl Grabo, ‘Erasmus Darwin: scientific ideas’ on file in the office, for copying. I’ll also put there Grabo’s ‘Newton and a metaphysical conception of matter’ and ‘Davy and theory of matter’, which again pursue the science in Prometheus Unbound, but are also useful in recording the tenor of the Romantics’ access to science and philosophy (not yet fully distinct). Ian Wylie’s ‘Wrestling with the spirit of Newton’ argues that it was Coleridge’s “struggle to accept the modern system of the world of Isaac Newton that caused the extraordinary burst of complex poetry” of his 23rd year: I’ll put a copy on file also. And Jean Hagstrum’s ‘William Blake rejects the Enlightenment’. Biographies are the current glory of English letters and an excellent route into the social and intellectual history of any period.
Please also read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams – largely for the later classes, in which we will be looking at the ways in which the Romantic interpretation of Enlightenment science anticipates both Darwin’s conclusions about the ‘spirit’ and integrity of nature, as well as Freud’s idea of the unconscious and its place in human nature. Familiarize yourselves with Marx too.

Assessment:
Two essays of between 4 000 and 5 000 words each, each worth 50% of the final mark. One essay should cover the material from Term 1 and the other the material from Term 2. Students should expect to develop their own essay topics, in consultation with the lecturer. Term 1 essays are due at the end of the mid-semester break and Term 2 essays by the end of consolidation week.

ELL5030F: LITERATURE AND MODERNITY 1:  AFRICAN FICTION: MODERNITY, POSTCOLONIALITY AND GLOBALISATION           

Lecturers: Associate Professor Harry Garuba: Harry.Garuba@uct.ac.za
Dr Sandra Young: Sandra.Young@uct.ac.za

Schedule:
Wednesdays 10:00-11:45   
Venue: Center for African Studies

 The course is divided in two parts.

1. Issues of modernity and postcoloniality (A/Professor Garuba)
2. Questions of migration, identities and globalisation  (Dr Sandra Young)

Each part will consist of three seminars, which grapple with theoretical issues and three seminars, which read specific literary texts in the light of those theoretical issues. Students will take turns in presenting some opening comments on the topic of the seminar in order to stimulate debate and discussion.

Assessment:
Two Essays of about 8 pages each – one essay for each part of the course – each counting 25% of the overall mark. One long paper of about fifteen to twenty pages, counting 50% of the overall mark
The two essays fall under the title “Tools and Texts” and will be handed in as follows:
First Essay Due Date will be given in class. Second Essay Due Date will be given in class
Long Paper due date will be given in class
With regard to the essays, in each case, the due date is one week after the theory section of each part of the course is completed. At this point, students should have read all of the setworks, although we would not have discussed them in class. The topic for each of the essays is to look critically at the theory readings dealt with in the three week block and attempt to extract tools that students anticipate will be useful in understanding the novels. Students may choose from one or more of the three weeks of the theory examined and apply some of the insights to one or more of the setworks for that part of the course. They should frame their own specific topic under the broad heading of “Tools and Texts”.
The long paper should

• apply the theory to the setworks
• show a broad understanding of the course as a whole and attempt to integrate its parts
• generate a bibliography beyond the readings supplied in the course reader

COURSE OUTLINE:
PART ONE: Issues of Modernity and Postcoloniality - (A/Professor Garuba)
Week One: Introduction
Week Two: Modernity, Colonialism and the Other
Hall, Stuart. "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power". Formations of Modernity, Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben eds. London: Polity Press: 275-321.
Chatterjee, Partha. “The Colonial State”. The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP: 14-34.
Scott, David. “Colonial Governmentality.” Social Text. Vol. 0, Issue 43 (Autumn 1995), 191-220
Week Three: Modernity, Discursive Representation and the Other
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983: 1-35.
Jeyifo, Biodun. “In the Wake of Colonialism and Modernity”.  Anglophonia/Caliban 7, 2000: 71-84.
Biakolo, Emevwo. "Categories of Cross-Cultural Cognition and the African Condition" in The African Philosophy Reader. P.H Coetzee and A.P.J Roux, eds. London & New York: 1998: 1-14.
Week Four: Body/Space and the Other
Huggan, Graham. "Decolonising the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection." ARIEL 20.4 (Oct. 1989):  115-31.
Low, Gail Ching-Liang.  "Body/Border Lines" and "The Colonial Mirror" White Skins, Black Masks: Colonialism and Representation. London & New York: 1996: Routledge: 13-35, 191-237.
Garuba, Harry. "Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative." Alternation. 9,1 (2002): 87-116
Week Five: Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God. Heinemann.
Week Six: Nuruddin Farah, Maps. Penguin.
Week Seven: Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter. Heinemann.

PART TWO: Questions of Migration, Globalisation and Gender - Dr Sandra Young

Week Eight: Migration and Identities
Sandhu, Sukhdev, 2004, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, Harper Perennial, xiii – xxvi.
Gilroy, Paul, 1993, The Black Atlantic, Harvard University Press, 187 – 201.
Okpewho, Isidore, 1999, “Introduction”, in Okpewho, Isidore, Boyce Davies, Carole & Mazrui, Ali A., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, Indiana University Press, xi – xxviii.

Week Nine: Migration and Identities (cont).
Hall, Stuart, 1995, “Caribbean Identities”, New Left Review, 209, 3 – 14.
Gikandi, Simon, 1996, “Introduction: Africa, Diaspora, and the Discourse of Modernity”, Research in Africana Literatures, 27 (4), 1 – 6.
Echeruo, Michael J.C., 1999, “An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project”, in Okpewho, Isidore, Boyce Davies, Carole & Mazrui, Ali A., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, Indiana University Press, 3 – 18.

Week Ten: Globalisation and Gender.
Joseph, May, 1999, Nomadic Identities, University of Minnesota Press, 111 - 125.
Kolawole, Mary E. Modupe, 1997, Womanism and African Consciousness, Africa World Press, 181 – 192.
Spivak, Chakravorty, Gayatri, 1990, “Questions of Multi-culturalism with Sneja Gunew”, in Harasym, Sarah (ed.) The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Routledge, 59 – 66.
Week Eleven: Biyi Bandele, The Street, Picador.
Week Twelve: Isidore Okpewho, Call Me By My Rightful Name, Africa World Press.
Week Thirteen:  Leila Aboulela, The Translator, Polygon.

ELL5031S: LITERATURE AND MODERNITY II

Lecturers: Dr Cóilín Parsons: Coilin.Parsons@uct.ac.za and 
Konstantin Sofianos: Konstantin.Sofianos@uct.ac.za

Schedule:
Monday 6 & 7, 14:00-15:45
Venue: A116 

Weeks 1-6 
Section 1: The Colonial Archive 
Drawing on your reading in Semester 1, this section is designed to introduce you to two key components of European modernity in the nineteenth century: colonialism and knowledge. At the same time, you will be asked to engage in archival research, and these 6 weeks will also prepare you to begin the research component of your MA, by introducing you to archival research as practice in literary study. 
  
Week 1: Excerpts from from Bayly, Empire and Information; Richards, The Imperial Archive; Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 
Week 2: Derrida, Archive Fever 
Week 3: Rudyard Kipling, Kim 
Week 4: Kipling archive at UCT 
Week 5: Olive Schreiner, Story of an African Farm 
Week 6: Schreiner archive at UCT 

Weeks 7-12 
Section 2: Global Transactions, Travelling Forms: Matrixes of Modernism
  
This section builds on the critical and archival work of Section I, but aims to reinscribe the problems of colonial translation and discourse against the broader late-nineteenth background of imperial globalisation:    new technologies, innovations in communications and transport, as well as the requirements and capacities of the military-political and financial complex of Empire, combined to spread a dense network of linkages across the planet, across which raw materials, commodity goods, people, information – but also ideas and books – could now move with unprecedented volume and velocity.
 
This structure would facilitate the planetary diffusion of metropolitan literary forms, but also conditioned literary innovations, dislocations and new departures, as established forms came to be re-appropriated within radically distinct social circumstances, and as foreign encounters and a new global awareness spurred novel strategies of literary representation. Drawing on a range of recent theoretical reflection, and focusing on select, representative primary texts, this section aims to shift the coordinates of our thinking about nascent colonial literatures as well as metropolitan Modernisms.  
  
Texts Include:
Pascale Casanova The World Republic of Letters
Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm
Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories
E.M. Forster Howards End
H.G. Wells Tono Bungay
Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out
George Orwell Burmese Days