LFU:online

Department of English Department of English

Dr. Geoffrey Vernon Davis Dr. Geoffrey Vernon Davis
ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Helga Ramsey-Kurz, MA ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Helga Ramsey-Kurz, MA, +43 512 507 41409

609678

English Literature and Culture (+ Reading List): African Literature in English: Sources and Resources

VO 2

7,5

Block

each semester

English

Ever since the late 19th century European “Scramble for Africa”, English has been an important constituent of Africa’s cultural and intellectual make-up. What had once been introduced as the colonizer’s tongue became a language of anticolonial liberation and remains a medium employed by Anglophone writers from West, East and Southern Africa to engage not only with Africa’s colonial past, but also with the social, political and cultural complexities and contradictions of its post-independence present. This lecture will seek to provide an introduction to the English-language literatures of Africa. It will survey such topics as the history of the English language on the African continent, the use of the language by African writers, the oral tradition, the impact of missionary education on Africans, the issues of identity which have informed their writing, the debates which have accompanied the emergence of African literature in English and the current state of African literary practice including its transnational and transcultural dimensions.

lecture

written exam on lecture material; oral reading list exam

The lecture will take the form of a running commentary on a collection of texts by African authors which have been selected for the contribution they make to the contextualisation of these literatures. The collection will be published this autumn in a volume I have co-edited with Frank Schulze-Engler. Students will be expected to read the relevant sections of the book before each lecture. The volume which forms the basis of the lecture is entitled “African Literatures” and it appears in the new series “Postcolonial Literatures in English: Sources and Resources”. It is published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.