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ENGLISH III 2015
NAME ........................................................... Signature............................................
If you do NOT intend to do English III, place a cross here _____ and return the form.
In the first semester, you will take EITHER Early Modern Literature OR Encountering African
Literature AND ONE Elective.
In the second semester, you will take EITHER Realism and the English Novel OR South African PostApartheid Writing AND ONE Elective.
First Semester
(Mark ONE choice with a cross)
Paper 1: Early Modern Literature
OR
Paper 2: Encountering African Literature
………
………
AND ONE ELECTIVE
(Please indicate your top FOUR preferences 1, 2, 3 and 4)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
Modern British Fantasy
Film and Postcoloniality
Is chick lit chic? Re-reading romance in contemporary women’s fiction.
Joseph Conrad
American Fiction
J.M. Coetzee and the Autobiographical Other
………
………
………
………
………
………
(Should it become necessary to limit numbers in any paper, we will assign you to your highest
possible preference. The choices you make on this sheet do not commit you irrevocably: the main
purpose of this survey is to help us plan ahead.)
Second Semester
(Mark ONE choice with cross)
Paper 3: Realism and the English Novel
OR
Paper 4: South African Post-Apartheid Writing
………
………
AND ONE ELECTIVE
(Please indicate your top FOUR preferences 1, 2, 3 and 4)
(g)
(h)
(i)
(j)
(k)
(l)
Animals and Animality in Literature
From South Africa to South Carolina
American Music, American Girls and American Dreams
Milton: Paradise Lost
Literature and Teaching
To be announced
………
………
………
... … …
... … …
………
Detach this sheet and return it to the Secretary’s office as soon as possible, or by Friday
October 10 at the latest.
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ENGLISH III BOOKLIST 2015
FIRST SEMESTER
Paper 1: Early Modern Literature
This paper is designed around the idea of the Renaissance itself: how this period reworked existing
stories, literary forms and genres into new forms of both popular and elite literature. It offers a
number of different examples of early modern literature and treats the various formal innovations
of the period as an important aspect of socio-political and cultural history. The paper begins with
the first book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of the great epic poems in the English language and a
complex allegory which comments on notions of justice, faith and ethics in Tudor England. This is
followed by two Shakespearean plays. Richard III features one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary
characters: a hunchbacked villain whose outward deformities, in keeping with early modern
conceptions of the body, express an evil soul. The play may be categorized as either history or
tragedy. A play from the Jacobean period, King Lear exists in two versions and its unavoidable
textual instability permits close attention to the materiality of early modern texts, and the
concomitant instability of plot and character in the play’s afterlife. John Donne’s poems speak back
to earlier forms of verse and invent a range of speakers to explore the varied experiences of both
romantic and divine love. The course will end with a study of some of Milton’s shorter poems –
“Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” and the great classical
elegy “Lycidas.”
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book One, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Hackett 9780872208070)
William Shakespeare, Richard III (Arden 9781903436899)
_____ , King Lear (Arden 9781903436592)
John Donne, Selected Poems (Penguin Classics 9780140424409)
John Milton, Selected Poems (Penguin Classics 9780140424416)
Paper 2: Encountering African Literature
This paper foregrounds the encounters in African writing between cultures, genders, genres,
emerging classes, religions, ethnicities and theoretical paradigms. It provides both a historical
overview of African literature and an opportunity for engagement with relevant theories, debates
and issues, as well as a focus on contemporary African literature which captures the cultural
diversity and richness of the continent, and its relations with the rest of the world. The inclusion of
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a contemporary novel concerned with the slave experience in the United
States, relocates African-American literature within the investigation of intercultural perspectives,
entangled histories, and a diasporic understanding of Africans within the world and the world’s
relationship to Africa.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (Penguin 9780141186993)
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Penguin Modern Classics 9780141187204)
Mariama Bâ, So long a Letter (Heinemann African Writers Series: Classic 9780435913526)
Oral literature (a reader will be provided)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage 9780099273936)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus (Harper Perennial 9780007189885)
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Seminar electives
(a) Jamie McGregor: Modern British Fantasy, 1916–1977
The enormous popularity of The Lord of the Rings has often caused it to be labeled “cult” fiction,
unworthy of serious academic attention. Despite this prejudice, its admirers have long recognised
it as an outstandingly vivid and original heroic epic, an unforgettably moving story of friendship
and sacrifice, and a tour de force of the creative imagination. It also forms part of a notable
resurgence of fantasy fiction in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, including works by authors
widely different from one another in outlook, but equally responsive to the unprecedented horror
of the time they lived in, from the Christian allegory of C.S. Lewis and the Arthurian whimsy of T.H.
White to the Gothic irony of Mervyn Peake.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Harper Collins 9780261102385)
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (Voyager 9780007157167)
T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone (Harper Collins 9780007263493)
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast (Vintage 9780749394820)
Recommended further reading:
Despite their often substantial size, the books included in this course are merely parts of even
longer sequences. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will probably already know its precursor The
Hobbit, and may even harbour ambitions to tackle The Silmarillion (despite its forbidding
reputation as “a telephone directory in Elvish”). The other set texts are similarly illumined by being
studied together with their companion volumes. For those who wish to invest in one or more of the
complete series, alternative titles are therefore included below. (In the case of the Lewis, buying
the additional volumes separately currently seems the more affordable option, though it is also
available singly as the “Cosmic”, “Space” or “Ransom” trilogy.)
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Voyager 9780007157150)
_____, That Hideous Strength (Voyager 9780007157174)
T.H. White, The Once and Future King (Voyager 9780006483014)
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (Vintage 9780099288893)
(b) Sue Marais: Film and Postcoloniality
This elective explores contemporary cinematic representations of cross-cultural diversity and
transnational entanglements by applying relevant postcolonial and film theory to a discussion of a
select number of specific films. However, students will be required to broaden the ideas and
insights so gained by conducting research into other films of their own choice.
Herzog, Aguirre, Wrath of God
Inarritu, Babel
Haneke, Caché/Hidden
Egoyan, Adoration
Tamahori, Once Were Warriors
Mehta, Earth
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(c) Lynda Gichanda Spencer: Is chick lit chic? Re-reading Romance in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction.
“What is wrong with fiction written for women, by women, about women? And why do the critics
never seem to have read any of the books they profess to hate?” (“In defence of Chick-lit”, Books
Blog, guardian.co.uk)
While popular fiction may be regarded by many critics as an inferior genre / low brow literature, it
continues to appeal to women writers and readers. In this elective we will begin by questioning
why in spite of being dismissed, romance fiction continues to be highly successful. We will also read
western romance fiction alongside African romance and consider the various ways in which African
women writers are using and subverting the genre.
We will reflect on how women writers are experimenting with various new narrative forms and
rewriting the popular romance. We will reflect on how this new genre known as chick lit is
positioned in relation to feminist ideas and concerns. We will interrogate how according to Pamela
Butler and Jigna Desai these narratives open up spaces to negotiate the contradictions and
complexities of contemporary feminine subjectivities.
Mills and Boon
Sapphire Press
Nollybooks
Consuming Passion (film)
Sex and the City (Series)
Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary (Picador 9780330375252)
Wanner, Zukiswa. The Madams (Oshun 9781770070585)
(d) Gareth Cornwell: Joseph Conrad
In this course we shall read three classic novels by the major Modernist writer Joseph Conrad. The
texts speak cogently to the perennial human quest for meaning and value in a universe devoid of
moral substance. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is a sea story, Lord Jim is set mostly in the Malayan
archipelago, while the narrative of The Secret Agent unfolds in Victorian London.
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories (Penguin 9780141441702)
_____, Lord Jim (Penguin 9780141199054)
_____, The Secret Agent (Penguin 9780141441580)
(e) Gareth Cornwell: American Fiction
This course offers a sampling of the rich variety of fiction published in the United States in the
1980s and 1990s. Texts range from the “dirty realism” of Richard Ford’s Rock Springs and Denis
Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, to Cormac McCarthy’s incendiary Western, Blood Meridian, Marilyn Robinson’s
whimsical Housekeeping and Daniel Woodrell’s genre-bending Tomato Red.
Richard Ford, Rock Springs (Grove Press 9780802144577)
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Picador 9780312424091)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Vintage 978-0679728757)
Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (Picador 9780312428747)
Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red (Back Bay Books 9780316206211)
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(f) Dirk Klopper: J.M. Coetzee and the Autobiographical Other
This course considers the confluence of autobiography, fiction and history in Coetzee’s trilogy of
fictionalised memoirs, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime, and in a fictional work that has clear
autobiographical reference, Diary of a Bad Year. It examines how Coetzee uses these discursive
concerns to explore issues of authorship and authority, self and other, language and power, text and
world.
J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (Random 9780099268277)
_____, Youth (Random 9780099433620)
_____, Summertime (Random 9781742741208)
_____, Diary of a Bad Year (Vintage 9780099516224)
SECOND SEMESTER
Paper 3: Realism and the English Novel
This paper introduces students to English fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Starting with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we examine
the emergence of the novel as a genre, paying particular attention to these texts’ installation of the
technique of realism and the understanding of subjectivity it inscribes. Thereafter, we assess the
ways in which Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations draw on
classical realism’s highest form, that is, the Bildungsroman. From the relative stability of the
Bildungsroman, we move to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and consider some of the
implications of Darwinian thought for the forms of nineteenth-century fiction. The paper concludes
with John Fowles’s reassessment of classical realist fiction from the self-reflexive, postmodernist
vantage of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford World’s Classics 9780199553976)
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Oxford World's Classics 9780199532896)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Oxford World’s Classics 9780199535576)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford World’s Classics 9780199219766)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Norton 97803939772788)
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Vintage Classics 97800994478331)
Paper 4: South African Post-Apartheid Writing
Christy Collins suggests that imaginatively it is possible to move beyond the polemical question
which so preoccupied writers and readers under apartheid: “Which side are you on?” to embrace
the alternative, “non-essentialist” question of “Where is here?” This course explores the ways in
which particular writers have responded to both these questions, and explores their
representations of identity, community and place/environment – or social and psychological
geographies – in contemporary, ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa.
Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (University of KwaZulu-Natal 9780869809952)
Kopana Matlwa, Coconut (Jacana 9781770093362)
Ishtiyaq Shukri, The Silent Minaret (Jacana 9781770092495)
K. Sello Duiker, Thirteen Cents (David Philip 9780864863577)
Ken Barris, What Kind of Child (Kwela Books 9780795702334)
Zoë Wicomb, Playing in the Light (New Press 9781595580474)
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Seminar electives
(g) Dan Wylie: Animals and Animality in Literature
What makes us ‘human,’ if it is not our distinction from ‘animals’? Yet in some sense we are ‘animal’
and ‘mammal,’ too. Writers have extensively explored the problem. In this course, some theoretical
and philosophical key texts, ranging from Nietzsche to Donna Haraway’s notion of the ‘cyborg,’ will
open the field. There are no set texts: students will be required to present regularly on topics of
their choice: these might include: the impact of Darwinism in fiction; the genre of the ‘bestiary’ in
poetry; the concept of the ‘pet’ in literature; the concept of the ‘wild,’ wilderness and ecology; the
figure of the animal-hunter in fiction and\or non-fiction; the world as seen from the perspective of
the dog; etc., etc.
Assessment will be continuous, based on short pieces of writing, the presentations, and a final long
essay on an individually-chosen but guided topic.
(h) Deborah Seddon: Spoken Word: From South Africa to South Carolina
Spoken word or performance poetry is one of the most socially dynamic and politically potent
forms of verbal artistry. It has played an important role throughout history in many cultures and
continues to survive and adapt to new technologies and social contexts. This course explores the
varied uses of oral traditions in South Africa before, during, and after apartheid; Afro-Caribbean
dub poetry; and the development of African-American rap. We will begin by exploring the South
African poetic tradition of izibongo (praise poetry) in the work of a number of South African
iimbongi, including Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi, David Livingstone Yali Manisi, and Zolani
Mkhiva, and then go on to engage with contemporary poets who are working within but also
reinventing the oral tradition including Ingoapele Madingoane, Lesego Rampolokeng, Ike Muila, and
Isabella Motadinyane in South Africa, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets
across the Atlantic. The subtitle of this course is taken from Gil Scott-Heron’s 1978 album, From
South Africa to South Carolina which draws attention to the connection made by poets themselves
between the struggle against oppression in South Africa and in the Black Diaspora. The course will
examine the place of the oral tradition in the South African literary canon and the transnational
aesthetics at work in modern forms of oral poetry.
A range of audio and audio-visual material will be made available. A reader of poetry and criticism
will be provided.
(i) Minesh Dass: American Music, American Girls and American Dreams
This elective will consider the relationship between popular American music and the USA’s
conception of itself. In particular, it will focus on music produced in the twentieth and twenty-first
century which represents or relates to the American Dream. The work of songwriters such as
Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Adam Duritz, Tupac Shakur and Tracy Chapman will
be analysed, but students will be encouraged to consider other artists whom they feel are relevant
and worthy of consideration. Some of the following questions will be discussed in class (although
this is by no means an exhaustive list):
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
What is the relationship between popular culture and a hegemonic state like America? Is
popular culture always inevitably in the service of/co-opted by the dominant discourse? Can it
ever be considered a kind of counter-narrative?
What is the American Dream and how do various songwriters conceive of it?
Why is the figure of the ‘American girl’ so ubiquitous and how might it be related to America’s
various fantasies about itself? How might female songwriters complicate or problematize this
standardised construction?
In which ways are we, in South Africa, meant to understand this body of work? In other words,
does our reception of the music differ from that of Americans because of our context?
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(j) Paul Walters: John Milton, Paradise Lost
Damned by Dr Johnson in the C18th as a “surly and acrimonious republican,” Milton is perhaps the
literary giant of the later C17th. Expensively and well educated, Milton took a further 5 years of
study and travel after his degree as a personal “finishing” programme towards his goal of becoming
a poet, writing “shorter” poems of considerable power in the meantime (see the Early Modern
Paper). He returned from Europe at the outbreak of the Civil War, which he entered on the side of
Cromwell and the Parliamentarians (Roundheads/republicans). He became Latin Secretary to
Oliver Cromwell, having to justify (in Latin) to the crowned heads of Europe why England had
chosen to dispose of theirs (Charles I). And so began a period of nearly 20 years in which his talents
were almost entirely confined to prose. With the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton was by now
entirely blind and in some danger of his life, but was allowed to retire into “obscurity” in which he
wrote some of the greatest poems on classical models in the English language: Paradise Lost,
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
This elective will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost: not for the faint-hearted, the poem has
the potential to be a life-changing experience – you will never look at iambic pentameter in quite
the same way again!
John Milton, Paradise Lost. Ed. Barbara Lewalski (Wiley-Blackwell 9781405129299)
(k) Paul Walters: Literature and Teaching
The course provides a preliminary overview of theories of reading, the history of education in
South Africa since 1948, issues arising from that history, and possible ways of addressing some of
the literary/pedagogic challenges confronting teachers in the C21. A reader will be provided.
Students will be expected to do extensive further reading.
(l) To be announced
This elective description will be made available in the first semester of 2015.