University of Cape Town

This course introduces students to a range of current ideas and questions within Literary Studies. The course reflects on some of the most important debates and approaches within contemporary literary and cultural studies. The course considers how cultural forms engage with the question of "‘the contemporary" or "the here and now", both within our current South African moment and across other historical periods and places. What new forms and canons are emerging for twenty-first-century readers and writers in an unstable world? The lecture series is complemented by small-group seminars that are closely tied to the wide-ranging research interests and creative work of staff and senior postgraduates

This course provides a critical understanding of a broad range of complex and diverse intellectual traditions in modern African worlds of thought. Its emphasis is on debates and arguments, conversations and contestations, and connections and displacements. In contrast to an essentialized and unitary notion of African thought, this course emphasizes the plural and dynamic worlds of African intellectuality, drawing particular attention to the vibrant histories of critiques and auto-critiques. In doing so, it also provides a basic sense of the various historical contexts of continental and diasporic activism in which these intellectual approaches were formulated and discussed. Among other themes, the course engages the debates on and around decolonization and violence, nationalism and tribalism, afro-communism and afro-feminism, precolonial epistemologies and customary law, aesthetics and materiality, religion and pedagogy, and postcolonial and neoliberal conditions. The study materials used in this course include original texts by African thinkers, visual sources, and musical compositions.

This is an introductory course in microeconomics, which exposes students to various microeconomic concepts and theories as well as the practical applications of these concepts. The course begins with a discussion of economic history and the characteristics of different economic systems, as well as factors influencing economic development following the Industrial Revolution. Hereafter, students are introduced to topics within the standard utility-maximization theory of consumption, including optimal bundle and indifference curve analysis. Students are then exposed to game theoretical frameworks to model social interactions amongst economic agents, before applying this framework to wage-setting relationships in the labor market. Applications of experimental economic methods are also briefly explored. Finally, students are introduced to the standard neo-classical theories of supply and demand as well as firms’ pricing decisions under differing levels of market competition.