English

One of the first forms of mass media, the power of the periodical was tremendous. It shaped readerships, politics, morality, and some of our best-loved works of fiction. With a focus on literary magazines, this course allows students to engage with literature in its original published form and to work with original artefacts. In the first week, students are given the intellectual and practical tools needed to handle and interpret physical and digitized periodicals through a series of seminars and workshops. Students then have two weeks of seminars, workshops, and excursions based around Victorian and Modernist periodicals, discovering familiar names in new contexts.

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read, and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognizable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which students try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.

This course offers an introductory survey. It begins by asking why Shakespeare is still considered a writer worth studying, four hundred years after his death– and why his work tends to be given a particular prominence within English Studies. A selection of texts are then examined over the course of the term, covering all of the main genres and all periods of the canon. The course concludes by considering the question of how the study of Shakespeare's plays relates to theoretical issues more generally. 

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 explores a range of children’s literature by an eclectic set of writers from different cultural and historical contexts, surveying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, representing what we have come to understand as a 'golden age'. Through a series of lectures, students read a variety of different texts, and by the end of the course, through close reading and analysis, are able to demonstrate a knowledge of major children’s authors, identify different categories of children’s literature, and illustrate an understanding of how these works reflect key social, political and cultural issues, with a particular focus on less-obvious aspects of the texts, and some of their radical underpinnings.