Courses offered include:
The ABC of Travel Writing is an interdisciplinary postgraduate course which includes a broad historical and theoretical overview of selected travel writings from the classical period to the present day.
The Modernist Novel and the Crisis of Modern Thought focuses on the evolution of Western thought in the later nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. This course engages with the prevailing interrogation of notions such as subjectivity, religious faith and political engagement, as well as emerging conceptions of language and related theories of aesthetic representation.
Theory of Literature explores some of the major developments in literary theory which have occurred during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Social Change in the 19th Century Novel takes into consideration Georg Lukàcs’s theory that novels reflect the structure of historical and social reality and the Marxist view of history as a dialectical class struggle. The course is structured around seminal European novels written in periods of important social and cultural upheaval.
American Literature consists of three independent modules, each with its own focus on particular aspects of American cultural history and aesthetic production.
Renaissance Literature highlights the adventurousness of English Renaissance authors in both poetry and drama.
Medieval Literature explores the various portrayals of heroism in medieval English literature. Students also have the opportunity of extending their linguistic expertise in Old and Middle English.
Postmodernism in Literature is probably the most contemporary course on the Honours curriculum, aiming to chart not only key practices in today’s literature (including film), but also how these relate, or do not relate, to current contexts.
South African and Post-Colonial Literature focuses on late twentieth-century and contemporary South African fiction.
Creative Writing: “Experiments in Telling” aims to encourage students with a literary or humanities background to produce creative work of their own.