Course objectives:

The objectives of this course are to introduce students to the most important aspects of contemporary African Literature: négritude, alienation, spiritual and cultural freedom, feminism and postcolonialism.

The literary text as a work of art could be appreciated on its own or in reference to other work of art, to the world or to history. Francophone fiction is a product of the historical encounter between the French colonizer and colonized peoples around the world, while Postcolonial literary criticism is literary scholarship devoted to its analyses and interpretation. In this course we will examine the Francophone postcolonial novel in its historical and regional contexts. We will also attend to the rhetorical tropes, including those of gender, that such narratives often deploy. How does the text describe, narrate or dramatize postcolonial subjectivity? How does it represent the relationship between the postcolonial subject and his/her environment? What are the modalities by which space, place, identity, and history are reclaimed or revised in Francophone postcolonial fiction? Is each narrative autonomous or is it in dialogue with textual antecedents and with the world? We will test the propositions above and answer these questions by orchestrating a dialogue with between postcolonial literature and theoretical texts and film.

Requirements:

1.00 credits at the 3000-level in French

Restrictions:

None

Textbooks:

TBA

Method of presentation:

Lectures, discussion groups, seminars.

Evaluation method:

TBA

More information about the courses can be found in the Undergraduate Calendar [1]