Universität Osnabrück, Wintersemester 1999/2000

African Literature
Literature About Africa

Content: Course Description Course Outline Topics for Oral Presentation Required Basic Reading

Course Description

ab 1. Sem.  Do 16-18

Long before Africans started writing about Africa and their encounters with Europeans, Europeans had written (and continue to write) about their experiences in Africa. Apart from travelogues and diaries, Europeans have explored their emotional responses to foreign black cultures in fiction. Africans, when they began to produce written literature, sometimes felt compelled to react to these novels. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, is in a way a response to Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson which he felt gave an unfair account of the African experience of colonialism. (By the way, not only did the empire write back in this case, it also filmed back and produced a hilariously tragicomic version of Mr. Johnson on screen). The seminar will attempt to analyse the relationship between African literature and literature about Africa and examine the strategies of writing and writing back. For the second meeting, students should have read Things Fall Apart. All other texts should be read as soon as possible.

Texts:

• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1959)
• Ronan Bennett: The Catastrophist (1997)
• William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa (1981)
• Joyce Cary: Mr. Johnson (1939)
• John Pepper Clark: America, Their America (1964)
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902)
• Chukwuemeka Ike: The Naked Gods (1970)

Course Outline

Week 1, 14/10:

• Introduction
• Whites in Africa (discussion of excerpts from novels and a short story).

Week 2, 28/10:

• The beginnings of African literature.
• Discussion of Things Fall Apart
  • Focus: who did Achebe write for, an African or a European readership?

Week 3, 04/11:

• Discussion of Mr. Johnson
  • Focus: why would an African reader be bothered?

Week 4, date to be fixed later:

• Filming back: Mr. Johnson

Week 5, 11/11:

• Mr. Johnson vs. Things Fall Apart: What does „writing back“ mean?

Week 6, 18/11:

• Discussion of The Naked Gods
  • Focus: Depiction of Europeans/Americans
  • Which education for Africa?

Week 7, 25/11:

• Discussion of A Good Man in Africa
  • Focus: Depiction of Africans

Week 8, 02/12:

• Strategies of writing back: language in African novels

Week 9, 09/12:

• Writing back as a phase in African literature
  • Discussion about theses from Toward the Decolonization of African Literature and Decolonizing the Mind

Week 10, 16/12:

• Discussion of Heart of Darkness
  • Focus: Discovering the other, discovering the self

Week 11, 13/01:

• Discussion of The Catastrophist
  • Focus: Writing about Africa as self-discovery

Week 12, 20/01:

• Africa: setting or symbol, background or point of focus

Week 13, 27/01:

• Discussion of America, Their America
  • Focus: Talking back with a vengeance

Week 14, 03/02:

• Foreign cultures in the lecture hall/classroom: consequences for teaching

Week 15, 10/02:

• Closing discussion (comments, criticism, suggestions)

Topics for Oral Presentations

1. British Education in Africa: History, Concepts, Consequences (Week 6)
2. William Boyd - a „good“ observer of Africa? (Week 7)
3. Strategies of Writing Back (Week 8)
4. Decolonization and Africanization of African Literature and Literary Criticism (Week 9)
5. Racism in Mr. Johnson and Heart of Darkness (Week 10)
6. Historical Background of The Catastrophist (Week 11)
7. New Fiction about Africa, e.g. Norman Rush Mating (1991) or Giles Foden The Last King of Scotland (1998) (Week 12)
8. Clear-Eyed or Distorted View: Clark's America, Their America (Week 13)
9. Approaches to Intercultural Learning (Week 14)

Required Basic Reading

Anthony A. Appiah. „New Literatures, New Theory?“ Canonization and Teaching of African Literatures. Ed. by Raoul Granqvist. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990 (Matatu Number 7), pp. 57 - 89.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980. (excerpts will be copied for you)

Tsitsi Dangaremba. „From Nervous Conditions.“ The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Ed. by John Thieme. London: Arnold, 1996, pp. 137 - 144.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. „From Decolonising the Mind.“ The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Ed. by John Thieme. London: Arnold, 1996, pp. 79 - 83.

This page was created by Dominique Bediako on June 1, 2001.

It was last updated on September 26, 2001.

The URL of this page is <http://www.oocities.org/afripalava/EnglishCourses/NigNovel.html>

For general information on Anglophone African Literature and African Studies, please consult my website African Palava.

© Dr. Dominique Bediako, formerly Lecturer (English Literature), Osnabrueck, Germany (now Lecturer in German, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda)