* ENGL 033a / LING 033a, Words, Words, Words: The Structure and History of English Words Peter Grund Preregistration required see under First-Year Seminar Program. Enrollment limited to first-year students. This course is part of the "Six Pretty Good Ideas" program. Friday sessions alternate between writing workshops and field trips to Yale collections. We devote sustained attention to developing writing skills and introduce students to the special collections, art galleries, and rare books libraries of Yale. Our readings range widely over cultures, places, and times: from Senegalese griots to the Lives of Mary Shelley from Gertrude Stein’s “autobiographies” to the microbiographies of Jorge Luis Borges from fragments by Walter Benjamin to Daphne Brooks’ liner notes on Beyoncé. We examine six roles biographers can play: the archivalist, the contemporary, the fictionalizer, the listener, the miniaturist, and the systematizer. This course focuses on the humanities through an intensive study of transatlantic biographers. * ENGL 032a / HUMS 022a, Six Pretty Good Biographers Ernest Mitchell Authors include Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mbolo Mbue, NoViolet Bulawayo, Taiye Selasie, and Chimamanda Adichie. From analyzing works responding to the colonial condition and the articulation of anticolonial sensibilities, to those narrating the African nation at independence and the postcolonial disillusionment that followed, the seminar attends to the formal and thematic implications of globalization for African literary writing. The class moves from an introductory unit that orients students to African and world literature to focus on close reading of primary texts informed by historical and theoretical nuances. We also examine advantages of the global circulation of African literary works and the pitfalls of a global readership. Our considerations include why certain texts cross the boundaries of nation and region while others remain confined within territorial bounds. Bookended by the writings of Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie, we explore the marks of regional specificity in these works and how they transcend local geographical markers to become worldly artifacts. This seminar introduces students to a subset of African literature that has entered the canon of world literature. * ENGL 028b / AFST 028b / LITR 025b, African Literature in the World Cajetan Iheka
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