English-Literary Studies University of Cape Town

Overview

About the Programme

Concerned with the global, the local and the decolonial, the curriculum of the English-Literary Studies programme at the University of Cape Town centralises South African and African literatures while remaining in constant dialogue with international intellectual traditions, asking what it means to read canonical and world literatures from the South.

The University of Cape Town is located in one of the most culturally diverse and socially complex cities in the world. Our department’s research, teaching and archival work both reflects on and responds to our city’s history and present in all its richness and difficulty.

In our lectures and intensive small-group seminars, we welcome students from various disciplines across the university. This intellectual and creative diversity shapes our curriculum and gives our students a lively introduction to different ways of thinking, researching and writing in a twenty-first-century world. We work with the written word across a variety of literary genres, but also with other kinds of meaning-making, including images, photographs and maps, spoken word, and the creative and performing arts. In doing so, we consider the historical and social contexts that shape the meaning of texts. Our newly reimagined curriculum traces how words, images and performances are assembled, archived and placed in dialogue across space and time.