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ED 276 - South African Literature

 

1. Paper on Footprints in the Quag and/or Fools

For this assignment, you may write on one of the topics suggested below, or suggest your own topic (Please talk to me about your idea first). The goal of this paper is to think deeply about one of the stories we have read by Miriam Tlali or Njabulo Ndebele and to focus on developing an argument to the class about the significance of a particular story...read more

2. Paper on Down Second Avenue

Esekiel’s Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue is an autobiography written about the author’s life in Marabastad near Pretoria, where he was born in 1919, about his earliest childhood in Maupaneng near Petersburg, and addresses how Mphahlele grew from a goatherd, to office clerk, teacher, academic, and finally to a distinguished international literary figure. Mphahlele’s autobiography is a deeply emotional piece in which he grapples with the people, events, and issues related to his educational experiences with colonialism in South Africa...read more

3. Paper on Chaka

Thomas Mofolo’s manuscript for Chaka in the Sesotho language was written around late 1909 and was not published into English until 1931 by F.H. Dutton. The translation we are reading by Daniel Kunene was published in 1981. Due to the complications related to multiple translations and the time lapse from when Mofolo originally wrote the manuscript to when it was first published in English, scholars find it difficult to agree on many issues. Controversies abound in regard to what is thought to be factual and also, as significantly, to how the text has been translated...read more