Universities and Online Degrees Guide

University of the Witwatersrand

Master of Arts in African Literature

The Master of Arts in African Literature in Language and Culture Studies is offered by University of the Witwatersrand.

Program Length: 2 YEARS.

Master of Arts in African Literature offered by the University of the Witwatersrand

The Master of Arts in the field of African Literature is a 1 year full-time or 2 years part-time degree.

Overview

This is a programme for those wishing to specialise in African Literature in English. The course is concerned with the intellectual place of Africa in the world and examines black intellectual traditions across the continent and the diaspora.

African Literature at Wits is the only department of its kind in South Africa and has, over the past three decades, produced high calibre graduates who have gone into research, publishing, journalism, creative writing and academic careers.

We examine a wide range of African cultural forms, their transmission and their transversal of geographic, cultural, political and disciplinary boundaries.

Our students adopt perspectives that take seriously our location in southern Africa while also taking into account the global relevance of African literary practice.

Staff members offer courses which explore critical, theoretical, and historical issues, as well as problems of representation in the broadest sense.

This kind of approach expands the field of literature to include a wide range of cultural practices from canonical texts of African writing to artefacts of visual and popular culture, revealing the role literature in its broadest sense plays as a form of exchange and expression. Our commitment to high quality is reflected in one of the highest rates of postgraduate student research publication among literature departments in the country.

Our course offerings include African Popular Media and the Novel; Critical Approaches to African Literature; Memory, Violence and Representation in Africa; Contemporary Trends in African Literature; Narratives of the Indian Ocean; Writing Slavery in the African World; and Feeling, Sentiment and Sensation.