European Literary Traditions Two

Read European literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism against the history that shaped it: Wordsworth and Blake, Dickens and George Eliot, Eliot and Woolf, and the playful fiction of the late twentieth century. Compare each movement with African writing, and sharpen two tools for writing about literature: clauses, and direct and indirect speech.

2

Structure in Modern Prose

Take modern prose apart to see how it is built: plot and conflict, point of view and the kinds of narrator, stream of consciousness, flashback, foreshadowing, motif and juxtaposition, with examples from Achebe, Woolf, Chopin and Dickens. Finish with sentence types and word formation, the building blocks of a writer's style.

3

Comparative Analysis of Prose

Set two prose works side by side and weigh them: review the key aspects of prose through Maupassant's "The Necklace" and O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi", learn the block and point-by-point methods, and plan a full comparative essay on Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ's The River Between. Practise stress and intonation for reading aloud, and write a formal application letter and CV.

4

Rhyme and Rhythm

Hear and name the music of verse: perfect, slant, eye, masculine, feminine, end and internal rhyme; stress, metre and the five main feet; and the method of scansion, practised on Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson and Frost. Close with the future forms you need to talk about plans, predictions and deadlines.

5

Appreciation of Poetry

Learn to appreciate a poem whole: its form and structure, its content, its sound devices and its imagery of all five senses, and the stylistic devices from apostrophe and allusion to paradox, irony, oxymoron, metonymy and synecdoche, in poems by Hughes, Keats, Donne, Shelley, Hardy and Rossetti. Finish by writing a full appreciation and using double comparatives.

6

Comparative Analysis of Poetry

Compare poems across authors, periods and cultures: two love sonnets by Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Wordsworth's sonnet and Whitman's free verse; a Japanese tanka and Lear's limericks; the epic and the ballad; and Gray's elegy with its epitaph and Ben Jonson's. Learn the point-by-point method and write comparative essays.

7

Comparative Analysis in Drama

Review the genres and key aspects of drama, then compare plays: Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel with Imbuga's Betrayal in the City; Sophocles' Oedipus the King with Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame; and Shakespeare's Macbeth with Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Finish with on time / in time and at the end / in the end.

8

Script Writing and Performance

Write, adapt and stage your own scripts: the layout and elements of a script, the process from idea to opening night, modal verbs in dialogue and stage directions, writing a speech and the minutes of a meeting, and performing set plays with voice, movement and staging.

Units