FB 6 Mathematik/Informatik/Physik

Institut für Mathematik


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Form, Time & Feeling in Contemporary South African Fiction

7.110102

Dozenten

Beschreibung

In this course, we examine the entangled nature of form, time and feeling in three recently published novels. We use these concepts as a point of departure to think about the South African socio-political sphere three decades after the formal end of apartheid. Literary fiction is one of the cultural forms that is negotiating an increasingly widespread sense of disenchantment with post-apartheid public life, in which the aftermaths of the colonial-apartheid past remain visible and the hopefulness that accompanied the attainment of democracy in 1994 has itself become another “ghost” that haunts present.

We will be considering these ideas through three novels:
CA Davids’ How to be a Revolutionary (2022) ISBN/EAN: 9781839760877,
Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2019) ISBN/EAN: 9781909762954,
and Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021) ISBN/EAN: 978152911387.

The selected novels function in different ways, and from different perspectives, as national allegories, drawing on some key conceptual, and formal, tropes of contemporary South African fiction. Among the questions we will ask of these novels are:

For what visions of the present are the novels a staging ground? How do they relate to the past, and which past - colonialism, apartheid, 1994? What future horizons are being imagined in the novels? How do they emplot these temporal relations/ imaginaries? From what genres do the novels draw? How do they stretch these forms? To what ends? What are the “structures of feeling” (Williams) that the novels foreground, what affective orientations?

Students taking this class will be asked to hold a short presentation on a topic of their choice regarding one or more of the three novels. A list of prospective themes will be handed out in our first session. If you already have a particular topic in mind, feel free to send me an email or come to one of my office hours.

If you require a Prüfungsnachweis for this class, you will need to write a term paper based on your presentation. Please refer to your specific Studienordnung to make sure you fit the requirements for this course.

Copies of the books are available for you to buy online at the bookstore InterKontinental. You may also acquire the novels elsewhere - but please do try to purchase the editions listed above, for the purpose of easier reference to page numbers. Please aim to have read the novels before the start of class. We will discuss the books in the order listed above, so at the very least you should have finished How to be a Revolutionary by the start of our first class (02.04.2024)

Weitere Angaben

Ort: 22/105
Zeiten: Di. 14:00 - 16:00 (wöchentlich)
Erster Termin: Dienstag, 02.04.2024 14:00 - 16:00, Ort: 22/105
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar (Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen)

Studienbereiche

  • Anglistik; Englisch > Kulturwissenschaft > Bachelor
  • Language and Literary Studies
  • Anglistik; Englisch > Literaturwissenschaft > Bachelor

Past and Forthcoming Events

Publications

  • Asymptotics of a time-bounded cylinder model, with N. Aschenbruck and S. Bussmann, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269964822000420
  • The method of cumulants for the normal approximation, with S. Jansen and K. Schubert, Probability Surveys 2022, Vol. 19, 185-270, https://doi.org/10.1214/22-PS7
  • Sedentary Random Waypoint, with C. Betken, arXiv:2009.02941
  • The Impact of Bit Errors on Intra-Session Network Coding with Heterogeneous Packet Lengths, with B. Schütz, N. Aschenbruck, S. Bussmann and M. Juhnke-Kubitzke, Proc. of the 45th IEEE LCN Symposium on Emerging Topics in Networking LCN, virtually hosted in Sydney, Australia, Nov. 16–19, 2020.
  • Stationarity for the Small World in Motion Mobility Model, with Nils Aschenbruck, Christian Heiden und Matthias Schwamborn, MSWIM '19: Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, Nov 25-29, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1145/3345768.3355935
  • Crossing Numbers and Stress of Random Graphs, with Markus Chimani and Matthias Reitzner, In Proceedings 26th International Symposium, GD 2018, Barcelona, Spain, 255--268, 2018 available here and for an extended journal version here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07558
  • Fluctuations in a general preferential attachment model via Stein's method, with Carina Betken and Marcel Ortgiese, Random Structures & algorithms, vol.55, no.4, 2019 available here
  • Connection times in large ad-hoc mobile networks, Bernoulli, vol.22, no.4, 2143--2176, 2016 available here
    with Gabriel Faraud, Wolfgang König
  • The random disc thrower problem, Proceedings of the 90th European Study Group Mathematics with Industry, 59-78, 2013  available here with T. van der Aalst, D. Denteneer, M. Hong Duong, R. J. Kang, M. Keane, J. Kool, I. Kryven, T. Meyfroyt, T. Müller, G. Regts, J. Tomczyk
  • Edge fluctuations of eigenvalues of Wigner matrices, High Dimensional Probability VI: the Banff volume, Progress in Probability, vol.66, 261-275, Springer, Basel, 2013 available here
    with Peter Eichelsbacher
  • Moderate deviations for the determinant of Wigner matrices, Dedicated to Friedrich Götze on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Limit Theorems in Probability, Statistics and Number Theory, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol.42, 253-275, 2013, available here
    with Peter Eichelsbacher
  • Moderate deviations for the eigenvalue counting function of Wigner matrices, ALEA, Lat. Am. J. Probab. Math. Stat. 10 (1), 27-44, 2013, available here
    with Peter Eichelsbacher
  • Moderate deviations via cumulants, Journal of Theor. Probability, 2012, available here
    with Peter Eichelsbacher
  • Moments of recurrence times for Markov chains, Electronic Comm. Probab., 16(28), 296-303, 2011, available here
    with Frank Aurzada, Marcel Ortgiese, Michael Scheutzow
  • Moderate deviations in a random graph and for the spectrum of Bernoulli random matrices, Electronic Journal of Probability, Vol. 14, Paper no. 92, 2636-2656, 2009, available here
    with Peter Eichelsbacher
  • Perpendicular transport of charged particles in slab turbulence: recovery of diffusion for realistic wave-spectra?, Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, 35, 025202, 2008
    with Andreas Shalchi
  • Velocity correlation functions of charged test particles, Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, 34, 859, 2007
    with Andreas Shalchi