Literature in the World: A View from Cape Town

Returning Recently to Teach at My Alma Mater, The University of Cape Town, I Was Amazed to Find That the Undergraduate curriculum to which I had been exposed at the dawn of the post-apartheid era remained substantially unaltered. With the exception of an experimentally convened introductory year that reverses chronology with interesting effects, the English major continues to plot a literary history across four inherited periods: Shakespeare and Co., Romance to Realism, Modernism, and Contemporary Literature, which collapses a previous bifurcation of the capstone course into Postmodernism or Postcolonialism.