The course equips students with knowledge about the major theories of phonology, including classical phonemics, prosodic phonology and generative phonology,
and then focuses on the segmental and non-segmental features of modern English. There will also be a practical phonetics component involving the use of a language laboratory.
This course offers students the opportunity to study the development, construction and use of various corpora in the study of language. It stresses the core values of a corpus-based
analysis as a viable alternative to the competent-based approach of the transformation-generative school. Students will gain practical experience working with the International Corpus of English (ICE)
The course exposes candidates to a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods commonly used in language and literary research. Issues covered include research design, developing
appropriate data collection instruments, survey and field techniques, sampling methods, content analysis, statistical analysis, discussion and interpretation of findings, and reporting research.
This course will assume a posture of enquiry not assertion. There will be a definitely exploratory attitude to this course because evidence is strong that feminist literary theory looks for its home on borderlines: it has better things to do than patrol boundaries. Thus, there will be some suggestions of the inter-disciplinary in the course.
The course will review a series of topics that seem to situate and define a good deal of women’s writing on:
Discourse-as-power and the politics of women’s writing;
Gender and race;
Cultural deformations of women into fetish, object, other;
Literary canonization that marginalize and silence women.
These two contemporary writers (Ayi Kwei Armah and NgugiWaThiongo) differ mainly in the sources of their influences. Yet, in spite of Ayi Kwei Armah’s absorption
in the ideas of Frantz Fanon, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s alignment with a folksy kind of Marxism, both writers explore the actual, spiritual and moral terrain of African
life and history. Both express a concern for African wholeness; both are disturbed by a history of European exploitation in Africa; both have attacked the notion
that economic relationships among people can be meaningfully studied from emotional and moral concerns; and yet both writers seem convinced that humans
cannot produce good work unless they are themselves good. This course will study the complete up-to-date writing of these two writers with a view to assessing
the value of their contribution to modern African thought.
This course is designed to exercise and extend critical skills and to provide some practice in research. The main focus will be on autobiography, since
this relatively ignored literary form: questions of self–representation in literature, the transformation of reality via imagination, the relationship between literature
and history, and nature of literary or poetic art.
This course will focus on four women writers whose biographies have little in common, except for gender: George Eliot, Toni Morrison, Ama Atta Aidoo, and Nadine Gordinmer.
For the most part, their writing will be studied chronologically. But attempts will also be made to analyse the texts as thematic units with overarching “feminist” concerns.
This course will raise such questions as the following: is there a distinctively feminine sensibility manifested in the creative process, in the choice of subject, in style,
in narrative point of view or, in the characterization of hero and heroine? What critical tools are appropriate for the study of women writers and images of the “feminine”?
This course is designed to appeal to candidates who are interested in working with large amounts of language data as well as those whose work involves
writing in different modes (e.g. secretaries)., It looks at regular linguistic patterning in different domains of language use. It is intended to improve the writing
of candidates by introducing them to the meaning expressed by the different patterns.
This course will focus on research methods and techniques of general bibliography. Students will be equipped with the resources and basic research
material in English literary studies and the skills and tools in presenting the findings of literary research. The course also explores methodological
issues such as sampling, field research, finding and formulating a research topic, writing a research proposal, annotating references,
developing conceptual and theoretical frameworks.
This course presents different approaches to the grammatical description of English, notably the ‘grammar tradition adopted by Quirk et al.,
transformational–generative grammar and functional grammar. Topics in both morphology and syntax will be explored.
