Undergraduate - UnitAZA2410 - Exploring narrative

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	South Africa School of Social Sciences
Offered	South Africa First semester 2015 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Dr Joseph Minga

Synopsis

This unit focuses on story-telling, literature and other narrative forms. How do we create a narrative? What are its basic features? How do different narrative forms work? These are some of the questions that we will explore. The narrative texts studied will be drawn from a variety of genres and will include short stories, novels, films and visual texts. Students will also have the opportunity to submit narrative texts as part of the assessed work.

Outcomes

On successfully completing this unit students should be able to:

Develop a sense of the variety of what is possible in literary and cultural studies and a general understanding of the different forms of narrative;
Handle the critical concepts and language appropriate to the discussion of different narrative genres, devices and techniques;
Recognise some of the theoretical perspectives that inform contemporary literary and cultural studies;
Demonstrate the basic skill of analytic and critical discussion, including the technical conventions proper to English;
Appreciate the historical perspectives and conventions within which literature and other narrative texts are produced.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 60%
Exam: 40%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.