ENG814: Studies in African Oral Literature

ENG814 is a one-semester course of three credit units. It is developed and written to cater for the study needs of postgraduate students of English and others in related departments like African Languages, Literature and Communication Arts, as well as students in the department of History. The course has twenty one units which include a general overview of oral literature as a universal practice, origin of oral African literature, nature and forms of oral African literature, adequate examples and discussions of its poetic, dramatic and prose forms, factors that constitute the building blocks of oral African literature, functions of oral African literature, oral African literature as the source of written literature as well as the factors that hinder the growth and development of oral African literature. Others are „chremasticism‟ or rubrics and designs in the African Verbal Arts, folktales and its aesthetic elememts, methods of characterising aesthetics in oral African folktales through selected tales, „parenthetic‟ creativity as the „moonlight‟ of oral African literature, aesthetic delimitations and oral literary theories and modern incursions, „codemodifications‟ and transitions in African Oral Literature.