The module addresses influential South African literary-cultural concerns through the examination of texts by leading South African writers. Running through the course is a series of questions with which students are required to grapple: What is suggested, in the course material, about how to live in a particular place at a particular time? Is ‘identity’ an essence, a construct, an uneasy mediation amongst contradictory positions? How have local particularities been conceived by writers in relation to various metropolitan, or supposedly global, realities?