In a language, suffix cohesion refers to the fact that suffixed words behave phonologically as simple or complex units depending on the suffix they are built with. This article uncovers a previously undescribed pattern of suffix cohesion in French, where words suffixed with vowel- and glide-initial suffixes behave phonologically like simple units (e.g. fêtiez [fet-je] ‘you partied’) and words built with other consonant-initial suffixes behave phonologically like complex units (e.g. fêterez [fɛt-ʁe] ‘you will party’). The evidence comes from a reassessment of well-known data on [ə]–[ɛ] stem alternations and from an acoustic study of [e]–[ɛ] and [o]–[ɔ] alternations in suffixed words as pronounced by 10 speakers living in the Paris area. The suffix’s phonological shape is found to provide the best account of the data among a set of factors that have been argued to be relevant to suffix cohesion in other languages (in particular resyllabification). The French pattern has important theoretical implications for theories of suffix cohesion as it is not prosodically conditioned. An alternative analysis in terms of paradigm uniformity is proposed, where suffixed words are treated as complex units phonologically if the suffix’s phonological shape facilitates the perceptual recognition of the base corresponding to the suffixed word’s stem.

This article explores psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about play and “transitional space” or “potential space” in relation to reading, pedagogy, and the legacy of apartheid in South African universities. Following the work of Carol Long, who argues that “apartheid institutions can be understood as the opposite of transitional spaces,” the author draws on her experiences of teaching in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape to reflect on how pedagogy is shaped by institutional culture. The article focuses particularly on “close reading” in the South African university classroom and how a rigid understanding of it has sometimes closed and constrained the experience of reading for students in order to argue for a more open model of “close reading” that values the immersive and creative aspects of reading as well as the analytic, following Winnicott’s understanding of meaningful cultural experience as rooted in play.

Postcolonial literary scholars often write about challenging traditional canons and Enlightenment ideas, but that challenge too often remains at the level of content and of ideas. We also need practical change to the university classroom, our curriculum, our syllabi, our pedagogy. And we need to be in dialogue with our colleagues teaching British or American or European literature who also want to decolonize their classrooms. There need to be fora where we can discuss the questions and problems we face in our classrooms and the strategies we have developed in response. These papers arise from an ongoing collaboration across institutions to discuss what we as teachers of literature can do differently and better.

The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounters. In addition to illustrating the complex and unpredictable workings of affect in teaching contexts, I also hope to show how these two incidents offer insight into the interface between sensorial and cognitive knowledge in relation to both literary and performance texts. The aim is to demonstrate how student responses to affective encounters resonate with, rather than directly address, some of the “everyday” processes of decoloniality.

Is Shakespeare universal? Is Hamlet a “strong” text that generates the same interpretation across cultural space and time, or is it a malleable text whose meaning is contingent upon variables in the encounter between text and reader and the contexts of reading? These were the kinds of questions that my students and I addressed in several courses I taught on Shakespeare over the past four years. As one might expect, our answers differed. Here, I develop and refine the argument I made and, sometimes, made incoherently: universality, whether in a writer, a text, or in criticism “is neither natural nor self-evident.” Because part of my reason for turning to Shakespeare was my dissatisfaction with contrapuntal reading as a pedagogical strategy for cultivating a “critical understanding of imperialism” in students, I conclude that we can only achieve that goal if we deploy contrapuntal reading across the literary curriculum.

What does it mean to decolonize the literature classroom? This short paper is intended as a personal reflection on teaching as an engagement with the social forces that bring neocolonial relations into the classroom, drawing on my experience teaching literature and literary theory in South Africa and Canada. I explore the idea of decolonizing the classroom as the production of an “outside” that provides meaning for the classroom’s “inside.”

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

The article tells the story of a pedagogical experiment that the author conducted in collaboration with final year master’s students in Kolkata, India. The aim was to “open up the classroom,” adapting Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy to an Indian context. The diverse group of students who participated in this experiment had a high degree of political consciousness regarding issues of gender, caste, sexuality, disability, and class due to the university’s history of student activism. Most students had already read a fair amount of postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature syllabus as it had conventionally been taught would not be able to engage these restive students or be relevant to their lived experiences. The experiment on classroom democratization and collaborative teaching would demonstrate to the future college teacher one kind of interventionist approach for raising student awareness in the Indian classroom.

This article reflects on the challenges that arise when the comparative literature classroom, especially in the Netherlands, is increasingly multilingual and simultaneously increasingly monolingual in its focus on English as a primary language. In view of moving comparative literary studies beyond its Eurocentric framework, what opportunities lie in teaching translated texts in “English(es)” in such a multilingual setting? What are the effects of such an interplay of mono- and multilingualism in view of a commitment to decolonizing the literary curriculum and pedagogical practice? What attention to language and linguistic difference might be available given the diverse linguistic and cultural literacies of students? Less interested in questions of translating texts, the article pursues how teaching literary texts in translation can foster listening to linguistic difference and encourage relational attunement when degrees of literacy and illiteracy are shared at varying levels of competence across students and teachers.