Frank England

Bio: Frank England is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Tragedy. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 8 citations.

Imposing Eliot: On Translating Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk

Abstract: Summary Amongst the contributions to the special edition of the Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir literatuurwetenskap on the oeuvre of Marlene van Niekerk (Volume 25(3) September, 2009), the task of translating her works into English was discussed. This article adopts a critical focus on four instances of the presence of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the translation of her novel Agaat (2004) for the South African English-speaking reader by Michiel Heyns (2006).

Affirming human bonds in a time of crisis - A central action of euripides' heracles?

Abstract: Summary Amongst the most troublesome of classical tragedies is the Heracles by Euripides. Interpreters are puzzled by its form, its structure, its jarring transition, and its ending. However, not only are its innovative meta-theatrical devices instructive of Euripides' experimentation with the tragic genre; recently, Katherine Riley (2008) has revisited its performance history, and her comment that it resurfaces at pivotal moments of historical importance may engender a proposal that it contains a message that is significant for our time, if not, indeed, for all time. Opsomming Euripides se Herakles is een van die mees problematiese klassieke tragedies. Interpreteerders krap kop oor die vorm, die struktuur, die ontstemmende oorgang en die slot daarvan. Dis egter nie slegs die innoverende meta-teatrale middele wat mens insig gee in Euripides se eksperimentering met die genre van die tragedie nie. Katherine Riley (2008) het die opvoergeskiedenis van hierdie tragedie weer ondersoek en haar kommentaar dat dit op deurslaggewende oomblikke van geskiedkundige belang weer op die toneel verskyn, kan 'n voorstel inhou dat dit 'n boodskap bevat wat belangrik is vir ons tyd--indien nie weliswaar vir alle tye nie. 1 Introduction Scholars are dissatisfied with the Heracles of Euripides. They claim that its suspenseful activity descends in bathetic manner toward an enfeebled denouement. It fails as a drama, and, certainly, it is not a "real" tragedy (Papadopoulou 2005: 2). It conflates an accepted form of a dramatic work--the suppliant drama--with a play that seeks to understand the violence of temporary insanity (Griffiths 2006: 46-47, 62). Perhaps it intends to be a "homecoming drama", a catalectic attempt to appropriate the "epic odyssey"? Or, to employ a symphonic structure, it is a play of "four movements"--those of "waiting for Heracles", which, perhaps, more aptly, may be rendered "waiting to die", of murder, of madness and murder, and of friendship--and this framework has been imposed upon a mythic tale (Barlow 1996: 6-8, 17). Alternatively, it coheres around the notion of madness, which is evident in Heracles from the time of, if not before, his arrival on the stage (Bond 1981 : xix). (1) Another proposition suggests that the play may be a "mantic" or "medical" drama, which probes the onset and effects of epilepsy (Aylen 1964: 128). (2) Or, and rather boldly, it is a proleptic exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is the regular diagnosis of the battle-scarred and war-ravaged of our own age (Meagher 2006: 14, 48, 50, 55). Given this range of views, any endeavour to interpret the Heracles entails entering an agonistic arena, a theatrical space from which many readers and viewers of the play leave rather bewildered. But if it is to be doubted that the Heracles of Euripides is as aporetic as some readers and viewers may assert--and it is a doubt that "worries" about the possibly concealed suspicion of the play's detractors that, possibly, Euripides was "tired", "short of time", "drunk", "sick of his kids", or, owing to no shortage of psychological interpretations, projecting his own derangement onto the text, or that he simply did not care--it may be helpful, first, to observe the "conventions-busting" and theatrically innovative aspects of the play as sufficient justification for its "awkwardness"; and, as a consequence of this observation, second, to ask about the central action of the Heracles, a question which raises the issue of its socio-political context, even though it may be difficult to date the play with any accuracy. (3) Such an endeavour, in part, is generated by the observation of Riley (2008: 4, 2) that, while the interest in this play has been desultory since its inception, it "has always surfaced in historically charged circumstances (e.g. late Julio-Claudian Rome, Tudor England, fin-de-siecle Vienna, Cold War- and post-9/11 America)", and that it "has been adapted for the stage more times (and in a wide variety of forms) in the last decade than in the whole of its previous history". …

Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: Rereading J.M. Coetzee's Foe

Abstract: Summary The novels of J.M. Coetzee both invite and reward multiple readings, and Foe (1986) remains one of Coetzee's most deliberately innovative and literary of novels. In a prescient act, a conference on Foe was hosted by the Theory of Literature Department at Unisa as early as 1988, only some two years after its publication, which resulted in the perspicacious and incisive scrutiny of this aesthetically strategic work. More recently, Attridge (2005) has revisited his 1992 examination of Foe, and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon. Following Attridge's (2005) insightful essay, this article also returns to Foe, and appropriates Grabe's (1989: 176) observation that “the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience” informs the work, and therefore rereads it as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, “La Pharmacie de Platon”.

" To see another person's face... to touch another person's hand": bodies and intimate relations in the fiction of Marlene Van Niekerk

Abstract: ii

Contemporary Afrikaans fiction in the world: The Englishing of Marlene van Niekerk

Abstract: Many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fifty years have been written in Afrikaans, but in order to reach a global audience the authors have had to turn to translators. Focusing on Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat, this article examines the challenges that this fiction, and the particular character and social status of different varieties of Afrikaans, present to the translator, and discusses the significance of the differences between versions addressed to an English-speaking South African readership and versions addressed to a global readership.