Helize Van Vuuren

Bio: Helize Van Vuuren is an academic researcher from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Historiography & Afrikaans literature. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 26 publications receiving 129 citations. Previous affiliations of Helize Van Vuuren include University of Natal & University of Port Elizabeth.

Examining the Servant's Subversive Verbal and Non-Verbal Expression in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Abstract: Summary The power struggle between Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) is one based in language. While the matriarch's perspective dominates the novel, thereby presumably silencing Agaat, the servant-cum-nurse employs alternative methods of communication, or mimetic gestures, to undermine Milla's point of view. Through verbal and non-verbal measures, Agaat attempts to counteract the dying woman's story. While these communicative measures rely on their finely nuanced and insidious attributes to function, they contain an essential ambivalence, as the controlling white woman never understands the full implications of her rejected child's communication.

Forgotten territory: the oral tradition of the /Xam

Abstract: Notably absent in South African literary histories is consideration of the oral tradition of the Bushmen. In rethinking South African literature, one of the traditional forms which urgently needs recovery as part of our South African literary and cultural heritage, is the collected narratives and songs/poems of the /Xam (as represented in the Bleek & Lloyd collection, published in 1911, 1924 and 1931-37, and in Von Wielligh and Marais's collections in Afrikaans in the 1920's). These previously marginalised forms need reincorporation into what we consider to be the corpus of South African literature.

The universal sanctity of whiteness: Antjie Krog's negotiation of black responses to white transformation in a change of tongue

Abstract: Country of My Skull (1998) emerged out of Antjie Krog's participation as a journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings and consists mostly of the collected stories of individual trauma inflicted by the apartheid regime, which are overlaid with her own responses to these graphic details. A Change of Tongue (2003) is more autobiographical and personal than the earlier work, more searching in its negotiation of the complexities and paradoxes confronting white identities in relation to a new sense of unhomeliness in a space which had been reserved exclusively for whites as home. It is also less comfortably indicting of the regime responsible for the atrocities, and more willing to confront the continued force of whiteness as a cultural construct. Studies in whiteness are employed to investigate Krog's experimentation with genre and her experience of ‘race’. The narrative perspective and its engagement with a post‐apartheid crisis in white identity, is explored, paying specific attent...

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

Abstract: Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

"Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa

Abstract: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Melissa Steyn. "Whiteness just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xxxix + 228 pp. References. Indexes. No price reported. Paper. Melissa Steyn's "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be" is an interpretation of white South Africans' narratives of their whiteness. It is based on the analysis of a questionnaire pertaining to the implications of being white. In comparison to the situation in Europe or North America, whiteness in South Africa no longer carries social privilege. With black political leadership and increasing African social and cultural assertiveness, white identity is challenged to adapt to new circumstances. Steyn identifies five narratives that try to come to terms with these new conditions. The first two are based on the Eurocentric belief in white superiority and never question the existence of a white identity that is in a dichotomous relationship with a denigrated blackness. The first narrative is unapologetic about the superiority of white culture and identifies with the paternalist task of "furthering the progress of humankind" (67) in South Africa; the second bemoans the injustice of the new social order and looks upon whites as the victims of a reversal of fortunes. The remaining narratives accept to varying degrees that white identity may change. Still projecting a strong affiliation with white identity, the third narrative concerns the possibility of using qualities supposedly inherent in white culture to succeed in the new South Africa. The more pragmatic version, which is based on liberal humanism with its trust in the individual and the belief in racial equality and democratic pluralism, seeks common ground with the black leadership. White guilt is acknowledged by way of critical self-observation, and such introspection has the potential to "envision possibilities of new forms of subjectivity within more inclusive structures" (99). The fourth narrative denies that whiteness has any implications in relation to people of color. Instead, an unproblematic white African or a South African identity is asserted. A lifelong commitment to racial equality culminates in the claim that color blindness has been achieved. Authors of this narrative are those who supported the struggle and in some way or another resisted apartheid. It is understandable that they find it particularly difficult to review their attitude to whiteness since they, after all, lived with the ideal of nonracialism. …

Culture and customs of South Africa

Abstract: Series Forward Preface Acknowledgments Chronology Land and People History and Political Economy Religion and World View Literature The Media Art and Architecture Cuisine and Traditional Dress Gender Roles, Marriage, and Family Social Customs and Lifestyle Performing Arts and Cinema Glossary Bibliographical Essay Index

About Telling: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Drama and Poetry

Abstract: ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. vi Preface ............................................................................................................................................ vii 1 Introduction: Speaking of Ghosts ........................................................................................... 1 1.1 Purpose, Method, Definitions ......................................................................................... 1 1.2 Talking Ghosts: On Ghost Stories and Criticism ....................................................... 26 2 How to Tell A Ghost Story .................................................................................................... 45 2.1 Field Survey: A Brief History of Ghost Stories and the Theatre ............................... 45 2.2 Major Argument: About Telling Ghost Stories .......................................................... 52 2.3 Speaking of Ghosts: Conor McPherson’s The Weir ................................................... 61 2.4 An Irish Gothic: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats... ................................................. 76 2.5 Staging South African Photography and the Ghost of Sizwe Banzi ......................... 90 2.6 A Haunting Machine: Theatrical Technologies and Samuel Beckett’s Shades ..... 108 2.7 Haunting Oceans, Mourning Languages: J.M. Synge and Derek Walcott ............ 135 3 Witness to Ghosts ................................................................................................................. 155 3.1 Field Survey: Transnational Poetics and the Globalgothic ..................................... 155 3.2 Major Argument: Voice, Medium, Rhythm, and the Poetry of Dead Metaphors162 3.3 Eavan Boland and the Haunted Chorus .................................................................... 187 3.4 Breyten Breytenbach and the Afrikaans Gothic ....................................................... 209 3.5 Nohow On from Here: Samuel Beckett’s Worsening Writings .............................. 235 3.6 Scholia on a Case Study: Imagining the Zong ........................................................... 259

Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country

Abstract: Njabulo S. Ndebele. 2007. Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country . Houghton: Umuzi-Random House. 279pp. ISBN 9781415200377.