Democratising culture and literature in a ‘New South Africa’: Organisation and theory

The Aesthetic Dimension by Herbert Marcuse; The Frankfort School by Zolton Tar

Appendix: South Africa:

The present paper attempts to investigate J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) in terms of Fredric Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious. Jameson’s intellectual hermeneutics l...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23311983.2018.1447758

A repressed desire named revolution: Social anomalies and anxieties in Coetzee’s Waiting for The Barbarians

The Magistrate, the Camp, and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee and the Subject of Human Rights

Summary This article attempts to move beyond what are perceived to be the limitations of both Lukacsian Marxist and Deconstructionist accounts of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. If a Lukacsian Marxism has correctly introduced the category of “history” into the analyses of the novel, it has done so only to berate Coetzee for its absence. Teresa Dovey's Deconstructionist analyses have helpfully focused attention on the novel's intertextual critique of the South African liberal novel. However, her criticism is deformed by its inability to confront the complexities of the text's meditation upon its relationship with “history”. The linguistic theory of Saussure, and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory, are used to analyse that relationship. While the allegoric form acts as a critique of “classic realist” writing, this does not signal the text's refusal of “history”. Rather, it affirms its location as a signifying “interpretation” of the real that recognises its discursive specificity. The novel exa...

The allegorical text and history: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Summary The article suggests new directions for the progressive teaching of English based upon Gramsci's notion of counter‐hegemonic struggle and Eagleton's recent study of the European aesthetic lineage in order to facilitate a process of cultural transformation conducive to a radical democratic society. Marxist literary theory needs to move beyond its mimetic and Althusserian models in order to confront fully these new demands. If English is to be the lingua franca of a post‐apartheid South Africa, English departments in universities and schools have a central role to play in this process.

Jean‐Philippe Wade

Papers

The allegorical text and history: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Re‐thinking teaching english for another South Africa