Reingard Nethersole

Bio: Reingard Nethersole is an academic researcher from University of the Witwatersrand. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary science & Rhetoric. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 8 publications receiving 19 citations.

“Local is Lekker”: Or why the New South African Parochialism will not go

Abstract: Summary Based upon brief comparisons with other literatures, the article examines the current debates on South African literature, isolating four symptoms which seem to indicate national self‐assertion via the high road of literature These are the pride taken in locally produced artefacts; an increasing “cross‐over” and mingling of different languages which make any quests for purity of language a risky business, challenging control over dominant discursive formations; the attempt to find an “authentic” South African voice in literature, and, finally, a questioning of hitherto accepted critical traditions and boundaries But although the intense focus upon the local seems both necessary and fruitful at this particular juncture in South African political history, the birthpangs of an emerging literature ought not to blind its practitioners into becoming parochial by cutting themselves off from the international debate

Reading in the in‐between: Pre‐scripting the “postscript” to Elizabeth Costello

Abstract: Summary By offering a close reading and analysis of “Postscript”, the text that concludes Coetzee's collection of “lessons” in his 2003 book Elizabeth Costello, in conjunction with Hofmannsthal's 1902 “Chandos Letter” (including brief reference to the Nobel Address “He and His Man"), the essay demonstrates the implications of palimpsestuous reading. Informed by Gerard Genette's study of the palimpsest as a mode of literary presentation particularly suited to poststructuralist understandings of the disassociation between author and protagonist, the essay argues, furthermore, that palimpsestuous writing articulates the conjunctive double of language and fiction as, philosophically speaking, the general and every single person's writing/reading as particular at the point where mutually historicising and historicised imaginings intersect along an elliptical axis connecting diachronic distance and synchronic proximity.

Literary history after Foucault

Abstract: Summary The essay shows the manner in which Literary History, normally conceived as being an aid to literary studies becomes, in fact, a judgement of what is commonly known as Literature (art). It proceeds with giving an overview of existing literary‐historical theories and practices which are located in six categories before outlining Foucault's archaeological and genealogical procedures. Although Literary History after Foucault is a chimera, his critiques of history, constituting fundamentally a critique of reason and the transcendental/sovereign subject as the sites of meaning are useful to Literary Theory because they afford insights into history as a construct of language and especially of discursive practices.

The emergence and transformation of literary space

Abstract: "The main theoretical difficulty inherent in the teaching of literature", Paul deMan (1986:29) observed, “is the delimitation of borderlines that circumscribe the literary field by setting it apart from other modes of discourse”, Dissatisfied with numerous existing notions as regards literature which are oblivious to the fact that literature depends upon a writer, a book, and a reader, this essay explores spatial denominators in its attempt to define the literary domain. It is argued that while story-telling precedes and succeeds literature, the site of the latter is one which emerged only in modernity and is about to be re-territorialized in the present. The republic of letters or the realm where the text functions as possible world is being replaced by the quarry of stories defining the world as text. Thus the modalities of signification have increased, yet the space of literature has been transformed by technological means changing it into the archive, a place of the past rather than a site of present production.

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

Missed connections: antony sher's titus andronicus in johannesburg

Abstract: This dissertation is a production history and reception study of the Market Theatre's controversial presentation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in 1995. Although directed by Gregory Doran, the star attraction and creative force behind this event was Antony Sher, a celebrity actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a luminary in the United Kingdom's South African expatriate community. Johannesburg theatre audiences initially welcomed Sher's self-described "homecoming" and the prestige his performance of Shakespeare would bestow upon that city's traditional Anglophile elite. For his part, Sher saw this event as a stepping stone towards repatriation and the beginning of a more ambitious career as a South African public intellectual. These mutual expectations were disappointed, however, when Johannesburg critics and audiences responded unfavorably to the actual staging of Titus, which featured South African stage accents instead of traditional Received Pronunciation. After Sher publicly countered public antipathy by writing a column accusing Johannesburgers of "philistinism," a bitter quarrel erupted on editorial pages of both South African and British newspapers. It reignited two years later with the release of Sher and Doran's apologia Woza Shakespeare! Titus Andronicus in South Africa. To date, this polemical work has served as the primary history of this affair. Drawing on communitarian philosopher Michael Walzer's theory of "connected criticism," this dissertation offers an alternative reception narrative that locates the failure of this production in the rhetorical mismatch between Sher's advertised intention to celebrate the achievement of racial "reconciliation" in that country and the aesthetic formation of "relevance," (as theorized by Alan Sinfield) that governed Sher and Doran's conceptual efforts to make Titus more accessible to a contemporary South African audience. I argue that Sher's professional immersion in the working methods of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and belated local knowledge of controversial new African National Congress cultural policies (such as the restructuring of the English-language radio station SAfm) diminished his ability to gauge the critical force of his production concept. The result was an inadvertent act of "bait-and-switch" that subsequent rancor over Sher's support for the apartheid-era "cultural boycott" and defensive appeals to "post-colonial Shakespeare" did little to illuminate.

Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Abstract: In an often-quoted interview from 1990, J. M. Coetzee describes the relation between his literary work and his life as "a person" in unexpectedly direct terms: Let me add ... that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so. (Doubling 248) Such a plain statement was all the more surprising coming from a writer whose work was, at the time of the interview, routinely categorized as 'metafiction.' It is remarkable that this writer confesses that he is deeply affected by the very thing his fictional work, on an ungenerous but far from uncommon reading, seemed unable to confront directly: "the fact of suffering in the world." Coetzee's statement explicitly connects this affective experience to his writings, which are not to be taken as a failure to acknowledge the affect generated by the fact of worldly suffering, but rather as so many "defenses" against it; his fictions serve as a strategy to contain the "overwhelm[ing]" intensity of the affect. Yet if they manage to mitigate this intensity, they do not neutralize it completely: the defenses constructed by fiction are "paltry, ludicrous." Coetzee's statement not only offers us a glimpse into the affective economy propelling his fiction, it also obliquely registers a limitation of his early work; in this way, it anticipates several of the trajectories that his work will explore after 1990. Coetzee describes his ambition to convey an affective response to suffering, yet he also subtly signals an awareness that his work has failed to do so effectively when he notes that the status of his fictions as "paltry, ludicrous defenses" is a fact, and "to me [Coetzee], transparently so." This phrasing indicates that this understanding of his fiction is less transparent to people other than the author, as the reception of his early work seems to confirm. There are at least two suggestions embedded in this dense passage, both of which are instructive for an understanding of Coetzee's trajectory in the last two decades: first, it announces Coetzee's exploration of different modes of writing that more successfully communicate the affect of suffering, and second, it indicates that two of the notions that will have to be renegotiated in such a writing practice are 'authorship' and 'authority.' Coetzee's fiction in the last two decades has returned time and again to these two closely interlinked projects. The reconsideration of authorship and authority was already central in The Master of Petersburg, the first novel he published after the interview, and it directly implicated the person of Coetzee himself in his three peculiar autobiographical fictions (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime). And as David Attwell has noted, in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year, "the practice of authorship itself' has become "[t]he overriding subject" (217); the same can be said about his Nobel lecture, "He and His Man." As for the attempt to convey a more direct affective response to suffering, the publication of Disgrace in 1999 seemed to announce a shift to a markedly more topical and realist register in its merciless depiction of the life of a white man in a post-Apartheid South Africa that has totally erased the terms of the social contract that used to pertain. The outspoken reactions to its depiction of new race relationships, lingering xenophobia, and sexual abuse seemed to signal that Coetzee, without abandoning his signature self-reflexivity, had finally managed to convey and provoke an affective response to the reality of suffering to which his work is committed. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Coetzee's twenty-first-century novels have not continued in this more realist vein. …