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Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 1997"


Journal ArticleDOI

41 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines two questions namely, how to describe cultural identity and how to relate cultural identity to literary studies, and the question of the relationship between literary studies and the study of literal and cultural identity.
Abstract: Summary This paper examines two questions namely, how to describe cultural identity and how to relate cultural identity to literary studies. By way of introduction, a distinction is drawn between globalization and nationalization. Special mention is made of Appa‐durais's suggestion that globalization consists of five cultural flows. The question arises as to which will be the stronger force in the near future: nationalization or globalization. The author defines cultural identity by citing many examples to prove his point. He ponders the question of the relationship between literary studies and the study of literal and cultural identity. New perspectives are offered in conclusion.

12 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the landscape as initially being part and parcel of God's creation, and also territory within boundaries defined by law, which subsequently led to the development of a national identity firmly rooted in the soil.
Abstract: Summary The article discusses the landscape as initially being part and parcel of God's creation, and also territory within boundaries defined by law. This subsequently led to the development of a national identity firmly rooted in the soil. The author regards the functions of the national landscape as providing a common unity to people and place, promoting their common origin, and finally naturalizing both unity and origin. Special reference is made to Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Winter's Tales as furnishing examples of the meaning of the landscape, and the meaning in the landscape. Structures in the landscape such as the social structure, the sexual structure and the structure of symbolic values are scrutinized. In conclusion, the author poses the question as to whether a national identity is indeed possible without a national landscape.

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use insights of recent theories of space as a basis for an investigation into the relationship between imperialism and the discourse of the metropolitan novel and examine Coetzee's novel Foe and its intertext Robinson Crusoe in the light of these notions.
Abstract: Summary This paper uses insights of recent theories of space as a basis for an investigation into the relationship between imperialism and the discourse of the metropolitan novel. J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe and its intertext Robinson Crusoe are examined in the light of these notions. Foe, it will be argued, is a critical engagement with spatialised structures of power such as imperialism, which seek to establish the dominance of a Western, rational, male subjectivity over colonised domains. Novelistic narrative is a key discursive feature of this dominance and in this sense the metropolitan novel is compiicit with imperialism. Foe's critique of imperial spatial arrangements therefore takes the form of an intervention in the archive of the novel: a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe in a radically different register.

9 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Mukherjee's The Holder of the World as mentioned in this paper explores links between seventeenth-century Massachusetts and pre-colonial Mughal India through the quest of a 1990s asset hunter for a lost diamond, the Emperor's Tear.
Abstract: Summary In Its frame tale, Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World (1993) excavates links between seventeenth‐century Massachusetts and pre‐colonial Mughal India through the quest of a 1990s asset hunter for a lost diamond, the Emperor's Tear. In the inset tale, Indians (Native Americans) are replaced by Indians (from the subcontinent) as the heroine (based on Hawthorne's Hester Prynne) moves from New England to the Coro‐mandel Coast and the court of the Moghul emperor Aurengzeb. Transactions between cultures are at the heart of the novel, which draws upon research into the trade between Colonial America and the East, reversing the direction of exploration and discovery. Mukherjee moves beyond the boundaries of the conventional historical novel, marrying The Scarlet Letter with virtual reality techniques, creating a fictional space which corresponds to her conception of transnational identity. In the frame tale a researcher is engaged with the problem of constructing an interactive model of historical...

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Brink's most recent novel, Imaginings of Sand (1996b), enters into the politics of the novel in a number of important ways, including the need to "address the silences of the past" and to appropriate this past/history through "imaginative understanding" in the form of fiction.
Abstract: Summary Andre Brink's most recent novel. Imaginings of Sand (1996b), enters into the politics of the novel in a number of important ways. His ideas of a post‐apartheid literature includes the need to “address the silences of the past” and to appropriate this past/history through “imaginative understanding” in the form of fiction. The implications of this link between the stories of fiction and those of history, and of his taking on the issue of the silenced woman's voice through his female narrator, are relevant to the ongoing discussion of the direction and ideology of a post‐apartheid literature. This paper argues that these issues are in themselves problematic and that a novel which aims to address them necessarily becomes itself messily involved in these problems of reading and of possible exclusionary practices.

5 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The emergence of the novel as an expression of modern nationalism was possible because it revitalized the themes of departure and return that lay at the heart of older forms of narrative.
Abstract: Summary The emergence of the novel as an expression of modern nationalism was possible because it revitalized the themes of departure and return that lay at the heart of older forms of narrative. These revitalized themes were used to define subjectivity in terms of territory. The changing relations of subjectivity, territory and narrative that align nationalism and the novel, also preprogramme the novel with the strategies of narrative that will later be so widely discussed under the heading of postmodernism. This set of narrative strategies thus works to define subjectivity on the boundary between nomadic and sedentary life. The novel as a form of narrating the nation is based on nomadic experience, but erases this experience in a celebration of sedentary life.

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the Skin of a Lion, through the fragmented and contrapuntal narratives of the marginalised characters, Ondaatje illustrates how inhabiting a dominant discourse through mimicry is a complex strategy of appropriation and resistance as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Summary This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects. The narrative exemplifies the intertextual mode that characterises Ondaatje's writing. In In the Skin of a Lion, through the fragmented and contrapuntal narratives of the marginalised characters, Ondaatje illustrates how inhabiting a dominant discourse through mimicry (Bhabha) is a complex strategy of appropriation and resistance. The ostentatious intertextuality of The English Patient, it is argued, exhibits “postcolonial impatience”: the tension between recognition by postcolonial subjects of the imperialistic narratives by which they are constrained, ...

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argues that if fictional characters are explained, not as having been explained, then the Law of Excluded Middle can be breached, since the differences between radical and non-radical completeness are ignored by fictional realists.
Abstract: Summary Reference, names and truth in fictional contexts are philosophically puzzling because unlike the case in ordinary situations, there are no such things as fictional characters to which we can refer, about which we can make truth claims and which can be named, and yet, the language we use about fictional characters seems to be meaningful in the same way as the language we use to talk about actual existent people and events. Although fictional realism, in claiming that fictional characters and events are (ike real ones in that they have properties, has the advantage that it can accommodate reference, truth and names for fictional characters it does so at the cost of ontological expansion. Furthermore, since the differences between radical and nonradical completeness are ignored by fictional realists, the Law of Excluded Middle is breached. This article, after examining a paradigm example of fictional realism and exposing its weaknesses, argues that if fictional characters are explained, not as having...

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated allochronism, the denial of the simultaneity of the ethnographic other with the representing subject and the consequent placing of that other in an other time, with reference to Paul de Man's examination of the relation between symbol and allegory.
Abstract: Summary Allochronism, the denial of the simultaneity of the ethnographic other with the representing subject and the consequent placing of that other in an other time, is investigated in this article with reference to Paul de Man's examination of the relation between symbol and allegory. Johannes Fabian's discussion of allochronism in terms of the spatialisation of time is related to De Man's conception of the symbol, after which the collusion of allochronism with Empire is examined in terms of both the historicist project and the appearance of the novel. The allochronic invention of the innocence of people “discovered” by European explorers in the New World, is a sign of the inaccessibility experienced by the European explorers to what they found: this invention of innocence is an attempt to account for alterity within the epistemology of Empire. Such an insistence on epistemological innocence may be related to the constitutive ambivalence and resultant duplicity of the (early) novel in relation to its f...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park as its point of departure, and consider the implicit attribution of moral responsibility for the novel's complicity with imperialism to Jane Austen herself.
Abstract: Summary Taking Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park as its point of departure, the paper firstly considers Said's implicit attribution of moral responsibility for the novel's complicity with imperialism to Jane Austen herself, secondly discusses the question that this raises for the theory of discourse which informs Said's reading and some of the ways in which these questions could be addressed, and lastly considers the status of blaming practices within literary contexts.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The play of textuality operative in Gothic invocations of the Nature:Culture binary opposition is explored in this article, where Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794] and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer [1820] are analysed.
Abstract: Summary This article is divided into three sections. Section one, in a self‐conscious act of critical aggression, approaches a range of Gothic narratives, including Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794](1980), Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk [1796](1980), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus [1818](1980) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer [1820](1989) with the metaphysical distinction between “Nature” and “Culture” at hand. Such an endeavour reveals the extent to which Romantic Gothic fiction characteristically involves the central narrative dynamic of an Edenic transgression and subsequent fall from the hallowed bounds of nature into the depraved realms of cultural engagement. Section two, however, in seeking to deconstruct this Edenic metaphor at work in the texts, proceeds to demonstrate the play of textuality operative in Gothic invocations of the Nature:Culture binary opposition. The absolute conceptual differences between the two states upon which the text...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Tourney of Babel as mentioned in this paper explores the detours of confusion between rhetorical excursions and philosophical discourse, where every loss is always a gain, and it is this confusion which is the imaginative playground of deconstruction.
Abstract: Summary Jacques Derrida's writing begets monumental problems, and also possibilities, for translation/interpretation/communication, which are central problems in linguistics, literature and philosophy. It is playfully argued (the feu continues to enrage serious writers) that translation/interpretation/communication is the detour, the exile, the abusage, the death of (m)Other. Using an error made by Derrida, the Tourney twists through the detours of confusion between rhetorical excursions and philosophical discourse: of Babel. It is this confusion which is the imaginative playground of deconstruction, where every loss is always aGAIN.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the question of whose story, perhaps whose identity, is relevant to South Africa of the 1990s is addressed by using several commentaries on my study Southern African Literatures (including those of panellists at the Conference "Literary Studies at the Crossroads").
Abstract: Summary Using several commentaries on my study Southern African Literatures (including those of panellists at the Conference “Literary Studies at the Crossroads") as a point of departure, the article attempts to consider ‐ by analogy ‐ the question of whose story, perhaps whose identity, is relevant to South Africa of the 1990s. It is argued that literary studies ‐ indeed, cultural studies ‐ needs to pursue methods of comparison and translation in breaking beyond the linguistic‐ethnic enclaves of the past towards complex understandings of what might constitute a South African identity.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored from a Lacanian, socio-critical and historical perspective the subtext of Fourie's drama Donderdag se mense (1989), as it pertains to a certain type of Afrikaner during the collapse of Afrikaans nationalism in the late eighties.
Abstract: Summary This article explores from a Lacanian, socio‐critical and historical perspective the subtext of Fourie's drama Donderdag se mense (1989), as it pertains to a certain type of Afrikaner during the collapse of Afrikaner nationalism in the late eighties1 The first section highlights Stanislavski's idea of a subtext The second section provides an outline of Donderdag's manifest text Sections three, four, five and their subsections deal with some of the play's action units in terms of their psychological, existential, socio‐historical and ideological subtexts The reception of the play is addressed in the concluding remarks This essay is the last of three complementary articles about Pieter Fourie's trilogy, Ek, Anna van Wyk, Die koggelaar and Donderdag se mense (cf Vermeulen 1996b; 1996c)