Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2003"

Postcolonial ecologies and the Gaze of animals: Reading some contemporary Southern African narratives

Abstract: Summary This essay is located within the new field of Animal Studies, and foregrounds literary representations of animals within a historicised culture, while stressing that ecologies are inseparable from politics and culture. Three southern African writers, Mda, Vera and Couto, contradict colonial discursivities about nature in their postcolonial texts. Their representations of human‐animal relationships will be discussed, to some extent, in relation to Derridean conceptualising of the animal gaze and the human response to being addressed by an animal. But because Derrida has animals as “the absolute other” the writers implicitly interrogate his theorising, for he cannot acknowledge what Adams calls “relational epistemologies”. African knowledges, as Mda and Vera represent them, construct such epistemologies for humans along with cattle, horses and “wild” animals. Couto, contradictorily, represents the repercussions of a breakdown of such epistemologies because of violence and poverty. Poland has humans ...

Reading against race : J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Justin Cartwright's White Lightning and Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket

Abstract: Summary In this essay, I argue that the treatment of race that one finds in J.M Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (2002) and Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket (2001), is premised on a recognition of the discursive inscription of the category of race in culture. These novels ponder the implications of the cultural basis of this trope by asking, for instance, whether nonracialism is a possibility that is open to the individual in a social context in which discourses of race prevail and, if not, how the individual may counter them. My essay examines not only the ways in which the novels under consideration articulate these questions, but also how they respond to them through a foregrounding of the culturally determined nature of reading.

Deconstructing Empire in Joseph Conrad and Zakes Mda

Abstract: Summary The publication of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness in 2000, almost a century after Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is not only redolent of its precursor in a titular sense, but also in its contingent and contiguous themes. Viewed from a postcolonial/postmodem perspective, both texts may be regarded as subversive offerings which disrupt colonial configurations of subjectivity. The degree to which Conrad and Mda succeed in deconstructing empire depends on the conditions of the historical production of their respective texts. Located within a modernist sensibility, Heart of Darkness, lacking the deictic in Mda's title, captures a historical moment of existential crisis in a manner that is simultaneously disruptive of colonial subjectivity and complicit with it, although in a characteristically ambiguous and inconclusive way. Set in the next millennium, The Heart of Redness continues the task of destabilising empire begun by Conrad, but this time through a revisionist reading of history, combining elemen...

Translating Triomf: The shifting limits of “ownership” in literary translation or: Never translate anyone but a dead author

Abstract: Summary This essay teases out the paradoxes inherent in competing notions of (1) authorial “ownership” of a text and of its modes of signification in acts of translation, (2) the claims upon that text by a translator, and (3) the senses in which imaginative texts are “co‐owned” by readers, specialists, critics, teachers, reviewers and editors. Based on anecdotal evidence ‐ in this instance, an incomplete case‐history of translating the Afrikaans novel Triomf into English ‐ the essay builds an argument about the nature of translation in more general terms.

"The Foot Does Not Sniff" : imagining the post-anti-apartheid intellectual

Abstract: Summary The South African literary institution is engaged in an examination of both its role in the history of apartheid and its potential futures. Originating in Edward Said's search for an alternative to a “politics of blame”, this article considers recent attempts to explore the possibility of “secular interpretation” in (and of) the South African context. Leon de Kock's trope of “the seam” and Mark Sanders's notion of “complicity” are considered. We characterise both as postdialectical descriptions of the interconnections that define South African (multivalent) being and mark its inscription. Further, we suggest that their postdialectical turn, despite the authors’ primary concern with the history of identity and historiography, advocates a persuasive mode of scholarship for engaging contemporary South African identity. Leaving the domain of scholarly debate, we turn to a literary representation of the contemporary South African intellectual. We look at the figure of Camagu in Zakes Mda's The Heart of...

Appropriating space and transcending boundaries in The Africa House by Christina Lamb and Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda

Abstract: Summary The appropriation of space and construction of shelter is part of the human endeavour to conceptualise being in and of the world. Places are defined spaces that serve as points of orientation, with the implication that space exists where humans are and vice versa. Houses, in particular, feature as places or sites that occupy and define personal space; they are not only adapted to a person's lifestyle and indicative of his/her identity but also serve as metaphors of certain periods and value systems. A comparison of The Africa House (2000) by Christina Lamb and Ways of Dying (1995) by Zakes Mda explores the concept of houses as constructs of identity and illustrates how they could be perceived to identify and reflect the cultural boundaries and imaginative worlds of their periods of origin and authors.

Towards the understanding of the modern grotesque

Abstract: Summary Even though the grotesque may be seen as a phenomenon which transcends generic, theoretical and periodic categorisations, in this article the emphasis is on its significance as an artistic device which enables writers to expose, highlight or conceal their individual apprehensions in respect of the challenges facing their generation. A brief evaluation of some of the pivotal works published in the second half of the twentieth century is followed by a summary of the evolution in understanding of both the term and the phenomenon. In evaluation of the critical works the emphasis is limited to the most influential contribution each of these works makes to the body of the grotesque scholarship. Likewise, in tracing the evolution, attention is paid only to the substantial shifts in the understanding of the grotesque in a given period. In conclusion an attempt is made at specifying some criteria which might be helpful in recognising the grotesque work as well as orienting oneself in its ambivalent universe.

Splice of life: Manipulations of the “real” in South African English literary culture

Abstract: Summary This essay employs the idea of a “splice” to look at ways in which South African writing in English has historically participated in a narrative move in which the category of the “real” is manipulated to lay claim to a greater purchase on authenticity of statement. The essay suggests that both fiction which poses as “more truthful” than confabulated nonfiction as well as nonfiction which pretends to be superior to fiction are playing a similar game. This game is seen as the desire to overcome a scene of near‐impossible heterogeneity by laying claim to a more singular truth and a more managable mode of truth‐telling.

Border crossings in Latina narrative : Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract: Summary In spite of being labelled a postcolonial novelist, Julia Alvarez avoids becoming a spokesperson for a generalised US Latino/a experience in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and thus escapes the double bind of group identity, or “representation” that is often associated with so‐called multi‐ethnic literature. Although Alvarez fits perfectly in the pluralist view of American society in the last few decades, her novel is different in the sense that it spells discursive trouble, marked as it is by transgressions, thereby subtly undermining the happily pluralist view implicit in much contemporary multiculturalism.

Imagining and living the exotic: A context for early rhodesian novels

Abstract: Summary The paper discusses some early Rhodesian novels within the context of nineteenth‐century debates about the exotic and recent theories about exoticism. The exotic has various temporal and spatial locations that are always sites of desire constructed from what is perceived to be absent in the present. Technological developments and radical social changes created different and competing absences in Victorian England and the paper compares responses to these by Tennyson and Ruskin. Pater, by contrast, rejects social contingency and celebrates instead the power of the individual imagination to create alternative and pleasurable realities. The competing demands of the lived and the imagined exotic can be seen in early Rhodesian writing. In Haggard's novels, written before Rhodes's occupation of Mashonaland, the interior of Africa is a landscape of romance. After Haggard had met Rhodes the interior is written as a potential colony and the colony denies the exotic its discrete existence. Early settler wri...

The speaking garden in William Blake's The Book of Thel: Metaphors of wisdom and compassion

Abstract: Summary Responding to the reductionist and objectifying dualisms of scientific mechanism and authoritarian Christianity, Blake's work evokes a view of being in which “everything that lives is holy”. In The Book of Thel (1789) this is exemplified in the representation of an ecologically interdependent Garden of speaking subjects. In this environment, the insubstantiality and impermanence of all subjectivity (which for Thel is a source of distress) is shown to be the necessary condition for love and reciprocity. This article is an appreciative reading of Thel in relation to the late modern predicament of eco‐social crisis, and in conversation with (simultaneously deconstructive and affirmative) views of subjectivity and liberation in Mahayana Buddhism. My purpose is to represent it as what might be called a “teaching text” for contemporary readers with regard to both the dualisms of self versus nature which habitually carve up the nondual world, and the dualistic oppositions of absolutism versus relativism ...

Mongane Serote's To Every Birth its Blood: History and the limits of improvisation

Abstract: Summary South African jazz carries a burden of optimism. It is consistently identified with an ebullient elan vital that resists the monomania of apartheid ideology. Mongane Serote's novel To Every Birth its Blood (1981) sounds a cautionary note in its exploration of the limits of modernist improvisation in the face of violent oppression. In exploring its representation of these limitations, this article addresses the critical debate regarding the disjuncture of its two parts that has inflected the novel's reception and reputation. More generally, it suggests ways in which representations of music might be read as either underscoring or as dissonant to the orders of narrative logic and modes of representation of the texts in which they occur.

The postcolonial space in Joseph Conrad : a consideration of two early novels

Abstract: Summary That Conrad continues to exert considerable influence on postcolonial discourse is unreservedly acknowledged today. Positing the notion of a “postcolonial space”, this article proposes to explore the problematic of racial, cultural and sexual identity in Conrad's first two novels, Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), treated dismissively by early critics of Conrad's work. The concept of a postcolonial space functions on at least three levels in this project. Firstly, it denotes the literal and metaphoric odyssey of the author who writes back from the periphery to the centre, deconstructing empire in the process of representation. Secondly, it acts as a “space‐clearing gesture” (Appiah), or theoretical space to interrogate Conrad in the light of some of the most pertinent concerns of modern literary discourse, namely, issues of racial, ethnic and gender subjectivity. Lastly, it postulates an indeterminate, interstitial “third space” (Homi Bhabha)...

‘n ekologiese perspektief op ‘n Nederlandse sprokie vir letterkunde‐onderrig in Afrikaans

Abstract: Summary The article focuses on a fairy tale by Godfried Bomans, “De rijke bramenplukker”, and the aim is to show how elements from fairy tales can address current environmental values in society. The writer discusses relevant intertexts and the context of the author, as well as the use of fairy tales as literary texts for the moral education of adolescents. The main argument is that literature can add to the sensitising of cultural (environmental) and aesthetic values in social contexts and therefore these types of fairy tales can form part of the secondary school curriculum, especially with the emphasis of the approach in the new outcomes‐based education on the development of values and responsible citizenship. The hidden environmental perspective in the fairy tale is explored as a possibility for the experience of values in the teaching of Afrikaans literature. This text is useful in the Senior Phase (Grades 7–9) where fairy tales as well as Dutch literary texts may be prescribed for learners of Afrikaans.

The problem of representing “truly” in Henry James's The Tragic Muse

Abstract: Summary In The Tragic Muse (1978) Henry James offers a study of the ways in which acting and portraiture are unseated from a locus of transcendental signification by the fact that they are irretrievably and problematically cut off from origin and self-authenticating presence. Both Miriam Rooth's performances and Nick's portraits fail to bridge the "spacing" that divides imitation from that which it represents. Jacques Derrida's essay "Signature Event Context" (1982) proves to be particularly apposite to a consideration of the narrative and thematic permutations thrown up by the problem of deferred origin in The. Tragic Muse. The notion of iterability is central to Derrida's essay: iterability is a function of differance which refers to a sign's effective operation in the absence of a producer or addressee; as such it is especially pertinent to a discussion of imitation and representation in James's work. Opsomming In The Tragic Muse (1978) bied Henry James 'n studie van die maniere waarop toneelspel en uitbeelding ontsetel word vanuit 'n lokus van transendentale betekenis deur die feit dat dit onherroeplik en problematies afgesny is van oorsprong en self-outentiserende teenwoordigheid. Sowel Miriam Rooth se optredes as Nick se uitbeeldings slaag nie daarin om die "spasiering" te oorbrug wat imitasie onderskei van wat dit verteenwoordig. Jacques Derrida se essay "Signature Event Context" (1982) blyk by uitstek van toepassing te wees op 'n oorweging van die narratiewe en tematiese permutasies wat deur die probleem van verskuilde oorsprong in The Tragic Muse na vore kom. Die idee van herhaalbaarheid is sentraal in Derrida se essay: herhaalbaarheid is 'n funksie van differance wat verwys na 'n sinnebeeld se effektiewe werking in die afwesigheid van 'n regisseur of 'n geadresseerde; as sulks is dit veral pertinent tot 'n bespreking van imitasie en voorstelling in James se werk. ********** Perhaps unusually for Henry James, the presentation of the worlds of art and politics in The Tragic Muse (1978) is delicately coloured with wry, knowing humour. The supporting cast, in particular, provides him with the occasion for almost Dickensian simile and caricature. Lady Agnes, nonplussed by the spectacle of Miriam's early attempts at acting, wears "the countenance she might have worn at the theatre during a play in which pistols were fired" (TM, 100). (1) Waiting for her son's return from the hustings of Harsh, "her tall, upright black figure seemed in possession of the fair vastness like an exclamation-point at the bottom of a blank page" (TM, 162). The dull, plodding, unfortunately-named Grace Dormer; the "immemorial blank butler" (TM, 193), Mr Chayter; the "large, mild, healthy" Urania Lennox "who liked early breakfasts, uncomfortable chairs and the advertisement-sheet of The Times" (TM, 345); the shawl-encrusted, obsequious Mrs Rooth (who "twinkled up at [Sherringham] like an insinuating glow-worm" (TM, 479))--all of these vividly-drawn characters provide the text with the matter and language of comedy, palliatives to its rather more weighty deliberations on the merits and risks of dedicating one's life to art. But humour in The Tragic Muse is not simply incidental, nor is it vested exclusively in minor characters. On the contrary, Peter Sherringham's childlike vulnerability to the charms of the theatre and its illusions is a target of much of the novel's more pointed satire. The vocabulary of truth, purity and perfection used to describe his idealism is strikingly similar to that used, on occasion, by James himself. (2) Sherringham's logocentric will to completion is particularly evident in his vision, born in "momentary illusion and confusion" (TM, 325), of a manager of the theatre "striving for perfection", a drama in which is rendered "all humanity and history and poetry" and which would be a "new and vivifying force" (TM, 326). Recalling Miriam's performance, he "floated in a sense of the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a thing perfectly done, in the almost aggressive bravery of still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life" (TM, 325). …

Nonidentity and reciprocity in conceptualising South African literary studies

Abstract: In his essay, "The Task of the Translator", first published as the preface to his translations of Baudelaire's poetry, from French into German, Walter Benjamin stresses what he calls the translatability of all literary works This is possible Benjamin (1992: 73) claims, due to the basic "reciprocal relationship between languages" He likens this reciprocity to "a kinship of languages" marked by a "distinctive convergence" Writing from a European linguistic context, he states: "Languages are not strangers to one another, but are a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to say" All languages, in others words, are vehicles for a range of common articulations In what seems like a countermove, he stresses the specificity of languages This uniqueness, according to him, marks the limits of translation and announce the untranslatable aspect of language as manifested in the phenomenon of nonequivalence at all linguistic levels: lexical denotation and connotation, semantic, syntactic and contextual Because languages are distinct, they are marked by difference so that according to Benjamin (1973: 74) it stands to reason that "kinship does not necessarily stand for likeness" This nonidentity, understood in the sense formulated by Heidegger (1960: 15) with regard to identity, should not be viewed as sameness, expressed as A=A, or self-coincidence or abstract equality, phrased as "the jejune emptiness of what, in the absence of internal relations, remains in persisting monotony" but is also applicable to literary works In Saussurian parlance, this nonidentity is not something fixed or essential but a nonpositive, relational phenomenon To be sure, for Benjamin, nonidentity, likewise, implies reciprocality and the other way round What do these two concepts, nonidentity and reciprocity, pertaining to an essay on translation, have to do with South African literary studies? On the face of it, apart from translation practices and studies relevant to a multilingual field, very little if not nothing Such a conclusion, of course, issues from the face of matters: the face here signifying the surface of things I enlist these two concepts because they are handy here in what is an attempt to chart the ways in which the field of South African literary studies has been conceptualised over time 1 South African literary studies, which this special issue of JLS and another to follow are devoted to, has been beset by conceptual exigencies since the beginning of the twentieth century when reference to South African literature first came into circulation These difficulties, while arising from many interrelated factors, can largely be attributed to the changing ideological perspectives which shaped successive political, cultural, linguistic orders and their inscription in academic practices for almost a century This produced a society with a cultural order of discursive divisions, fragmentations, shifts and instabilities flowing from the linguistic and literary divisions which developed in the wake of the ethnic division of South Africa well before but especially after 1948 This either precluded an inclusive conceptualisation or marginalised such conceptualisation for much of the century In addition, the sway of poststructuralist theory, with its suspicion of grand conceptualisations during the last quarter of the twentieth century, also played a role in barring the approach to the object With its emphasis on heterogeneity and difference and a rejection of anything suggesting homogenisation, the particularities of the various South African literatures were regarded as mutually exclusive systems beyond the capture of theoretical systematisation Independently and in combination, these factors checked attempts at arriving at even an operational definition which admitted to the object of South African literary studies not as the sum of its parts but as a field where both the reciprocity between languages and their nonidentity could be approached …

Die tekstualisering van die liggaam in Lady Anne

Abstract: Summary One of the central themes in Antjie Krog's seventh volume of poetry, Lady Anne (1989), is the portrayal of the body. Several poems focus on the female body, the body as a writing instrument (in support of Cixous's famous dictum), the interaction between the male and female body, the body as textualised object and the body of the Other. Interestingly enough, Krog does not opt for the traditional maternal metaphor for the writing process but employs obvious phallic metaphors to convey her poetic inclinations. Her preoccupation with the body and bodily metaphors is an intertextual response to that of Breyten Breytenbach. In Lady Anne the focus is in particular on the body of the Other(s) encountered at the Cape by the historical subject, Lady Anne Barnard. Finally, it is shown how the poem “jy word onthou vanwee ...” is a culmination for all the perspectives on the body in the text as a whole.

Introduction: Special Issue: Aspects of South African Literary Studies Part 1

Abstract: This is the first of two double-volume special issues devoted to Aspects of South African Literary Studies. Conceived neither thematically nor with any specific theoretical focus, its aim, rather is to gather current essays by leading researchers in the field in a journal with a theoretical orientation which is open to general literary studies. This symptomatic approach is intentional. It seeks to open the field to practices neither constrained by nor preoccupied with this or that theory without in any way placing theoretically informed approaches under erasure. This approach is mindful of the fact that the field of South African Literary Studies, as my opening essay indicates, has had considerable difficulties with regard to its demarcation as an object of study. This of course is a theoretical problem. Hence an attempt is made to move behind theoretical disputes in order to delineate language-based typologies for how this object has been conceived in the past and how it may be defined today for scholarly purposes. What is proposed is a multilingual South African definition as a way of overcoming the difficulties inherent in other conceptualisations discussed in detail. Two pertinent questions lurk behind this conceptualisation: they are that of national literature and what might be the most appropriate method or methods for approaching this multilingual field of study. The question of a national literature is dealt with in the second double volume to follow this one. Methodological questions require separate treatment and will receive attention in a separate volume devoted to these matters. This is planned for the near future. For the rest, the volume consists of a variety of essays reflecting on work now being done by a selection of the scholars in the field. Michael Titlestad and Mike Kissack's essay "The Foot Does Not Sniff: Imagining the Postapartheid Intellectual" deals with the role of literary institutions during the apartheid past and new possibilities for its future in a democratic dispensation characterised by cultural heterogeneity. They draw on postcolonial theory to propose what they call a postdialectical secular mode of interpretation and critique as a way through which the postapartheid literary scholar and intellectual could engage with the past and the present in terms other than the "politics of blame". Their essay, through a reading of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, establishes interconnections between contemporary fiction in English and early Xhosa writing, which, due to a history of division, has received scant attention in the past. Work in the opposite direction from English and Afrikaans to the African languages is just as necessary. Related to this, is Mike Marais's reading of the textualisation of race in three postapartheid novels in English and its inscription in culture. Where Titlestad and Kissack seek to overcome the paralysis induced by the accusatory politics concerning the past, Marais examines whether the construction of a nonracial culture is at all possible and how racialism may be counterveiled. The critique of race which is central to postcolonial literatures has of course been at the heart of the brand of colonialism which prevailed for so long in South Africa and is indelibly inscribed in all the literatures. His reading establishes that these novels conclude that the transcendence of "race" through a metaphysics of nonracialism is impossible but that acknowledgement of local cultures and meaning structures combined with an ethic of tolerance provide discursive possibilities to resist racialism. From the problem of racial prejudice which structured the processes of human othering Africans close to, if not part of the realm of animals, Wendy Woodward's "Postcolonial Ecologies and the Gaze of Animals: Reading Some Contemporary Southern African Narrative" looks at the process of othering animals in culture and Derrida's designation of animals as "the absolute others". …

The humorous depiction of characters in the prose works of S.M. Burns-Ncamashe

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to discuss and evaluate the employment of humour in the depiction of characters in the prose works of S. M. Burns-Ncamashe, as humour tends to manifest itself significantly in this aspect. This humorous depiction of characters is discussed with emphasis laid on the various methods of character portrayal that display the employment of humour. Each method is discussed in terms of its theory and application. An evaluation of Burns-Ncamashe's use of humour in depicting characters is made part of the concluding section, in which some findings are highlighted. Devices of humour that are employed by the author are spotlighted within the discussion. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om die aanwending van humor in die uitbeelding van karakters in die prosawerke van S.M. Burns-Ncamashe te bespreek en te evalueer, omdat humor in hierdie opsig sigself pertinent manifesteer. Hierdie humorisriese uitbeelding van karakters word bespreek met die klem op die verskeie tegnieke van karakteruitbeelding wat die gebruik van humor uitbeeld. Elke metode word bespreek in terme van die teorie en toepassing daarvan. 'n Evaluering van Burns-Ncamashe se gebruik van humor in die uitbeelding van karakters vorm deel van die afsluiting waarin sommige van die bevindinge uitgelig word. Die verskeie humortegnieke wat deur die skrywer aangewend is, word ook ontleed.