Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2006"

Blanc de Blanc : whiteness studies - a South African connection?

Abstract: Summary Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered “blank”, a taken‐for‐granted negative essence, a place less looked‐into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de‐essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the “difference within” would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.

Feminist translation strategies: Different or derived?

Abstract: Summary This article explores the problem of difference in translation under the influence of deconstruction, with particular reference to four French‐Canadian feminist texts by Nicole Brossard and their feminist translations into English (two translations by Barbara Godard and two translations by Patricia Claxton). These translators claim to utilise innovative translation strategies in challenging certain conventional views on translation. It is because of their explicit rejection of traditional views on fidelity and their emphasis on the individualistic and creative nature of translation as expressed in metatexts that feminist translators’ work is seen as a threat to mainstream translation discourse. Equally, it is for precisely these reasons that feminist translators may make a contribution to contemporary translation studies, should their claims be substantiated in practice. But in my view, no critic to date has really questioned the basis upon which feminist translation rests: the contention that thr...

Haunted house, haunted nation: Triomf and the South African postcolonial gothic

Abstract: Summary By drawing upon contemporary loci of fear and cultural anxiety, Gothic literature continually reinvents itself across international borders. This article places Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf (2004) within the context of the Gothic novel as a uniquely South African development of the postcolonial Gothic mode. In Triomf, Van Niekerk reworks the conventions common to Gothic fiction to create a literature of terror that captures the Zeitgeist of Afrikaner anxieties ‐ the novel functions as a critique of white South Africa's civil religion of cultural dominion. Specifically, Van Niekerk deploys a hauntology of the Voortrekker tradition that questions the congruence of South Africa's mythologised past and the nation's projected postcolonial claims for the present and future; as Sophiatown's buried past rises to the surface, the Benade family find themselves haunted by the apartheid policies that constructed their suburban home ‐ the haunted house becomes the haunted nation. To illustrate the spectral pur...

Accountability, acknowledgement and the ethics of “quilting” in Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Abstract: Summary This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998). Arguing that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her transposing of testimony and of academic non‐fictional texts into fictional narrative or poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in Country of My Skull because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases traces to textual “origins”: whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices and, second, plagiarism ‐ two very different ethical transgressions which, neverthe...

Confession and public life in post‐apartheid South Africa: A Foucauldian reading of Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Abstract: Truth commissions around the world have given the technique of confession a new public currency and political power. Many works of literature thematising these commissions have also adopted the technique of confession for literary purposes. In this paper I bring Foucault's understanding of the technique of confession, and his discourse on the role of public intellectuals in modernity, to bear upon an examination of Antjie Krog's literary reflection of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), entitled Country of My Skull (1998). I look at how this text, and Krog's subsequent public intellectual status as a witness of the TRC, perpetuate the technique of confession without problematising it in ways that Foucault's work would suggest is necessary. Waarheidskommissies die wereld oor het die tegniek van skuldbelydenis met 'n nuwe openbare geldigheid en politieke mag beklee. Talle literere werke wat hierdie kommissies dokumenteer het ook die tegniek van skuldbelydenis vir literere doeleindes ingespan. In hierdie referaat pas ek Foucault se opvatting van die tegniek van skuldbelydenis en sy diskoers oor die rol van openbare intellektuele in moderniteit toe op 'n ondersoek na Antjie Krog se werk Country of My Skull (1998). Ek kyk hoe hierdie werk, en Krog se daaropvolgende openbare intellektuele status as getuie van die Waarheids-en-versoeningskommissie (WVK) die skuldbelydenistegniek perpetueer sonder om dit te problematiseer op wyses wat Foucault se werk suggereer noodsaaklik sou wees.

Cannibalism in the colonial imaginary : a reading of Joseph Conrad's "Falk"

Abstract: Summary Together with terms such as “savage”, “child” and “simpleton”, the word “cannibal” has played a significant role in the lexicon of colonial discourse as a signifier of alterity. Using Peter Hulme's thesis on the origin of the term “cannibal” as an anchor, this essay explores the fraught relationship between anthropophagy and the discourses surrounding the topic of cannibalism. As a point of articulation, I shall examine the short story “Falk” by Joseph Conrad in which a European protagonist confesses to the act of cannibalism in extremis. Reading the story contrapuntally, this essay interrogates the circumstances around Falk's “crime”, unravelling the narrator's own preconceptions and prejudices which feed into society's fixation with labels and stereotypes such as “savages” and “cannibals”.

Foucault's Las Meninas and art‐historical methods

Abstract: Summary This article focuses on the ways in which Foucault's Las Meninas has been represented and critiqued in art‐historical texts and endeavours to gauge its significance to the discipline, in particular, the “New Art History” of the 1970s and 1980s. Art historians have not yet adequately engaged the historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological dimension of Foucault's articulation of an archaeology of the structures of thought and the significance of this inquiry to the writing of art histories. However, Foucault's unprecedented reading of Velazquez's painting ‐ unfettered by art‐historical methods ‐ played a significant role in facilitating a critique of the limitations of canonical art‐historical interpretive procedures. Art historians Svetlana Alpers, Norman Bryson and Eric Fernie have, for example, drawn attention to the insularity of the discipline; its emphasis on connoisseurship; its preoccupation with the construction of meaning via archival documents and iconographic and stylistic ...

Shadowing Afrikaner nationalism: Jungian Archetypes, incest, and the uncanny in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf

Abstract: Summary Marlene van Niekerk's novel Triomf dramatises a political and psychological crisis in Afrikaner nationalism at the time leading up to the 1994 elections. Taking a psychoanalytic approach to this postcolonial narrative, one may construct a theoretical understanding of how internai violence induced by a nationalist Afrikaner culture is projected outward. Reading van Niekerk's novel as a psychological allegory, one may interpret her characters to be representative of components of an imaginary Afrikaner consciousness ‐ a psyche struggling to come to terms with the history of apartheid and a Utopian nationalist identity. By mapping Jungian archetypes onto the novel's characters, we can theorise about the relationality of particular psychic components of a nationalistically oriented consciousness, and turning to Freud's theory of the uncanny, we can come to understand the struggle between these components. Van Niekerk leads her readers away from the mythologised past of Afrikaner nationalism, and towar...

“Enslaved sovereign”: Aesthetics of power in Foucault, Velázquez and Ovid

Abstract: Summary Michel Foucault's essay on Las Meninas has created spaces for diverse analyses of Velazquez's painting and of Foucault's reading of its intimations. My purpose in this paper is to argue for an interpretation of both painting and essay that is shaped by an exploration of aesthetics of power rather than by perspectival considerations. To further delineate Velazquez's interest in the inherently antagonistic relation between artistic expression and institutional power, I extend my inquiry to his Fable of Arachne, a painting that could have served Foucault's aesthetic and epistemological purposes well, and to a text from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which this painting is firmly rooted.

Representations of Islamic belief and practice in a South African context: Reflections on the fictional work of Ahmed Essop, Aziz Hassim, Achmat Dangor and Rayda Jacobs

Abstract: Summary This study explores the representation of Islam in the fictional work of four South African writers: Ahmed Essop, Aziz Hassim, Achmat Dangor and Rayda Jacobs. After clarifying significant principles of Islam, I follow a threefold basis of enquiry, considering how far these authors, in terms of their fiction, reveal Islamic belief as an empowering force for social justice and compassion; how far they are prompted by feminist views; and how far they feel a need to interrogate Islamic teaching and practice. Given particular attention in my enquiry are: Essop's story, “The Hajji” (1978) and novel, The Visitation (1980); Hassim's novel, The Lotus Eaters (2002); Dangor's novella, “Kafka's Curse” (1998) and novel, Bitter Fruit (2001); and Jacobs's novel, Confessions of a Gambler (2003a) together with her short story collection, Postcards from South Africa (2003b). To begin with I contrast Dangor's more interrogative stance towards the use of violence with Hassim's apparent readiness to countenance it. In...

To be a cosmopolitan : Lewis Nkosi and Breyten Breytenbach : review article

Abstract: Using as a starting point the recent publication of two review anthologies, the paper enters a debate that has currency in both South Africa and abroad: What purchase has the cosmopolitan project - as Kwame Anthony Appiah asks in his new book, Cosmopolitanism - in a world increasingly conservative post-9/11? To focus on South Africa, if Nkosi and Breytenbach were self-styled cosmopolitans, what would constitute their value in our literature, indeed in our society? Hierdie artikel gebruik as uitgangspunt die onlangse verskyning van twee resensiebundels om aan 'n debat deel te neem wat in Suid-Afrika sowel as in die buiteland relevant is: Wat is die sin van die kosmopolitaanse projek - soos Kwame Anthony Appiah vra in sy nuwe boek Cosmopolitan - in 'n wereld wat sedert 9/11 toenemend konserwatief raak? Met betrekking tot Suid-Afrika, kan gevra word watter bydrae Nkosi en Breytenbach as selfgenoemde kosmopolitane in ons literatuur en inderdaad in ons gemeenskap lewer.

A homo calculator at large : reading the late work of Foucault in the light of Ivan Vladislavic's "Villa Toscana"

Abstract: Summary This essay takes the form of a reading of Foucault's late work on the subject and power, particularly that concerned with the technologies of self, and the implications this work has for an understanding of the relationship between questions of government and those of self-government in modernity. Focusing on the figure of Jeff Budlender, central character of the opening story of Ivan Vladislavic's The Exploded View, the essay explores how, from the point at which the state engages in biopolitics--that is, systematically invests in a technology of individuals--forms of government cease to translate spontaneously into practices of self-government. The result, expressed at the level of the individual, is, I argue, the often uneasy attempt to orientate the self to the individual self while at the same time taking cognisance of that self's position in the social entity as a whole. This conflicting position is, I suggest, vividly revealed in Vladislavic's account of the inner life of Budlender, demographer and statistician, as he attempts to make sense of South Africa, himself, and even the woman he loves in ways that alternate between brief concerns with the individual followed by more lasting preoccupations with the group, finally doing justice to neither. Opsomming Hierdie essay is in die vorm van 'n lesing van Foucault se latere werk oor die onderwerp van mag, veral die mag wat betrekking het op die tegnologiee van die self, en die implikasies wat hierdie werk inhou vir 'n begrip van die verhouding tussen regerings--en selfregeringskwessies in moderniteit. Deur te fokus op die figuur Jeff Budlender (sentrale karakter van die openingsverhaal van Ivan Vladislavic se The Exploded View), ondersoek die essay hoe--van die punt waar die staat biopolitiek begin toepas (d.i., stelselmatig in 'n tegnologie van individue bele)--regeringsvorme ophou om spontaan in selfregeringspraktyke omgesit te word. Ek voer aan dat die resultaat, uitgedruk op die vlak van die individu, die dikwels ongemaklike poging is om die self ten opsigte van die individuele self te orienteer, terwyl daar terselfdertyd kennis geneem word van die self se posisie in die sosiale entiteit as geheel. Voorts voer ek aan dat hierdie konflikbelaaide posisie tekenend onthul word deur Vladislavic se relaas van die innerlike lewe van Budlender, die demograaf en statistikus, na gelang hy poog om Suid-Afrika, homself, en selfs die vrou wat hy liefhet te verstaan op maniere wat kortstondige bemoeiing met die individu afwissel met meer blywende ingesteldheid op die groep, sodat daar uiteindelik nie reg geskied aan een van die twee nie. One of the characteristic features of the extraordinary, mostly short and less formal pieces published in the eighties is the way Foucault locates the particular theme he is exploring in each case within the wider trajectory of his work, particularly that concerning the subject and power and describes himself as engaged in "a genealogy of the modern subject as an historical and cultural reality" (Foucault [1981] 1994:177). Up until that point, he states, he had conducted this genealogical enquiry from two vantage points; the first he describes as general, the second as practical. The first or general route is best represented by The Order of Things ([1966]1970), which is concerned with how scientific knowledge from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century had attempted to explain human life, labour and language by means of overarching common logics and criteria. The second route, taken in Madness and Civilization ([1961]1965), The Birth of the Clinic" ([1963]1973), and Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1977), focuses on the ways in which a set of technologies (ranging from institutions to discourses) produces particular subjects simultaneously as objects of knowledge and of domination. In characterising the direction taken in his later work, Foucault speaks of the importance of adding a fourth cluster of techniques to the three outlined by Habermas: those of production (concerning the transformation and manipulation of things), those of signification (that permit one to use sign systems) and, most important here, of domination (those that direct the conduct of individuals by way of imposing certain aims and objectives upon them). …

Foucault's Hölderlin

Abstract: Summary This article traces the dispersal of language, its significance for Foucault's idea of Literature in modernity, and the paradigmatic role of Holderlin's writings within it. This path centrally involves outlining the interface, in the modern episteme, between language and Literature, the double withdrawal of the gods/God, the double division between reason and madness, and the “mad poet/philosopher/genius” within it. The article draws together Foucault's archaeological account of Literature, and his genealogy of madness and of genius, in order to elucidate the “truth”, judged by the terms of a genealogical account, and the “falsity”, judged by the terms of an archaeological account, of the proverbial epithet “the mad genius/poet/philosopher” associated with the name of Holderlin.

Bewaarder van die stilte : gedagtes oor J.M. Coetzee se etiek van skryf

Abstract: Summary In two of J.M. Coetzee's early works, Life & Times of Michael K ([1983]1987aj and Foe ([1986]1987b), two voiceless, unessentialised figures are portrayed. These figures are not only manifestations of the Other, but also idiot‐figures, ignorant consciousnesses with a restricted language ability ‐ radical outsiders. This article is a study of how Coetzee portrays these subjectivities in an ethical way in his writings. Firstly it is argued that the construction of a centralised subjectivity is a technique of subjection of the modern State. The article then shows how the two characters escape the processes of interpretation of the power structures. Furthermore it analyses how as an effect of Coetzee's ambiguous style it appears as if the characters also escape the attempts of the narrator to interpret them or give them a voice. It will become clear that reader engagement is effected despite the detached way in which the characters are portrayed. This is exactly because their irreducible being cannot b...

Passing through the screen: Pierre Boulez and Michel Foucault

Abstract: Summary In this paper I examine Foucault's little essay, “Pierre Boulez: Passing through the Screen”, in which he looks back from the vantage point of the 1980s at Boulez's music of the 1950s and his contribution to the project of aesthetic modernism. Before making a fairly detailed reading of the paper, I examine Boulez's role in the twentieth‐century serial tradition inaugurated by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Foucault's reading of Boulez focuses initially on the composer's radical break with the past; I suggest that Foucault was in a certain sense talking about his own break with a philosophical tradition founded in experience and conventional meaning. Boulez's experiment in the scientific and formal, I continue, had much in common with the methodologies from the history of science that were to become central to Foucault's thinking. Departing briefly from Foucault's essay, I argue that Gilles Deleuze fully understood why Foucault considered the project of serial music an important model; in fact...

Introduction : literature and art as diagnosis and dissent in the work of Michel Foucault

Abstract: In an interview on The Order of Things (1966), Foucault identifies a key feature of his own method: namely that of taking up "Don Quixote, Descartes and a decree by Pomponne de Bellievre about houses of internment in the same stroke" ([1966]1998e: 262). He goes on to say that he is concerned with all that "contains thought in a culture", be it in philosophy, or a novel, in jurisprudence, in an administrative system, or in a prison (p. 267). The apparently disparate themes that characterise Foucault's work emerge partly as a matter of his choice of fields of evidence or reference, which consists not exclusively or even predominantly of established and authoritative scientific, theoretical, or historical literature. The wide range of material and subject matter that engages Foucault's attention encompasses, for example, botanical gardens, the inscrutable orderings of species in Borges's Chinese encyclopaedia, agendas relating to executions, the daily regimens of prison and of plague towns. But, importantly, within and between these disparate elements, Foucault uncovers discursive orders and epistemic configurations that govern knowledge systems, practices, and institutions. He writes the history of events as they appear and disappear within these systems, as they become ordered and as they lose their place within the orders that once held them together. That his investigations do not present a casual stroll through the botanical gardens of discourses, becomes clear when we look at Foucault's methodological elaborations that explicitly attempt to find the thresholds of discourses that define them, their objects, their domains of application, and most importantly for Foucault, their limits. Displacement, discontinuity, transformation, and transgression, are concepts central to Foucault's work. They attain their meanings from the exploration of the limits of discourses. It is only in paying careful attention to the threshold positions and the great aesthetic works that so often exemplify them most vividly, that it is possible to uncover both the emergence and the obsolescence of discourses. This is why, most noticeably in Foucault's archaeological writings, references to works of art, and literature are never far off. A closer examination of the role of these texts reveals their conceptual and analytic significance. They are not merely fortuitous or decorative references; nor are they deployed illustratively in terms of their contents or their capacity to articulate moral or social criticism. Literature and art occupy a privileged position in Foucault's work as a result of their capacity to establish both systematic and symptomatic links between knowledge and art. Attempting to categorise the ways in which Foucault engages with art, literature and music is no easy task, one which cannot hope to adequately describe the extraordinary range or depth of his work with and about literature. However, we suggest here that Foucauit values aesthetic work, firstly, because of what we have called its diagnostic power; and secondly, for its capacity not just to argue for, but to instantiate dissent or radical critique. The first or diagnostic role is best illustrated in "The Order of Things" ([1966]1998e), a role which we hope to show is integral to the archaeological enterprise itself. In this diagnostic role artworks can elucidate the paradigmatic organisation of discourses and epistemes. It is this role that three key threshold texts ("texts" in the broader sense) assume in Foucault's "Archaeology of the Human Sciences"--Cervantes's Don Quixote, Velazquez's Las Meninas, and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. But more importantly, in their exemplary status, these texts reveal not that which is at the heart of each episteme, but the cracks, instabilities, and tectonic shifts within and between them--in the periods between the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity,--exposing their limits and transformations. …

"Yarn-Spinning Is Also Highly Recommended": Yann Martel's Framing Narratives

Abstract: Summary In Yann Martel's collection The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” and Other Stories ([1993]2005), we can clearly discern the construction of a metaphorical frame that creates and encircles the real, thereby describing two important poststructural frames of reference: the Lacanian “magic circle” (especially as this is foregrounded by Catherine Belsey in her recent monograph, Culture and the Real (2005), and the Derridean parergon. Martel's fictions perform a cultural function in that they frame the unsignifiable unknown (be this death, AIDS, God, or the creative moment) with a “signifying screen” (Belsey 2005: 72) that is creative, gives pleasure, and fleetingly appeases the drive of the subject. The framing performance of Martel's stories is intriguingly complex, operating not only at the level of theme and subject but also at the level of structure, prepositional play, language and metaphor.