Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2008"
TL;DR: This paper explored the Southern Gothic of the USA in relation to key southern African texts in order to define what a southern African Gothic might resemble, and found that there is a Southern Gothic and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner produced more psychological and socially violent Gothic works than their European counterparts.
Abstract: Summary Typically, death, violence, evil (metaphysical or actual), madness, enclosure, doubling, dangerous sexuality, incest, archaicism, ruins, haunting, monsters, bats, rats, cats, eschatological religiosity and hyperbolically tawdry dark aesthetics come to mind when the word “Gothic” is used. In other words, the Gothic immediately conjures up Eurocentric or quasi-Eurocentric imagery. This makes perfect sense when one considers that Gothic sensibilities and art are far more likely to arise, and have arisen, within cold northern climes with medieval heritages than in sunny southern ones. Nevertheless, there is a Southern Gothic, and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner produced more psychological and socially violent Gothic works than their European counterparts. My concern in this article is to explore the Southern Gothic of the USA in relation to key southern African texts in order to define what a southern African Gothic might resemble. What I discov...
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the notion of postmodern liberal literature through the filter of the political theory of Richard Rorty, who argued that it is perfectly possible to be both a political liberal and a postmodern sceptic, or "ironist" at the same time.
Abstract: Summary This article explores the notion of postmodern liberal literature through the filter of the political theory of Richard Rorty. It is generally assumed that the rival claims to validity of liberalism and postmodernism are mutually contradictory and therefore irreconcilable. Rorty's work, however, is characterised by the attempt to accommodate the most valuable insights of postmodern theory within the political ideals of liberalism. For Rorty, it is perfectly possible to be both a political liberal and a postmodern sceptic, or “ironist”, at the same time: hence his coinage of the term “liberal ironist”. Rorty argues further that the figure of the liberal ironist is best represented by writers of literature, in the narrow sense of poets, dramatists, and especially novelists. Ironist writers are, in Rorty's view, primarily interested in the private goals of self-creation and redescription within the context of an acute awareness of the contingency of their belief system. Nevertheless, in so far as the...
12 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the meaning of the word "trauma" was investigated in relation to the event of September 11, as formulated by Jacques Derrida, and with that in mind, the narrative complications of Josephine Hart's The Reconstructionist (2002) were examined with a view to demonstrating the theoretical, heuristic and hermeneutic value of “trauma” at an intratextual level.
Abstract: Summary Is “trauma” a viable category in literary theory? That is, could “trauma” be articulated in such a way that, in addition to its acknowledged diagnostic and therapeutic function in psychology and psychoanalysis, it may be shown to have a distinct hermeneutic function where literary fiction is concerned – regarding the generation of the narrative thread, for example? This article investigates these questions in the light of the meaning of “trauma”, largely in relation to the event of September 11, as formulated by Jacques Derrida. The affinity of Derrida's conceptualisation with that of Lacanian psychoanalysis is noted, and with that in mind, the narrative complications of Josephine Hart's The Reconstructionist (2002) are examined with a view to demonstrating the theoretical, heuristic and hermeneutic value of “trauma” at an intratextual level.
10 citations
TL;DR: The Feast of the Goat (2000) as discussed by the authors explores and elucidates the liberal values and principles underpinning Mario Vargas Llosa's work by offering a careful reading of his recent novel.
Abstract: Summary This article seeks to explore and elucidate the liberal values and principles underpinning Mario Vargas Llosa's work by offering a careful reading of his recent novel, The Feast of the Goat (2000). Having critically examined in several of his earlier novels what he regards as the inevitable destructiveness of socialist utopianism, Vargas Llosa turns his attention in The Feast of the Goat to the equally destructive force of right-wing authoritarianism, manifested in this case by the brutal thirty-one-year dictatorship of the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Unlike other versions of the so-called Latin American dictator novel, which tended to utilise allegorical and even magic-realist techniques, The Feast of the Goat focuses in meticulously researched historical detail upon the very real figure of Trujillo in order to consider the tensions between the eternally antagonistic human aspirations of power and freedom. While providing a vivid if harrowing account of the dictator's grim tyra...
7 citations
TL;DR: Otieno as discussed by the authors focused on a select number of chapters in her autobiography, Mau Mau's Daughter (1998) dealing with the burial of her husband, where the idea of home in the ways in which English uses it, was turned on its head.
Abstract: Summary The reading of home is especially problematic with regard to a great many women in the postcolony of Kenya, and the major part of this article will focus on how one of Kenya's most controversial women's rights activists, Wambui Waiyaki Otieno, has become unhomed. In particular, I shall concentrate on a select number of chapters in her autobiography, Mau Mau's Daughter (1998) – those dealing with the burial of her husband, where the idea of home in the ways in which English uses it, was turned on its head.
6 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the ways in which whiteness as a set of discourses is being revised in the post-apartheid cultural imagination through a reading of a comic strip by Anton Kannemeyer and of Ivan Vladislavic's novel The Restless Supermarket.
Abstract: Summary This article explores some of the ways in which “whiteness” as a set of discourses is being revised in the post-apartheid cultural imagination. Through a reading of a comic strip by Anton Kannemeyer and of Ivan Vladislavic's novel The Restless Supermarket (2001), the article considers specifically the manner in which performances of whiteness are represented as responding to the pressures felt at the site of the post-apartheid interracial encounter. The feverishness with which discourses of white masculinity are either disavowed or aggressively reinforced (in the case of Kannemeyer and Vladislavic's texts respectively), indicate that postapartheid revisions of (white) identity work to a variety of ends and continue to play out around uncertainties about the meanings of race. The article considers some of the strategies of translation used in moments of interracial contact, and argues that potentially ethical and responsible performances of whiteness can only take shape if the singularity of the ra...
6 citations
TL;DR: This article showed that the recurrent use of predicated themes in the novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton has certain communicative implications, since they are appropriate to express feelings, and to highlight information in situations of climax in the novel under analysis.
Abstract: Summary This paper intends to prove that the recurrent use of predicated themes in the novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton has certain communicative implications, since they are appropriate to express feelings, and to highlight information in situations of climax in the novels under analysis. The analysis of this syntactic structure in context will point out that predicated themes allow the writer to be conscious that he is asserting or denying something in a firm way; the predicated theme is also an important structure for the textual organisation of discourse. The linguistic framework for this paper is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), a linguistic school that establishes a clear link between lexicogrammatical choices in the text, and the relevant contextual factors surrounding it. Systemic linguistics explores how linguistic choices are related to the meanings that are being expressed.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors used a large array of characters that could be described as marginal characters and put fewer and fewer words in the vagrant characters mouths, paradoxically silencing them to prevent herself from becoming a spokesperson for the marginalised.
Abstract: Summary In her various novels, Afrikaans author Lettie Viljoen (pseudonym of Ingrid Winterbach) uses a large array of characters that could be described as marginal. These characters contrast strongly with the focaliser(s) in each text and in this way help to highlight the social differences caused by apartheid and the toll it took on both the haves and the have-nots. The struggle between the centre and those living at the margins – and particularly the manner in which the centre tries to co-opt or erase the margin – therefore becomes important. Viljoen/Winterbach also puts fewer and fewer words in the vagrant characters’ mouths, paradoxically silencing them to prevent herself from becoming a spokesperson for the marginalised. All of the above will be demonstrated in an analysis of three texts by Viljoen/Winterbach: Klaaglied vir Koos ([1984]1987), Erf (1986) and Buller se plan (1999).
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a defence of the humanities that emphasises the nature and value of humanistic knowledge is presented, against the background of views on social dedifferentiation and the end of the book emphasise the career value of humanities.
Abstract: Summary This article1 is a defence of the humanities that emphasises the nature and value of humanistic knowledge. I firstly outline the present negative perceptions of the humanities and the factors that constrain their development in South Africa. Chief among them is the privileging of technical rational knowledge above Bildung and self-development. Against the background of views on social dedifferentiation and the end of the book I emphasise the career value of the humanities. I try to reverse the opposition between technical rationalist knowledge and Bildung by analysing Maslow's hierarchy of needs and confronting his theory with a number of findings of our recent research into identity and literary space. Two keywords that feature strongly are centrality and narrativity. The implications of this view are explored in a brief analysis of Eben Venter's novel Foxtrot van die vleiseters (1993) [Foxtrot of the Meat-eaters]. 1The article was developed as a thought paper in the NRF's project Shifting Bounda...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Schoeman's representation of an ethically stunted and uncompromising Afrikaner community in his novel, Promised Land (1978) in counterpoint to Antjie Krog's efforts, in Country of My Skull (1999), to inaugurate a new ethics of representation in response to the demands and opportunities of the post-apartheid dispensation.
Abstract: Summary This essay places Karel Schoeman's representation of an ethically stunted and uncompromising Afrikaner community in his novel, Promised Land (1978) in counterpoint to Antjie Krog's efforts, in Country of My Skull (1999), to inaugurate a new ethics of representation in response to the demands and opportunities of the post-apartheid dispensation We relate the two texts by reading them through the lens of Derrida's seminar on the ethics of hospitality First, we discuss Krog's version of hospitality as an implicit response to the dynamics of moral myopia captured so vividly in Schoeman's dystopian portrait of Afrikanerdom Second, we address the purported plagiarism in Country of My Skull in the context of the protocols for hosting the voice of the other in those works defined as “creative non-fiction” In our concluding discussion we shift our attention to the ethical implications of various practices of citation
4 citations
TL;DR: Schoeman's This Life as discussed by the authors is a post-apartheid novel that considers the past and the future of the Afrikaner people, and it is alsomarkedly Gothic in style and content: violence, fear, death, and suffering permeate the tale.
Abstract: Summary Karel Schoeman's This Life (published as Hierdie lewe in 1993; translated into English in 2005), like other post-apartheid novels recently published by Afrikaansspeaking authors, considers the past and the future of the Afrikaner people. It is alsomarkedly Gothic in style and content: violence, fear, death, and suffering permeate the tale, whose mood is elegiac. I argue, following a proposition by Gerald Gaylard that “[The] melodrama of the Gothic can be seen as a characteristically modern... artistic mode... [that] points beyond itself to the chance, the uncanny, irrational, horrific and sublime in modern life”, that Schoeman's particular use of Gothic conventions in This Life to represent gender relations on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South African farm, and given his concern in this and his other writings about the past and future of the Afrikaner people as well as the role of the artist within the South African context, the representation of the narrator in This Life and ...
TL;DR: In this article, Paton indicts Afrikaner Christian nationalism by dramatising a paradox inherent in it, and argues that the culture's uncompromisingly strict legality renders its members vulnerable to that which the community disavows and criminalises in the Immorality Act: the libidinal attraction to the Other manufactured by colonialism's desire machine.
Abstract: Summary Too Late the Phalarope [1955]1971 provides an occasion to reflect on the relationship between colonialism, law and criminality. I argue that Paton indicts Afrikaner Christian nationalism by dramatising a paradox inherent in it. Afrikaner nationalism's uncompromisingly strict legality – both the normativity that regulates the behaviour of members of the Afrikaner community, and the strict enforcement of these norms – renders its members vulnerable to that which the community disavows and criminalises in the Immorality Act: the libidinal attraction to the Other manufactured by colonialism's “desiring machine”. Moreover, by producing the conditions under which the “colonial desire” of the colonised – the desire for continued survival – cannot lawfully be fulfilled, colonial law is responsible for the criminality of the colonised.
TL;DR: This paper explored the interconnections and interactions between these three people and focused on the aspect which binds them together, namely the issue of Afrikaner identity, which can be defined in terms of their links with the Afrikaaner, their position within the Afrikaller community and their stand towards Afrikaans.
Abstract: Summary The theme of “exits and entrances” can be traced on various levels, e.g. on the personal level of death (Fugard's father, the deaths of Marais and Huguenet) and birth (Fugard's daughter); on the professional level (the end of Huguenet's career versus the start of Fugard's career), as well as political (one political dispensation taking the place of another). Against this thematic background three characters emerge: the Playwright (Young Fugard), the Actor (Andre Huguenet) and the Poet (Eugene Marais). This paper explores the interconnections and interactions between these three people and focuses on the aspect which binds them together, namely the issue of Afrikaner identity. Although all three of them stand outside of a narrow definition of this identity, they can all be defined in terms of their links with the Afrikaner, their position within the Afrikaner community and their stand towards Afrikaans.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on recent works of four internationally known artists: the novels Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Excursion to Tindari (2006) by Andrea Camilleri, In stede van die liefde [In Lieu of Love] by Etienne van Heerden and the film Dirty Pretty Things directed by Stephen Frears in 2002.
Abstract: Summary In this essay the manner in which literary and cinematic narratives articulate the issues surrounding human harvesting and organ transplants is discussed. The focus is on recent works of four internationally known artists: the novels Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Excursion to Tindari (2006) by Andrea Camilleri, In stede van die liefde [In Lieu of Love] (2005) by Etienne van Heerden and the film Dirty Pretty Things directed by Stephen Frears in 2002. A shadowy world is depicted where illegal trafficking tests the border between human and inhumane in terms of moral, physical and socio-political realities. At the same time these narratives are also love stories, revealing the many faces of love surfacing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The organisation of spatial patterns and the articulation of the conflict experienced in multicultural and immigrant societies are some of the meaningful literary devices and motifs developed in all four “texts”. Whilst the genre, cultural con...
TL;DR: In this article, the problem with truth and memory is investigated, where memory is described as subjective and unstable, and it is only through the action of remembering that rectification and justice can take place and, in the end, can lead to reconciliation.
Abstract: Summary How does one deal with the past in the creation of a new myth and what role does memory play in this process of recreation? Antjie Krog's novel, Country of My Skull (2002), uses the South African past in this search of a new myth after the end of the old Apartheid myth. In this article the problem with truth and memory is investigated, where memory is described as subjective and unstable. As a result of the subjective and human nature of memory, the fallibility of memory is pointed out. In the same way as memory, truth is also dependent on perception and personal experience, also set in the past and is therefore subject to the problem of memory. It is only through the action of remembering that rectification and justice can take place and, in the end, can lead to reconciliation. Within the context of this essay, this process of remembering takes place through literature and the action of writing as the processing of the trauma of the past is investigated.
TL;DR: In this article, the white child caught in the barbed wire and then violently ripped free symbolises not only the death of white supremacy but also the birth of a new South African society.
Abstract: Summary In Nadine Gordimer's story “Once upon a Time” published originally in 1989, the white child caught in the barbed wire and then violently ripped free symbolises not only the death of white supremacy but also the birth of a new South African society. The multiple ironies of imagery and structure brilliantly clarify Gordimer's inverted fairy tale of a Yeatsian “terrible beauty”.
TL;DR: The authors argues that the Afrikaans poet N.P. van Wyk Louw's last and greatest collection of poetry, Tristia (1962), constitutes a complex response to many ideas expressed in his earlier poetry or articulated in his polemical writings of the 1930s.
Abstract: Summary The article argues that the Afrikaans poet N.P. van Wyk Louw's last and greatest collection of poetry, Tristia (1962), constitutes a complex response to many ideas expressed in his earlier poetry or articulated in his polemical writings of the 1930s. More particularly, it is shown that Gestaltes en diere (1942) implies a movement away from the non-rational that is at times glorified in Louw's earlier work; that the figures of the hero and the cultural aristocrat are gradually replaced in his work by the intellectual whose activities are characterised by uncertainty and a cautious search for truth; and that Nuwe verse (1953) opens the possibility of a more sensual and less essentalistic appreciation of earthly glories. The latter half of the article is devoted to an analysis of the concept of the sign, with its roots in medieval Christian aesthetics, as it appears in Tristia. This leads to the conclusion that Louw's later hermeneutics, which is based on a distrust of the symbol and a belief in huma...
TL;DR: This paper argued that Derrida's critique of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss in Of Grammatology is applicable to some of the writing that has been produced in relation to the Bleek and Lloyd archive.
Abstract: Summary The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials has elicited a variety of responses from scholars in different disciplines. These include interpretation of the texts, history and biography. Most of this writing has not been subjected to close criticism. I will argue in this paper that Jacques Derrida's critique of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss in Of Grammatology (1976) is applicable to some of the writing that has been produced in relation to the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Derrida's work also illuminates Bleek's ideological framework and the attitudes displayed towards the Bushmen during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
TL;DR: The authors reread Foe as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, "La Pharmacie de Platon", and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon, and appropriates Grabe's (1989: 176) observation that the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience informs the work.
Abstract: Summary The novels of J.M. Coetzee both invite and reward multiple readings, and Foe (1986) remains one of Coetzee's most deliberately innovative and literary of novels. In a prescient act, a conference on Foe was hosted by the Theory of Literature Department at Unisa as early as 1988, only some two years after its publication, which resulted in the perspicacious and incisive scrutiny of this aesthetically strategic work. More recently, Attridge (2005) has revisited his 1992 examination of Foe, and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon. Following Attridge's (2005) insightful essay, this article also returns to Foe, and appropriates Grabe's (1989: 176) observation that “the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience” informs the work, and therefore rereads it as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, “La Pharmacie de Platon”.
TL;DR: In this article, a historical overview of degrees of cultural translation in all its literary variations is sought for issues involved in Stephen Watson's plagiarism charge in 2005 against Antjie Krog for her The Stars Say “tsau” (2002).
Abstract: Summary South African literature has a long history of cultural translation or transplantation from the San or Bushman2 oral tradition. This phenomenon of the appropriation of the voice of the extinct San can be traced though all genres, but is especially prevalent in children's books, poetry, and fiction. Through a historical overview of degrees of cultural translation (in all its literary variations) clarification is sought for issues involved in Stephen Watson's plagiarism charge in 2005 against Antjie Krog for her The Stars Say “tsau” (2002). The central question is whether this practice of importing elements of San orality and culture into South African literature constitutes an illegal appropriation of the First People's heritage, or whether it is an ongoing form of homage, as George Steiner suggested of all forms of translation in 1999. Read as a tribute, keeping San cultural memory alive, this literature of cultural transplantation is an archive consisting of the stronger culture's interpretations...
TL;DR: In this article, a critical stance towards the possibilities of narration to help us to understand the world and ourselves is taken in the volume of short stories, Tot verhaal kom (2003).
Abstract: Summary In de Vries's volume of short stories, Tot verhaal kom (2003), narration as means of understanding is investigated. In spite of the “narratavistic turn” in the humanities, de Vries takes a critical stance towards the possibilities of narration to help us to understand the world and ourselves. The closure offered by narratives might assist us to find meaning in our world but in all the short stories in this volume there is a consciousness that the closure offered by the stories is not enough. All perceptions, all emotions and experiences, can simply not be narrated. In every story, it does not matter how well it is constructed, there is still something elusive that escapes closure. Therefore another story is always needed. These stories often reflect on those elusive elements that are excluded from the narration and of which one cannot be really aware at the time of narrating.