Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2015"
TL;DR: In this paper, a close gendered reading of the presentation of clothing in the text of the Hunger Games trilogy is presented, with the central protagonist undergoing several makeovers, each designed to customise her appearance for particular ideological purposes.
Abstract: SummarySuzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy presents a dystopia in which young people from less privileged socio-economic districts are sacrificed in murderous “games” in order to reinforce state power. Katniss Everdeen emerges from this context of oppression as the leader of a rebellion against centralised state domination. The series seems to flout well-established conventions of heroic fantasy, in which, traditionally, a male hero develops towards psychological maturity as he combats a social threat, apparently without concern for his appearance. By contrast, the Hunger Games trilogy places great emphasis on clothing, with the central protagonist undergoing several makeovers, each designed to customise her appearance for particular ideological purposes. In this article I explore this theme, which may be interpreted as too frivolous for heroic narrative, via a close gendered reading of the presentation of clothing in the text. I argue that the costumes worn by Katniss Everdeen on various occasions, de...
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Hemans' "Indian picturesque" is subverted through an emphasis on the moral geography of the city; the feminisation of the land continuing in a different fashion.
Abstract: SummaryThis essay studies Felicia Hemans’ The Indian City as embodying an aesthetic view of India. The essay argues that the poem deploys the aesthetic of the picturesque in order to produce a cultural fable about the collapse of an Indian city. The first section maps Hemans’ “Indian picturesque” and its pastoral Concordia discors in which diverse elements exist in harmony, and with a definite feminisation of the landscape. In the second section, it shows how this picturesque is subverted through an emphasis on the moral geography of the city; the feminisation of the land continuing in a different fashion. In the final section the essay argues that the civic picturesque of the poem retreats behind the natural picturesque, a process again initiated by the woman's presence, even as the landscape itself serves as a space of gendered memorialisation. It argues that, ultimately, Hemans presents the Oriental woman as politically ineffectual because although Maimuna is initially a point of political coalition sh...
8 citations
TL;DR: Serote's ouvre as discussed by the authors represent a triumph of a special order, stemming from a dedicated artist's effort to master the techniques of evocation, narration, analysis, and revelation which are so important to the craft of writing.
Abstract: SummarySerote's ouvre – the lyrics, the fiction, and the essays – represent a triumph of a special order. Springing from a dedicated artist's effort to master the techniques of evocation, narration, analysis, and revelation which are so important to the craft of writing, they are also the result of Serote's quest for fresh methods to explore the narrative and dramatic possibilities of the South African experience. What is special about Serote's achievement is the manner the three literary forms serve one another. For in keeping with the multidimensional nature of his quest and by the disciplines of the three literary forms, it was necessary that the techniques arrived at be such as would allow him to explore the complex dynamics of the South African experience without violating his passionate dedication to narrative as a fundamental agency for exploring the human condition as it plays itself out in modern South African history.
6 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that translators can leave their own trademark on a translat... and this assumption is repudiated by scholars such as Baker (2000), who maintains that it is impossible to produce a stretch of language in a totally impersonal way.
Abstract: SummaryTranslators have been preoccupied with translations since Babel. Different texts have been translated from one language into another to enable target readers to access the source text message. Literary translation is not exempt from this. Literary translation is done with the purpose of allowing the reader of the translated literature to be as inspired, moved and aesthetically entertained as the reader of the original text. Since translation has for a very long time been considered a derivative of the original text, translators are said not to have a style of their own on the basis that they reproduce the work of the original writer. However, this assumption is repudiated by scholars such as Baker (2000), who maintains that “it is impossible to produce a stretch of language in a totally impersonal way. It is like handling an object without leaving one's fingerprints on it”. On the basis of this assumption, this article seeks to illustrate that translators can leave their own trademark on a translat...
4 citations
TL;DR: A brief history of the cultural status of brocade in the 19th century, and a critical account of the ways in which brocade features in Henry James's work can be found in this paper.
Abstract: SummaryThis essay begins with a brief history of the cultural status of brocade in the 19th century, and then offers a critical account of the ways in which brocade features in Henry James's work. James's association of brocade with the aristocracy and the metropole, and his treatment of it as both an embodied object and a metaphor, reveals the textile to be a significant index of a number of his abiding concerns. The essay concludes with a consideration of how brocade both supports and contradicts poststructuralist positions about the referentiality of things in James's writing, as well as of how brocade provides a fitting analogy for his later style.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the return and revitalisation of traditional Christian themes, such as sacrifice, guilt, sin and redemption, and the manifestation of supernatural phenomena in three contemporary postmodern novels (Atonement by Ian McEwan, Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult and Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen).
Abstract: SummaryThis article focuses on the return and revitalisation of traditional Christian themes, such as sacrifice, guilt, sin and redemption, and the manifestation of supernatural phenomena, such as visions, faith healing and stigmata in three selected contemporary postmodern novels (Atonement by Ian McEwan, Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult and Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen). It offers an examination of how these themes materialise in novels written by certain writers who are not explicitly religious, or in novels which do not have an overtly religious focus. There is a co- existence of belief and unbelief, or religion and science in all the novels under discussion. The theories of Jean Francois Lyotard and specifically his notion of “incredulity towards metanarratives” as well as his notion that narrative and scientific knowledge are both subject to legitimisation are relevant to this article. Gianteresio Vattimo's ideas on the role of religion in contemporary life and the possible convergences of postmod...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that Shelley anticipates a simulacrum of the kind imagined and inscribed in Derridean discourse as a "ghost", which wards off totality in his Promethean fashion.
Abstract: SummaryThe protean Percy Bysshe Shelley communicates the knowledge of instability in the stable course of life. At times, Shelley's fragile hopes and dreams are decimated upon the eerie encounter with reality. On other occasions, universe heightens his ethical sensibility by investing it with a generative vision to ameliorate his shattered convictions, and as such the messianic faith gives a new scope to his worldview. The oscillation between desire and despair, between reconstruction and destruction, parallels the Derridean exorcism of Western metaphysics. My point throughout the article is that Shelleyan philosophy visualises a transcendental wisdom – not hampered by the neutralising boundaries of tradition – which wards off totality in his Promethean fashion. I suggest that Shelley anticipates a simulacrum of the kind imagined and inscribed in Derridean discourse as a “ghost”.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which official sites of memorialisation either erase or radically desexualise the histories of sexual minorities, and examines the epistemological status of fiction as an alternative archive of marginalised voices and experiences.
Abstract: SummaryTracing the figure of the archive, this article examines the ways in which official sites of memorialisation either erase or radically desexualise the histories of sexual minorities. Furthermore, the article examines the epistemological status of fiction as an alternative archive of marginalised voices and experiences. I focus particularly on Gerald Kraak's novel Ice in the Lungs (2006) to reveal the importance of literature in reinscribing a gay cultural history into discourses of the apartheid era. The text does this in a way that celebrates eroticism and resists desexualising or sanitising representational impulses. The novel speaks to the silences in official sites of history- making in South Africa and reveals the complex intersections of sex and struggle in the antiapartheid movement. The article also considers how Kraak's novel interro- gates the current idealisation of the liberation movement by exposing the homo- prejudice that characterised large parts of it. While the centrality of race ...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the effect of apartheid on the subject under apartheid from a temporal perspective, through a close textual analysis of the urban setting and characters' rich and nuanced psyche as well as their physical and affective lives.
Abstract: SummaryWhile the phenomenon of apartheid has been extensively explored in terms of topographic designs and spatial separateness, its multiple and complex “temporal geographies’’ still need to be explored and assessed. This article seeks to investigate Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) from a temporal perspective – more specifically, how lived time is experienced by the subject under apartheid. Through a close textual analysis of the urban setting and of the characters’ rich and nuanced psyche as well as their physical and affective lives, this article shows how, at the basis of Serote's novel, there lies an intricate, dynamic and multi-layered phenomenology of time. Serote's model is one that sees different temporal dimensions at work simultaneously: external time, inner psychic time, and the temporal complication brought about by the apartheid regime (with its unpredictable, pervasive and terrorising methods). This complex temporal tapestry unfolds while being sustained and contained...
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that one of the challenges white Zimbabwean writers have to deal with in their narratives is a troubled colonial past, which made the treatment of blacks before and during the war unjustified.
Abstract: SummaryThis article argues that one of the challenges white Zimbabwean writers have to deal with in their narratives is a troubled colonial past. In Peter Godwin's Mukiwa, A White Boy in Africa, there is a plain acknowledgement that Rhodesia had problems of legitimacy, which made the treatment of blacks before and during the war unjustified. Godwin's rendition of the past is therefore informed by this recognition, compelling the author to employ narrative strategies which make it possible for him to embrace certain aspects of the past while simultaneously distancing himself from others. This analysis of Godwin's Mukiwa shows how a re-imagined childhood consciousness enables an understanding of the Rhodesian past. Through this narrative strategy, Godwin is supposedly faithful in rendering the past, including its imperfections. Furthermore, the Rhodesian past is depicted as a baneful entity that estranges whites from the Zimbabwean present.
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on Alex La Guma's last published novel, Time of the Butcherbird, and argue that this does not diminish the aesthetic validity of the novel in any way.
Abstract: SummaryThis paper focuses on Alex La Guma's last published novel, Time of the Butcherbird. Starting with the critical reception of this work, in which it becomes clear that the bulk of the critics have reservations about the aesthetic quality of the work, the paper attempts to locate Time of the Butcherbird within La Guma's literary oeuvre of social realism by employing George Lukacs's theory. Although I share with other critics the sentiment that this novel seems to be somewhat different from La Guma's previous work in terms of its focus and ideological orientation I argue that this does not diminish the aesthetic validity of the novel in any way. The central thrust of this paper, however, is that, unlike other La Guma novels, not only is this novel somewhat inconsistent with La Guma's own ideological convictions, but the text itself is characterised by ideological contradictions which may, arguably, be attributed to La Guma's attempt to deal in fictional terms with the (still) unresolvable South African...
TL;DR: Naidoo's Footprints beyond Grey Street (2007) adjusts conventional boundaries of the autobiographical genre: it is written by Naidoo but appears not to be principally concerned with the author's life as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: SummaryPhyllis Naidoo's Footprints beyond Grey Street (2007) adjusts conventional boundaries of the autobiographical genre: it is written by Naidoo but appears not to be principally concerned with the author's life. It is written largely about her comrades in the African National Congress who were in exile in African countries. Of the stories in Naidoo's “autobiography”, “Charlie and Jo” in particular epitomises the absence of the author: a stylistic and generic anomaly which merits particular attention and thus forms the focus of this article. This memory-tale of social recollection evidences autobiographical self-displacement: the privileging of collective memory as opposed to an individual's nostalgic journey towards self-definition. This foregrounding of a collective identity has been identified and termed communography in the writings of comparable political groups such as the Irish Republican Army.
TL;DR: In this article, a dialogue between Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013) and Ben Okri's Dangerous love (1988), fictions that foreground art and delineate it as a shamanic ritual site is discussed.
Abstract: SummaryThis article teases out a dialogue between Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013) and Ben Okri's Dangerous love (1988), fictions that foreground art and delineate it as a shamanic ritual site. Having provided synopses of ritual in these two novels, the discussion then goes on to remark on the concern with this key subject in these novels’ respective scholarships. Thereafter, the examination moves on to suggest that these overlapping highlight the tendency in African literatures to turn to spirituality and to the figure of the shaman during challenging political transitions. The proposal is that the shaman reconfigures memory into secular mediations of other subjects’ trauma, making these intercessions operate in mutually inclusive private and public complexities. The rest of the article considers the depictions of two such intricacies: the artist's struggle to establish a narrative of mourning in Dangerous love, and the socially oriented dance and sculpture in The Sculptors of Mapungubwe.
TL;DR: In this paper, Caravaggio's depiction of the young David looking at the severed head of Goliath at the end of his outstretched arm is transposed in A Sportful Malice into a secular subject, and the symbolic import of the painting into a comic mode in a very funny work of fiction that might possibly suggest comparable degrees of artistic self reflection.
Abstract: SummaryCaravaggio's painting, David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1609) is the central iconic intertext in Michiel Heyns's novel, A Sportful Malice: A Comedy of Revenge, which was awarded the 2015 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. The article demonstrates how Caravaggio's depiction of the young David looking at the severed head of Goliath at the end of his outstretched arm is transposed in A Sportful Malice into a secular subject, and the symbolic import of the painting into a comic mode in a very funny work of fiction that might possibly suggest comparable degrees of artistic self- reflection. The article examines the implications of the painting as a complex self- portrait by Caravaggio, and the disdain and compassion, and repulsion and identification, in the relationship between the youthful beheader and his victim, as a metaphor for gay cruising, and for the ironically amused tone of Heyns's protagonist, Michael, and his camp sensibility. “Camp” is theorised with reference to Susan Sontag's pioneering “Not...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine selected waterscapes in The Alexandria Quartet through the theoretical and imaginative lens of Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of the heterotopia, and argue that Durrell's excessive and uncanny representation of these watercapes, as remote and unreal places, acts to disturb a sense.
Abstract: SummaryThe mirage with its disruptive and deceptive phantasmagorical features is an image repeated in many of the numerous waterscapes located in Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Viewed through memory, the topographical reality of the Quartet’s water- scapes becomes a space of illusion and yet, at the same time, a real space perfectly ordered, except that it seems to remain outside of time. Hence, Durrell's water- scapes ambivalently play between the real and unreal of Other spaces in a single space. This essay examines selected waterscapes in The Alexandria Quartet through the theoretical and imaginative lens of Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of the heterotopia. It is contended that the mirror of the heterotopia, with its distortion of time, offers an important theoretical entry into reading Durrell's waterscapes as Other spaces. However, related to this, the article argues that Durrell's excessive and uncanny representation of these waterscapes, as remote and unreal places, acts to disturb a sense...
TL;DR: The importance of music in To Every Birth Its Blood is explored in this paper, where the protagonist grows from a single person to a national community, from jazz to soul, from impotence to sexual agency, from alienation to political action.
Abstract: SummaryWith To Every Birth Its Blood, Wally Mongane Serote has written one of the greatest jazz novels. Music is a character in the book that has voice and impacts the plot. It speaks not only to provide context or colour, but also participates in dialogue with the interior consciousness of the principal protagonist Tsietsi (Tsi) Molope. Tsi develops from a state of alienation and impotence to a purposeful actor. And the protagonist grows from a single person to a national community. The music develops from jazz to soul, from impotence to sexual agency, from alienation to political action. The importance of music is explicated more prosaically in a subsequent novel, Revelations, in which the youths of the Soweto uprising become the adult actors in “the new South Africa”. Democracy has brought not only the stresses of addressing historical injustice and the responsibilities of governance, but highlights a series of philosophical issues and cultural practices which are attendant to many uncertainties about ...
TL;DR: The pharmakos theory always undertakes to weigh a character's punishment against his sin, with the consequence that a certain degree of innocence ends up being imputed to him as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: SummaryNarratives written by Nigerians of the Igbo ethnic stock – those of Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, and others – have been read by critics as positing postcolonial and socio-cultural issues, thanks to Euro-Western theoretic lenses. However, there is more to these – the presence of the pharmakos figure, whose suffering is in excess of his sin or contrasts his (near) innocence. The pharmakos theory always undertakes to weigh a character's punishment against his sin, with the consequence that a certain degree of innocence ends up being imputed to him. Therefore this article, in deploying such pharmakos sub-concepts as the mob, violence and persecution-inducing identification marks, will attempt to bring this figure to the centre of retributive suffering through the indigenous idea of nso. Nso (inexactly translated into English as “taboo” or “abomination”) is the code of order in the Igbo cosmology as ordained by the Earth goddess, Ani/Ala, which when broken beckons on sentence and transforms the seemin...
TL;DR: Wally Serote, one of the most influential and enduring poet-activists, drew on African music, spirituality, oral literature and history of the struggle to develop and articulate his calling as a liberator and healer as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: SummaryLiberating South Africa from more than three centuries of colonial oppression required enormous vision and self-empowerment, to advance a struggle that was not only counter-hegemonic but also transformative. Wally Serote, one of the most influential and enduring poet-activists, drew on African music, spirituality, oral literature and history of the struggle to develop and articulate his calling as a liberator and healer. Written in exile, his prescient poems invoke faith in African popular resources to illustrate and teach the importance of challenging oppression. Beyond offering incisive representations of African subject positions, the poems invoke the creative energies needed to generate the psychological, social and cultural healing required for transformation. Against the background of the subjugation and decimation of African cultures and resources and the forced exile of thousands of citizens, Serote's attentiveness to the development of engaged and liberated African voices in the medium of ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw parallels between Gregor Samsa's bizarre hidden away condition and awkwardness of South Africa's insularity and exceptionalism, and argue for an integrated idea of the South Africa, on the basis of Mandela's pluriversalism.
Abstract: SummaryIn its insistence on the allegorical frame of South African transformations that attend the disfigured stature of a hero into a cauldron of Kafkaesque sterility and grotesque existence, this paper draws parallels between Gregor Samsa's bizarre hidden away condition and awkwardness of South Africa's insularity and exceptionalism. In arguing for an integrated idea of South Africa, on the basis of Mandela's pluriversalism, it offers a retrieval of South Africa's simultaneous worldliness and Africanness, further to provide a decolonial critique of what counts as a place called South Africa from an ontological perspective of what Lewis R. Gordon in the fashion of Frantz Fanon calls a zone of “being and non-being” (2005). However, it adds two further dimensions: the immanent conditions of becoming South Africa(n) and the drives that define the agency of attaining ontological totality for putative citizens and denizens in South Africa.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the production of the 1968 NBC-TV Special against the backdrop of the tensions and drama that led up to this signal moment in the history of American rock ‘n roll, a moment that would serve as a template for performing artists of the future.
Abstract: SummarySimon Frith has stated that the aim of even serious rock musicians is, in short, to be popular (Frith 1983: 176). But popularity, Frith continues, “is taken to mean occupying a particular place in the community rather than just accumulating large record sales. The tensions emerge when these two goals are thought, for whatever reasons, to be incompatible” (Frith 1983: 176). Elvis's epoch-making return to the stage in 1968 had all the hallmarks of an acrobat negotiating a tightrope, as he had to balance the expectations of his manager and the record-buying public on the one hand and his own sense of performance and popularity on the other. In focusing on the 1968 NBC-TV Special, an important milestone in Elvis's career as a popular singer, this paper proposes to examine the production of the ‘68 Special against the backdrop of the tensions and the drama that led up to this signal moment in the history of American rock ‘n roll – a moment that would serve as a template for performing artists of the fut...
TL;DR: The authors explored representations of time and temporality in two contemporary South African novels in order to examine the salience of the Derridian contretemps in relation to modern South African society.
Abstract: SummaryThis article explores representations of time and temporality in two contemporary South African novels in order to examine the salience of the Derridian contretemps in relation to contemporary South African society. As defined by Jacques Derrida, the contretemps is an experience of time and space that is essentially “out of joint” and is often used to represent anomie in a particular context. My close-reading of Imraan Coovadia's High Low In-between (2009) and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) thus reveals how the contretemps is employed to not only provide a sense of time gone awry, but also to outline how these narratives explore the contretemps as a potentially ‘new’ temporal modality for contemporary South Africa.
TL;DR: The authors examine a number of key paratexts which attempted to legitimise Small Circle of Beings within the field of anti-apartheid writing, typically by using a "mimetic" or "historicist" conception of allegory which insisted on Galgut's ineluctable submission to his heavily politicised context.
Abstract: SummaryThis article offers a close reading of Damon Galgut's Small Circle of Beings, a novella which attracted little interest upon its initial publication in 1988 and remains one of the most critically neglected works in his oeuvre. I suggest that the novella's neglect sheds light on some of the reading protocols which governed the reception of local writing in the late apartheid years and continue to inform definitions of what “properly” constituted South African literature during this period. I examine a number of key paratexts which attempted to legitimise Small Circle of Beings within the field of anti-apartheid writing, typically by using a “mimetic” or “historicist” conception of allegory which insisted on Galgut's ineluctable submission to his heavily politicised context. In a discussion which takes its cue from Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature, I endeavour to “resist the allegorical reading” of Small Circle of Beings in this article and provide an analysis of the novella which prese...