Research Articles (English Studies)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/213

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 85

�� The Agapanthi, Asphodels of the Negroes��: Life-writing, landscape and race in the South African diaries and poetry of George Seferis
(Taylor & Francis, 2012) Field, Roger
The Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971) spent 10 months in South Africa during WWII as a senior diplomatic official attached to the Greek government in exile. Drawing on his diary entries, correspondence and poetry this article challenges earlier interpretations of his work best described as a �synchronic panoptic vision� (Bhabha). Beginning with an exploration of the troubled relationship between the �glory that was Greece� and the failure of its early 20thcentury nationalist, expansionist and modernization projects, the article argues that Seferis tried to overcome alienation from landscape and a crisis of creativity in two ways: he transcribed and commented on Cavafy�s poetry, but was unable to resolve his relationship with the latter; by reaching down into the ruins of ancient Greece and back into its mythological past, through a process of negative displacement he transforms these crises into a descent to the world of the dead. Unlike Odysseus, he receives no guidance from its inhabitants, for they speak only the language of flowers and there are none. Accompanying Seferis� dual purpose use of classical mythology as national heritage and ironic device is a more problematic aspect of modernism � the relegation of Africa and its sub- Saharan inhabitants to a primitive otherness that, he felt, limited his ability to express himself, and which generated some of his greatest poetry.
Alan Paton�s sublime: race, landscape and the transcendence of the liberal imagination
(University of KwaZulu Natal, 2005) Wittenberg, Hermann
This article develops a postcolonial reading of the sublime by suggesting that aesthetic theories of the sublime were, in their classical philosophical formulations by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, founded on problematic assumptions of racial difference. In the colonial sphere, it is argued, the sublime could discursively manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested landscapes. This is particularly evident in the Alan Paton's writing. This article looks at the origins and the influence of rhetoric of the sublime in Paton's work, particularly in his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, and argues that the sublime is a key discursive structure in the shaping of Paton's complex and ambivalent representation of South Africa's politicised and racialised landscape.
Alan Paton�s writing for the stage: towards a non-racial South African theatre
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2007) Wittenberg, Hermann
Introduction: It would not be an exaggeration to assert that no South African playwright in the 1950s and 1960s received as much international attention and recognition as Alan Paton, until eclipsed by Athol Fugard�s emerging career. Paton�s own plays and musicals, and the stage adaptations of his novels, had some extensive and successful runs on Broadway in New York, and also played to packed houses in South Africa. Some highly acclaimed artists, ranging from the German avant-garde composer Kurt Weill to South Africa�s jazz musician Todd Matshikiza, helped to bring his work to the stage. Yet Paton�s theatrical work has received surprisingly scant attention from critics, which is all the more remarkable, given the author�s prominence as one of South Africa�s most well-known writers. Like his novels, Paton�s plays are not simply light human dramas or romantic comedies as much colonial theatre at the time, but serious works that were deeply concerned with the socio-political issues facing South Africa under apartheid. As Paton once put it, he was never interested in �writing a �jolly good fellow� sort of play.� Three of his major plays were written and performed in a crucial period of South African history: the Sharpeville massacre, the implementation of the Group Areas and other cornerstone apartheid acts, the treason trials, and the declaration of the republic.
All the Tokoloshes are dying
(Routledge, 2021) Pancham, Kershan ikram
The last line of defence, when even the most distant tokoloshe returned, Took up a place of arms or/of wisdom, to make the last stand of the world. Even the oldest ones returned, long away in their peace and nature after their years of service, even The Oldest Ones, returned.
Antigone’s return: when a once-told story is not enough
(African Journals Online (AJOL), 2022) Marika Flockemann
Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local it erations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshon a (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his fore sight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on there velatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness.
Attending to the affective: exploring first year students� emotional experiences at university
(South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Bharuthram, Sharita
This study engaged students at the affective level in order to acquire a better understanding of their emotional experiences at university with the ultimate aim of improving teaching and learning. A qualitative research study was undertaken whereby students wrote about their feelings at that particular moment, on two different occasions in a semester. The data reveals that students used mostly negative descriptors to express their emotions some of which included feelings of self-doubt, alienation, loss of identity and not belonging to the university and their disciplinary community. The feelings expressed by students show that their emotions constitute the very core of their being and are therefore intertwined with the way they perceive their studies and themselves as students and as individuals. Hence, it is argued that emotional factors cannot be disentangled from teaching and learning and that spaces need to therefore be created in the curriculum for the inclusion of the affective domain.
BECOMING-MINORITARIAN Constructions of coloured identities in creative writing projects at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Moola, Fatima
The institutional history of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in some ways mirrors the paradoxes, ambiguities, absurdities, contradictions and possibilities � in short, the complexities � of the concept �coloured�. The one feature that remains constant in coloured identity constructions is the conception of marginality, a marginality which primes it for consideration through the lens of theoretical articulations of minority discourses generally, and minority literature, in particular. If published writers of coloured identity are a minority in the South African literature landscape, the creative writing student is an interesting minority within that minority. Perhaps what is most unique about the UWC creative writing programmes is the way in which they have fostered a �becoming-minoritarian� in respect of language, through the multi-and trans-linguality encouraged by cross-faculty collaborations, bringing in disciplinary expertise from Afrikaans, English and Xhosa, the Nguni language most commonly spoken in the Western Cape
Between text and stage: the theatrical adaptations of J.M. Coetzee�s Foe
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Naidoo, Kareesha; Wittenberg, Hermann
Several of J.M. Coetzee�s novels have been adapted successfully for the stage, both as theatrical and operatic versions, but these adaptations have not received much critical attention. This article examines the ways in which Peter Glazer and Mark Wheatley have adapted Coetzee�s novel Foe (1986), resulting in two different and distinct stage productions, performed in the US and the UK respectively. In order to explore the complex relationship between the published text and the play versions, the article will ground itself in theories of adaptation, drawing extensively on work by Linda Hutcheon and Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. One of the key ideas in adaptation theory is that adaptive fidelity to the source text is neither possible nor desirable, but that adaptation is a more complex, multi-layered intertextual and intermedial interplay of fictional material. The article discusses the two play scripts and analyses the adaptive choices which underpin them and how these structure their meaning-making. Finally, the article also suggests that these scripts can be used to throw more light on Coetzee�s enigmatic novel.
The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka�s Ak�: the years of childhood
(Sage Publications, 2012) Moolla, Fiona F.
The scarification in Ak� is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka�s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically �opens� the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Ak� is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka�s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.
The Boer and the jackal: Satire and resistance in Khoi orature
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Wittenberg, Hermann
Bushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popular studies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesser known Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despite commonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open to discursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily found in Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figure of the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historical realities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued that Khoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginative use of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral culture allowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much less pronounced in Bushman narration.
Border crossings in the African travel narratives of Ibn Battuta, Richard Burton and Paul Theroux
(Taylor & Francis, 2012) Moolla, Fiona F.
This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the �boundaries� of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant contemporary idea of �Africa� as the inscrutable, savage continent.
Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
(University of Pretoria, 2018) Woodward, Wendy
This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic�in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements between human and canine, whether convivial or adversarial, manifest poetically in myriad ways in gendered and/or racialised contexts and analyses how the vulnerabilities of both humans and dogs are made to intersect. Ruth Miller portrays dogs as divine creations who are uncertain and �embarrassed�. Ingrid Jonker�s poems intertwine human and canine, foregrounding gendered vulnerabilities. Where dogs are figured metonymically, entanglements of human and dog break down binary categorisations, in Jonker�s poems as well as in those of other poets.
Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)
(Brill, 2020) Martin, Julia
Green Matters reflects on the �unique cultural function� of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse? I�d like to explore this question with regard to my own practice. After some years of writing fairly conventional journal articles and conference papers about literature and ecology, I now find myself among those practitioners in the Environmental Humanities who have been prompted by the urgency of the present crisis to reconsider the modes of our academic expression. This means that I wish to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature.
The classics, African literature, and the critics
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa Rhodes University, 2017) Field, Roger
Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this privilege. Instead, students and lecturers alike may find value and relevance for these works if they explore a range of aesthetic, conceptual, cultural, and political issues that close readings may precipitate. After analysing a fictional demonstration of how not to teach The Odyssey, the article surveys a range of writers and cultural critics who identify as African or African-American, and whose work comments directly and indirectly on the history of the meaning, purpose and value of selected ancient and classical Greek texts. This spectrum stretches from defensive cultural nationalism to an open-ended combination of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. The article concludes that a combination of resistance and appropriation is the best way to make new and local these canonical texts.
Co-constructing a rubric checklist with first year university students: A self-assessment tool
(University of Jyv�skyl�, 2017) Bharuthram, Sharita; Patel, Mahmoud
This paper reports on a study in which students co-constructed a rubric checklist with their lecturer and which they used to assess themselves. Data were collected by means of a student questionnaire, tutor feedback, as well as tutors� and lecturers� observations to ascertain students� experiences and opinions of the design process and of using the tool to self-assess. The findings show that co-designing the rubric checklist with students increased their motivation and enhanced students� confidence in completing the task. In addition, students gained enormous benefits from using the rubric checklist as a self-assessment tool. Reflecting critically on the feedback received from students and tutors the authors argue that for enhanced student engagement in the teaching and learning process they should be involved as active participants in the assessment processes. In addition, students need to learn to assess the quality of their own work early in their academic career with continuous guided practice throughout their studies with the intention of making the practice of self-assessment a norm rather than an exception, thereby creating independent reflective learners.
Coming home, coming out: Achmat Dangor's journeys through myth and Constantin Cavafy
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2011) Field, Roger
Despite his international status, the impact of Constantin Cavafy�s poetry on South African letters has gone largely unnoticed. This article draws attention to the range of Cavafy's, influence on the local poets, writers, critics and cultural activists, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, but directs most of its attention to two early short stories by Achmat Dangor, �The Homecoming� and �Waiting for Leila�, and his most recent novel Bitter Fruit. In all of these works Dangor refers directly and indirectly to Cavafy�s poetry, his sexuality, his evocations of place and his use of Greek mythology, particularly in one of his most famous poems �Ithaka�. The article also addresses Dangor�s ambivalence towards Cavafy, particularly the disjuncture between Cavafy�s ironic, apolitical modernism, modernism�s appeal to Dangor, his desire to produce accessible protest literature and his need to justify recourse to the classics in Africa.
A comparative reading of Elleke Boehmer�s Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins� The Boy in the River: different attitudes towards the possibility of cultural �mixedness�
(Routledge, 2016) Hunter, Eva
This article examines two contemporary texts that present different attitudes towards cultural diversity in Britain: Elleke Boehmer�s novel Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins� memoir The Boy in the River. Boehmer, who is an internationally recognised theorist in colonial and postcolonial writing, applies her concept of �mixedness� to characterisation and incident, using the metaphorical and narrative devices available to the writer of fiction, to achieve in her novel a more promising approach to cultural hybridity than does Hoskins. Writing as an �expert� on �African� religions, Hoskins must, in a fact-based genre, establish himself as a reliable informant for his implied British audience. Confronting the ambiguities of ethically and judicially complex situations relating to belief in sorcery and witchcraft, he consigns them to the nonrational, alien, and predominantly dangerous. Hoskins therefore, despite his commitment to notions of shared humanity, reinscribes oppositional boundaries between the belief systems of �the West� and �Africa�.
Complicit refugees, cosmopolitans and xenophobia: Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' and Romesh Gunesekera's 'Reef' in conversation with texts on xenophobia in South Africa
(Common Ground, 2008) Flockemann, Miki
In the aftermath of the brutal xenophobic attacks in parts of South Africa against 'other' Africans between March and May this year, a fairly sustained (if repetitive) public debate has emerged in the local press. The aim is to extend this discussion to South African literary production and to stories from elsewhere - in this case, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The distinction between complicit refugees and cosmopolitans draws on some of the arguments of Mark Saunders and Anthony Appiah as a framework for comparing Hosseini s popular 'The Kite Runner' (2003) and Gunsekera's lyrical 'Reef' (1994). These will be read in relation to K. Sella Duiker's 'Thirteen Cents' (2000). Establishing a 'conversation' between these texts is associated (from Appiah) with calls/or re-thinking terms such as citizen and cosmopolitan. This, in turn. has implications for the current expressions of and about, xenophobia in South Africa.
�Connecting Mind to Pen, to Eyes, to Face, to Arms and Legs�: Toward a Performative and Decolonial Teaching Practice
(Cambridge University Press, 2020) Flockemann, Miki
The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounters
Der Aspekt der Einf�hlungs�sthetik in Andr� Brinks The Other Side of Silence
(Peter Lang, 2014) Rath, Luisa
There are many opinions about what constitutes a postcolonial novel. The act of representation is part of this controversy: which voices should be represented by the narrator and which should remain silent? This aspect of aesthetic empathy is widely discussed by postcolonial theorists. Andre Brink's narrative The Other Side of Silence, which deals with the German colonial period in what is now Namibia and the fate of the female protagonist Hanna X, employs a special use of different narrating voices, a combination of archival documents and fiction and an overt critique of colonialism. This paper analyses the peculiarities of this narrative by taking account of the critical voices against Brink's fiction.

Browse

Browsing by Title

Results Per Page

Sort Options