Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096759
M. Hanif, Tahereh Rezaei
J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians explores the possibility and limits of rationalizing and dominating the ‘other’ through an experience of dislocation. This article argues that the experience of topographic and aesthetic dislocation has the power to transform the Magistrate’s ethical standards in relation to the ‘other’. The novel unwinds a space in which to explore the postcolonial sublime, in terms of which the tension between the self and other is concealed yet, in the progress of the narrative, a politics of forgetting gives way to the ethics of remembrance. This article treats aesthetics as a discursive field and the novel as an instance of an allegorical mode. It intends to explain how manipulation of aesthetic norms can become politically interventionist and make the formulation of the postcolonial sublime an ethical obligation.
{"title":"From the Politics of Forgetting to the Ethics of Remembering: The Postcolonial Sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians","authors":"M. Hanif, Tahereh Rezaei","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096759","url":null,"abstract":"J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians explores the possibility and limits of rationalizing and dominating the ‘other’ through an experience of dislocation. This article argues that the experience of topographic and aesthetic dislocation has the power to transform the Magistrate’s ethical standards in relation to the ‘other’. The novel unwinds a space in which to explore the postcolonial sublime, in terms of which the tension between the self and other is concealed yet, in the progress of the narrative, a politics of forgetting gives way to the ethics of remembrance. This article treats aesthetics as a discursive field and the novel as an instance of an allegorical mode. It intends to explain how manipulation of aesthetic norms can become politically interventionist and make the formulation of the postcolonial sublime an ethical obligation.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"59 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47656877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096753
Chukwunwike Anolue
Abstract Time and nature are two intertwined concepts. They are so inseparable that there is a temporal index to every spatial event and vice versa. Nothing happens in a space except at a time; neither does anything happen at a time except in a space. For the Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare, time and space occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre, but critics tend to privilege one and ignore the other in their analyses of his poetry. Osundare also frequently poetizes animist deities of Ikere-Ekiti, the town in Southwest Nigeria where he was born and raised. He uses his poetry as a medium to worship the deities. This paper is a study of time and nature in relation to an animist god of Ikere-Ekiti. It fuses ecocriticism and temporal analysis to shed light on ‘A Song for Olosunta,’ a panegyric which evokes an annual festival in honour of Olosunta, a lithic god worshipped by Osundare and his fellow Ikere-Ekiti animists. Against the background of the annual festival inscribed in the poem, I examine the god as an ecological and temporal icon, highlighting the differences between his shrine and its surroundings; and between his timescape and the timescape outside the shrine.
时间和自然是两个相互交织的概念。它们是如此不可分割，以至于每个空间事件都有一个时间索引，反之亦然。在一个空间里，除了某个时间，什么都不会发生；除了在一个空间里，任何事情都不会在一个时间发生。对于尼日利亚诗人尼伊·奥森达雷来说，时间和空间在他的作品中占据着突出的位置，但评论家在分析他的诗歌时往往会优先考虑其中一个，而忽略另一个。Osundare还经常将他出生和长大的尼日利亚西南部小镇Ikere Ekiti的万物有灵论神灵诗意化。他用诗歌作为崇拜神灵的媒介。本文研究了时间和自然与一位万物有灵论的伊凯雷·埃基提神的关系。它融合了生态批评和时间分析，为《献给奥洛桑塔的歌》（A Song for Olosunta）提供了线索，这首歌是一首赞美诗，唤起了一年一度的节日，以纪念奥伦代尔和他的Ikere Ekiti万物有灵论者所崇拜的石器时代的神奥洛桑塔。在诗中所刻的一年一度的节日背景下，我将神视为一个生态和时间的象征，强调了他的神殿与其周围环境之间的差异；以及在他的时代景观和神殿外的时代景观之间。
{"title":"In the Centre of the Cosmos: Sacred Spacetime in Niyi Osundare’s ‘A Song for Olosunta’","authors":"Chukwunwike Anolue","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096753","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Time and nature are two intertwined concepts. They are so inseparable that there is a temporal index to every spatial event and vice versa. Nothing happens in a space except at a time; neither does anything happen at a time except in a space. For the Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare, time and space occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre, but critics tend to privilege one and ignore the other in their analyses of his poetry. Osundare also frequently poetizes animist deities of Ikere-Ekiti, the town in Southwest Nigeria where he was born and raised. He uses his poetry as a medium to worship the deities. This paper is a study of time and nature in relation to an animist god of Ikere-Ekiti. It fuses ecocriticism and temporal analysis to shed light on ‘A Song for Olosunta,’ a panegyric which evokes an annual festival in honour of Olosunta, a lithic god worshipped by Osundare and his fellow Ikere-Ekiti animists. Against the background of the annual festival inscribed in the poem, I examine the god as an ecological and temporal icon, highlighting the differences between his shrine and its surroundings; and between his timescape and the timescape outside the shrine.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"35 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49022817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096749
C. Theron
Abstract This article is a comparative reading of Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), travelogues that explore erstwhile frontier zones in view of a changing social landscape inflected with the rhetoric of democracy. The comparison is based on the thematic parallels between literature from the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa in which the landscape is portrayed in metonymic relation to the nation. Drawing on the field of world literature and the notion that texts might undergo transformation in the way they are interpreted due to their movement across space and time, the article employs a ‘bifocal’ lens that produces a contrapuntal engagement between mid-nineteenth century America and post-apartheid South Africa.
摘要本文是对玛格丽特·富勒（Margaret Fuller）1843年（1844年）的《湖上的夏天》（Summer on the Lakes）和朱莉娅·马丁（Julia Martin。这种比较是基于美国文艺复兴时期和种族隔离后的南非文学之间的主题相似性，在这些文学中，风景被描绘成与国家的转喻关系。这篇文章借鉴了世界文学领域的观点，以及文本由于在空间和时间上的移动而可能在解读方式上发生变化的观点，采用了一种“双焦点”的视角，在19世纪中期的美国和种族隔离后的南非之间产生了一种对位的接触。
{"title":"Imprints of Indigenes and the Optics of Settlement: A Bifocal Reading of Summer on the Lakes and A Millimetre of Dust","authors":"C. Theron","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096749","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article is a comparative reading of Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), travelogues that explore erstwhile frontier zones in view of a changing social landscape inflected with the rhetoric of democracy. The comparison is based on the thematic parallels between literature from the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa in which the landscape is portrayed in metonymic relation to the nation. Drawing on the field of world literature and the notion that texts might undergo transformation in the way they are interpreted due to their movement across space and time, the article employs a ‘bifocal’ lens that produces a contrapuntal engagement between mid-nineteenth century America and post-apartheid South Africa.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"1 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49088125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096760
L. Wright
Abstract This article sets out the South African background to a previously unknown play by John Bright, the Hollywood scriptwriter, based on Wulf Sachs’s famous psycho-documentary Black Hamlet (1937) and written in conversation with him. The playscript appears as an Appendix to this number of English Studies in Africa. The aim is to provide pertinent information to enable international readers and theatre practitioners to assess the script’s historical value and theatrical potential. The article concentrates on the sociological and anthropological moment from which Wulf Sachs’s work emerged and its relevance for understanding the playscript John Bright wrote. Further literary-historical detail about the play’s discovery, focused mainly on America, is available in Wright (2021).
{"title":"Black Hamlet: A Script in Search of a Stage","authors":"L. Wright","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096760","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article sets out the South African background to a previously unknown play by John Bright, the Hollywood scriptwriter, based on Wulf Sachs’s famous psycho-documentary Black Hamlet (1937) and written in conversation with him. The playscript appears as an Appendix to this number of English Studies in Africa. The aim is to provide pertinent information to enable international readers and theatre practitioners to assess the script’s historical value and theatrical potential. The article concentrates on the sociological and anthropological moment from which Wulf Sachs’s work emerged and its relevance for understanding the playscript John Bright wrote. Further literary-historical detail about the play’s discovery, focused mainly on America, is available in Wright (2021).","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"74 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46773343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-28DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2059931
(2022). Notes on Contributors. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 65, A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture. Guest Editor: Rick de Villiers, pp. 87-88.
(2022)。关于贡献者的说明。非洲英语研究:第65卷，一个世纪的现代主义在南非文学和文学文化。客座编辑:Rick de Villiers，第87-88页。
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2059931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2059931","url":null,"abstract":"(2022). Notes on Contributors. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 65, A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture. Guest Editor: Rick de Villiers, pp. 87-88.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":" 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138492534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2055855
J. M. Ong
In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) reveals similarities and confluences in their novelistic structures, experimental temporalities, allegorical representations, use of natural imagery, and in the central and unifying linear motifs that are used to hold together the novel forms. Additional modernist aesthetic and political links are provided by depictions of sex- and gender-crossing characters in Orlando, The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), as well as by the feminist arguments and role of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ in From Man to Man and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The article concludes by arguing that ‘Woolf and/on Schreiner’ provides evidence towards a claim for South Africa as a pioneering site of modernist innovation, and thereby contributes to new understandings of the development of global modernisms.
{"title":"‘Too Uncompromising a Figure to be So Disposed of’: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner","authors":"J. M. Ong","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2055855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2055855","url":null,"abstract":"In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) reveals similarities and confluences in their novelistic structures, experimental temporalities, allegorical representations, use of natural imagery, and in the central and unifying linear motifs that are used to hold together the novel forms. Additional modernist aesthetic and political links are provided by depictions of sex- and gender-crossing characters in Orlando, The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), as well as by the feminist arguments and role of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ in From Man to Man and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The article concludes by arguing that ‘Woolf and/on Schreiner’ provides evidence towards a claim for South Africa as a pioneering site of modernist innovation, and thereby contributes to new understandings of the development of global modernisms.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"31 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46116216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2055856
S. Kostelac
This article examines Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), a novel which pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s canonical work of literary modernism, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Yet the Johannesburg of Melrose’s novel is devoid of the transforming cosmopolitanism that characterizes Woolf’s London and which allows for new social relations to be imagined across historically entrenched boundaries. While the implicit comparison between Woolf’s post-war London and post-apartheid Johannesburg finds the latter considerably wanting, Melrose’s novel also reminds us of the limits of Woolf’s fictional imagination, which are, perhaps, most overtly marked by her representation of the servant class. I argue that Johannesburg engages, at one level, in an act of extended literary redress by privileging the perspectives of domestic workers in Johannesburg who continue, after apartheid, to labour in homes and for families that are not their own. At the same time, however, the novel maintains its appeal to a ‘postimperial’ metropolitan gaze by adopting white characters unable to extract themselves from a range of reactive phobias about Johannesburg. The novel, I conclude, thus finds itself caught between the contradictory impulses of revision and reversion; between redressing the representational conventions which entrench historical inequalities and regressing into the tropes which perpetuate our difference and separation.
{"title":"Paying Homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Revision and Reversion in Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg","authors":"S. Kostelac","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2055856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2055856","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), a novel which pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s canonical work of literary modernism, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Yet the Johannesburg of Melrose’s novel is devoid of the transforming cosmopolitanism that characterizes Woolf’s London and which allows for new social relations to be imagined across historically entrenched boundaries. While the implicit comparison between Woolf’s post-war London and post-apartheid Johannesburg finds the latter considerably wanting, Melrose’s novel also reminds us of the limits of Woolf’s fictional imagination, which are, perhaps, most overtly marked by her representation of the servant class. I argue that Johannesburg engages, at one level, in an act of extended literary redress by privileging the perspectives of domestic workers in Johannesburg who continue, after apartheid, to labour in homes and for families that are not their own. At the same time, however, the novel maintains its appeal to a ‘postimperial’ metropolitan gaze by adopting white characters unable to extract themselves from a range of reactive phobias about Johannesburg. The novel, I conclude, thus finds itself caught between the contradictory impulses of revision and reversion; between redressing the representational conventions which entrench historical inequalities and regressing into the tropes which perpetuate our difference and separation.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"46 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45450028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2055853
Arthur Rose
Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the final scene of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save (1935). Ostensibly an account of ‘Nongqause the Liberator,’ the prophet behind the Cattle Killing of 1856–1857, Dhlomo’s play presents ‘not merely a work of historical recovery or a reflection of increasing segregation but also an engagement with the full range of nationalist imaginings at work in the New African era’ (Wenzel 83). In this regard, it is pertinent to recall that a more immediate precursor for the millenarianism presented in the play was the arrest of Nontetha Nkwekwe in 1922 and her death in the same year of its publication. Like Nongqause, Nkwenkwe was a millennialist prophet. Responding to the Spanish Influenza, Nkwekwe’s prophecies eventually provoked the South African authorities to incarcerate and then institutionalize her. Given the increased attention on the influenza as a shaping influence on the modernism of 1922 and after, this essay figures Dhlomo with an expanded global modernism that engages more explicitly with its millenarian correspondents.
{"title":"Millenarian Modernism in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save","authors":"Arthur Rose","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2055853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2055853","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the final scene of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save (1935). Ostensibly an account of ‘Nongqause the Liberator,’ the prophet behind the Cattle Killing of 1856–1857, Dhlomo’s play presents ‘not merely a work of historical recovery or a reflection of increasing segregation but also an engagement with the full range of nationalist imaginings at work in the New African era’ (Wenzel 83). In this regard, it is pertinent to recall that a more immediate precursor for the millenarianism presented in the play was the arrest of Nontetha Nkwekwe in 1922 and her death in the same year of its publication. Like Nongqause, Nkwenkwe was a millennialist prophet. Responding to the Spanish Influenza, Nkwekwe’s prophecies eventually provoked the South African authorities to incarcerate and then institutionalize her. Given the increased attention on the influenza as a shaping influence on the modernism of 1922 and after, this essay figures Dhlomo with an expanded global modernism that engages more explicitly with its millenarian correspondents.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"5 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46485410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2055859
Rick de Villiers
This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.
{"title":"Criteria of Embarrassment: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus Trilogy’ and the Legacy of Modernist Difficulty","authors":"Rick de Villiers","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2055859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2055859","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"58 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46720025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2055854
Michelle Adler
Focusing on the transnational lives of William Plomer (1903–1973) and the artist Edward Wolfe (1897–1982), this paper considers the formative influences of their South African heritage on their creative development, as well as the impact of European modernism on their work. In particular, a connection is made between Wolfe’s immersion in modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, and his subsequent influence on the writing of Plomer’s controversial novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), including its suppressed homoerotic elements. Finally, the paper argues that Turbott Wolfe is shaped both by Plomer’s liminal position within South Africa’s segregationist colonial culture, as well as by his exposure to a metropolitan modernity marked by waning confidence in the teleology of empire.
{"title":"Near Symmetries: The Transnational Modernism of Edward Wolfe and William Plomer","authors":"Michelle Adler","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2055854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2055854","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on the transnational lives of William Plomer (1903–1973) and the artist Edward Wolfe (1897–1982), this paper considers the formative influences of their South African heritage on their creative development, as well as the impact of European modernism on their work. In particular, a connection is made between Wolfe’s immersion in modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, and his subsequent influence on the writing of Plomer’s controversial novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), including its suppressed homoerotic elements. Finally, the paper argues that Turbott Wolfe is shaped both by Plomer’s liminal position within South Africa’s segregationist colonial culture, as well as by his exposure to a metropolitan modernity marked by waning confidence in the teleology of empire.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"17 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42000160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：