Recently added articles from Journal of Literary Studies:
Introduction: the power of autobiography in Southern Africa.(Special Issue 1)(Editorial)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Biography became an important method of reconstructing the past in Britain and America only in the nineteenth century and by the second quarter of the twentieth century it had, in radical circles at least, come to be regarded as inferior historiography. The cult of the great leader or the ...
Writing a life in epistolic form: Bessie Head's letters.(Interview)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary In this article Bessie Head's letters--mainly those published in the two collections, Vigne's A Gesture of Belonging (1991) and Cullinan's/maginative Trespasser (2005) along with extracts from her letters quoted in Eilersen's biography of Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears ...
The self-invention of Hugh Masekela.
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary This article examines the self-invention of Hugh Masekela as a troubadour of music and the frames through which the construction of the memory process is allowed to unfold. It argues that unlike straightforward resistance autobiography, Masekela's Still Grazing (2004) ...
Challenging aids denialism--Khabzela: life and times of a South African.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary This article argues that the biography Khabzela: Life and Times of a South African (Mc Gregor 2005) repositions Aids sufferers at the centre of the current HIV and Aids debate. The article shows that, through the tragic representation of its subject, the biography ...
The story of Seretse and Ruth: a Southern African foundational fiction.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary This article is centred on Wilf Mbanga and Trish Mbanga's Seretse and Ruth (2005), a Zimbabwean-authored, fictionalised biography of the first President of Botswana, Seretse Khama and his British wife, Ruth Williams. In the article, analysis of Seretse and Ruth is placed ...
Fictions of autobiographical representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary The aim of this article is to critically analyse the problems of the ideologies of narrativity raised in Joshua Nkomo's autobiography The Story of My Life. When this Zimbabwean version of the book was published in 2001, there were speculations and "gossip" that its ...
The authority of presence: reading Judith Todd's Through the Darkness as diary.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2009; ... Summary Judith Todd's Through the Darkness (2007) is an account of her life in Zimbabwe since independence and is constructed from notes and letters written over the years. The article addresses the implications of Todd's narrative method which at times reads like a diary with ...
Editorial note.
Mar 01, 2009 ... 1. Review Section The editors of JLS/TLW have decided to replace the review section with a review essay section and announcements of new books, thereby achieving two objectives. Firstly, we hope to provide authors with the opportunity of developing their comments into ...
The postcolonial Gothic: time and death in southern African literature.
Dec 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Postmodern liberal literature: Richard Rorty's "liberal ironists".(Company overview)
Dec 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: rereading J.M. Coetzee's Foe.
Dec 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Die problematiek van onthou: die proses van herinnering in Antjie Krog se Country of My Skull.
Dec 01, 2008; ... 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 ....
Plagiaat? Appropriasie? Kulturele oorplanting? Huldiging?: Brandende kwessies rondom mondelinge tradisies--Eugene Marais en die San opnuut bekyk.
Dec 01, 2008; ... Summary South African literature has a long history of cultural translation or transplantation from the San or Bushman (2) 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 ...
Centrifugal force: some remarks on vagrants in three texts by Lettie Viljoen/ Ingrid Winterbach.
Dec 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Story skills and hierarchies of needs and values: a defence of the humanities.
Sep 01, 2008; ... Summary This article (1) 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 ...
Text or presence: on rereading the /Xam and the interpretation of their narratives.
Sep 01, 2008; ... 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 hot been subjected to close criticism. I will argue in ...
"Not properly human": literary and cinematic narratives about human harvesting.
Sep 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Imagery and structure in Nadine Gordimer's "Once upon a Time".
Sep 01, 2008; ... 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 ...
Iron law and colonial desire: legality and criminality in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope.
Sep 01, 2008; ... 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 ...