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In Storyscapes we listen carefully to what South African writers reveal about themselves and their relations to South African space since the democratic transition of 1994. One main focus is the power of stories to uncover contradictory processes and investments of identity and to point readers toward a more meaningful life. Another main focus is the complexities of the post-colonial understanding of South African land, landscape, and space. Space in relation to race, class, and gender identity figures prominently in analyses and comparisons of diverse South African texts, such as Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart, André Brink's Imaginings of Sand, as well as the important South African subgenre of the farm novel. Questions of black or hybrid identity are highlighted by confronting older texts with new ones by black and women writers such as A.H.M. Scholtz and E.K.M. Dido. These texts - and a number of Afrikaans texts that are less well-known in the English-speaking world - are set in the wider frameworks of postcolonial criticism and global issues of cultural identity.
The contributions to this volume probe the complex relationship of trauma, memory, and narrative. By looking at the South African situation through the lens of trauma, they make clear how the psychic deformations and injuries left behind by racism and colonialism cannot be mended by material reparation or by simply reversing economic and political power-structures. Western trauma theories – as developed by scholars such as Caruth, van der Kolk, Herman and others – are insufficient for analysing the more complex situation in a postcolony such as South Africa. This is because Western trauma concepts focus on the individual traumatized by a single identifiable event that causes PTSD (Post T...
This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This book discusses the relevance of the concept of liminality for the short story genre and for short story cycles, emphasizing theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance and applicability. Liminality as a concept of demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, and interethnic transnationality. Over the la...
The ethics of the Bible can be summarized in one word: love. Love became flesh in the person of Jesus--in the narrative of his life, his teachings, his death, and his resurrection. Jesus was the "Word of God" (John 1:1). Splendors of Godly Love brings a fresh perspective on age-old Christian concepts to guide us through life. Chris van der Merwe is a literary scholar who carefully analyzes biblical texts and explores the richness of their content. He reflects on seven Christian values and explains how faith, hope, righteousness, truth, humility, and joy are all connected to the central Christian virtue of love. While talking about some of the tough choices that present-day Christians have to make, and the emptiness that so many of us experience, he delves deep into the truths of the biblical texts and shares with his readers some of the wonderful wisdom of poets and writers from all over the world. He argues that the emptiness of our existence can be filled with meaning only if we seek to reflect the splendor of God's love in our daily lives.
How can artists (and others) who find themselves in positions of privilege think differently about the way they do what they do in order to create the conditions for better, more just relations to flourish? Finding an answer to that question is at the heart of this book. After critiquing the relationship between contemporary art, race and privilege the author brings together First Nation and feminist philosophies of relationality, the game of string figuring, and her own history as an artist to propose an alternate methodology that puts relation at the centre of practice. She introduces the multivalent concept of “tacking”—a movement at an oblique angle to prevailing winds—in order to traverse the waters of contemporary art to challenge power and create a more just future.
Thinking and Practicing Reconciliation asserts that literary representations of conflict offer important insights into processes of resolution and practices of reconciliation, and that it is crucial to bring these debates into the post-secondary classroom. The essays collected here aim to help teachers think deeply about the ways in which we can productively integrate literature on/as reconciliation into our curricula. Until recently, scholarship on teaching and learning in higher education has not been widely accepted as equal to research in other fields. This volume seeks to establish that serious analysis of pedagogical practices is not only a worthy and legitimate academic pursuit, but a...
Preliminary Material -- Critical Appropriations and Hermeneutic Resistance -- Penetration: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country -- Resistance: Waiting for the Barbarians -- Parasitism: Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron -- Visitation: Disgrace -- Secrecy: Foe -- (Un)belonging: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime -- Intrusion: The Master of Petersburg and Slow Man -- Fidelities: Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year -- Works Cited -- Index.
Verbal imagery and visual images as well as the intricate relationships between verbal and visual representations have long shaped the imagination and the practice of intercultural relationships. The contributions to this volume take a fresh look at the ideology of form, especially the gendered and racial implications of the gaze and the voice in various media and intermedial transformations. Analyses of how culturally specific forms of visual and verbal expression are individually understood and manipulated complement reflections on the potential and limitations of representation. The juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers explores the gap between them as a space beyond cultural boun...
Verbal imagery and visual images as well as the intricate relationships between verbal and visual representations have long shaped the imagination and the practice of intercultural relationships. The contributions to this volume take a fresh look at the ideology of form, especially the gendered and racial implications of the gaze and the voice in various media and intermedial transformations. Analyses of how culturally specific forms of visual and verbal expression are individually understood and manipulated complement reflections on the potential and limitations of representation. The juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers explores the gap between them as a space beyond cultural boun...
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.