Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: A Review Essay
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458573 , vital:75753 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n2_a5
- Description: The poetics of Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature (2020) is intimated in the title of the book, where the infinitude of ‘finding’ and the provisionality of ‘reflections’ anticipate what, in the introductory chapter “Finding My Way”, is described as an avoidance of the “monumentalising study” in favour of a more “mobile, tentative, suggestive scholarship” that is comfortable with “paradox and open-endedness” (12). The chapters that follow explore ways in which the notion of South African literature and the notion of the literary may be reimagined, and explicate a mode of reading ‘with’ the text, showing how this may be applied to ways of reading belief. They also examine the notion of creative non-fiction, revisit orality in South African literature, describe an autobiographical history with a book, and end with a reflection on postapartheid South African literature as “a place of radical newness and obsessive return” (175). What the book omits in its coverage, but which is nevertheless present in its ways of thinking, is Brown’s environmental concern with ‘wildness’ and ‘rewilding’, described in his book Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019), published a year earlier. As is the case with the essays in the earlier book, the essays in Finding My Way speak to one another, disclosing of a way of thinking, of finding one’s way, that is recursive in style and attentive to the thing under scrutiny.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458573 , vital:75753 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n2_a5
- Description: The poetics of Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature (2020) is intimated in the title of the book, where the infinitude of ‘finding’ and the provisionality of ‘reflections’ anticipate what, in the introductory chapter “Finding My Way”, is described as an avoidance of the “monumentalising study” in favour of a more “mobile, tentative, suggestive scholarship” that is comfortable with “paradox and open-endedness” (12). The chapters that follow explore ways in which the notion of South African literature and the notion of the literary may be reimagined, and explicate a mode of reading ‘with’ the text, showing how this may be applied to ways of reading belief. They also examine the notion of creative non-fiction, revisit orality in South African literature, describe an autobiographical history with a book, and end with a reflection on postapartheid South African literature as “a place of radical newness and obsessive return” (175). What the book omits in its coverage, but which is nevertheless present in its ways of thinking, is Brown’s environmental concern with ‘wildness’ and ‘rewilding’, described in his book Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019), published a year earlier. As is the case with the essays in the earlier book, the essays in Finding My Way speak to one another, disclosing of a way of thinking, of finding one’s way, that is recursive in style and attentive to the thing under scrutiny.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
The twice-told tale: Ethiopia, race, and the veil of signs
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458615 , vital:75756 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-1b96674043
- Description: This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheless, while Ethiopia is deployed as a trope of racial difference and race-based cultural aspirations, the demarcation it marks between self and other is indeterminate and ambiguous. This demarcation is unstable insofar as the trope of Ethiopia, and what it signifies in the world of the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, is defined not only by the cultural or religious meanings accrued over a period of almost thirty centuries, but also by the imperial politics of modern Ethiopia in the period under consideration. This politics crystallises around the coronation of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, and marks both the culmination of the historical deployment of the Ethiopian trope and its moment of deconstruction.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458615 , vital:75756 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-1b96674043
- Description: This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheless, while Ethiopia is deployed as a trope of racial difference and race-based cultural aspirations, the demarcation it marks between self and other is indeterminate and ambiguous. This demarcation is unstable insofar as the trope of Ethiopia, and what it signifies in the world of the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, is defined not only by the cultural or religious meanings accrued over a period of almost thirty centuries, but also by the imperial politics of modern Ethiopia in the period under consideration. This politics crystallises around the coronation of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, and marks both the culmination of the historical deployment of the Ethiopian trope and its moment of deconstruction.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Introduction: the problem of nostalgia
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458539 , vital:75752 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC199629
- Description: We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about because they were exploited by these politics.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458539 , vital:75752 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC199629
- Description: We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about because they were exploited by these politics.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
The pastoral, the primal and the post-apartheid sublime in Justin Cartwright's White Lightning
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458599 , vital:75755 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171543
- Description: Country is a familiar topos in South African literature, featuring in travel writing and the farm novel, in imperial romance and postcolonial narratives, as pastoral and as anti-pastoral, an uncanny presence in the landscape of modernity. A surprising number of recent South African novels present what may be called post-apartheid country narratives. I am particularly interested in the return to country in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Justin Cartwright's White Lightning, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor. Given the history of settler occupation of the land, and the literary deployment of the idea of the land both to posit and to problematize white settler identity, why these stories of a white man's return to the land in the post-apartheid period? What is the impulse behind retracing of contested ground?.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458599 , vital:75755 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171543
- Description: Country is a familiar topos in South African literature, featuring in travel writing and the farm novel, in imperial romance and postcolonial narratives, as pastoral and as anti-pastoral, an uncanny presence in the landscape of modernity. A surprising number of recent South African novels present what may be called post-apartheid country narratives. I am particularly interested in the return to country in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Justin Cartwright's White Lightning, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor. Given the history of settler occupation of the land, and the literary deployment of the idea of the land both to posit and to problematize white settler identity, why these stories of a white man's return to the land in the post-apartheid period? What is the impulse behind retracing of contested ground?.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Preface: Douglas Livingstone's prose writings
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458588 , vital:75754 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC152172
- Description: I should like to thank Stephen Gray for his conception of this collection of the prose writings of Douglas Livingstone and his judicious selection of items; Mariss Stevens for her detailed description of the NELM collection of Livingstone's papers; and NELM staff for their compilation of the bibliography.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458588 , vital:75754 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC152172
- Description: I should like to thank Stephen Gray for his conception of this collection of the prose writings of Douglas Livingstone and his judicious selection of items; Mariss Stevens for her detailed description of the NELM collection of Livingstone's papers; and NELM staff for their compilation of the bibliography.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
Lesego Rampolokeng, Robert Herold, Ike Muila, Isabella Mothadinyane. Performance: Gluepot Bar, Grahamstown. July 1994. Book Review
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1994
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460808 , vital:76037 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_157
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1994
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1994
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460808 , vital:76037 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_157
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1994
Tatamkulu Afrika. Dark Rider. Cape Town Snailpress and Mayibuye Books, 1992. Book Review
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460836 , vital:76039 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_477
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1993
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460836 , vital:76039 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_477
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1993
Keorapetse Kgositsile, When the Clouds Clear. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990. Book Review
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460796 , vital:76036 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460796 , vital:76036 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
Sankie Dolly Nkondo, Flames of Fury and Other Poems. Johannesburg Congress of South African Writers, 1990. Book Review
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460820 , vital:76038 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460820 , vital:76038 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
Zinjiva Winston Nkondo, The wng Road the Tunnel. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990. Book Review
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460851 , vital:76040 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460851 , vital:76040 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_194
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
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