- Title
- Niq Mhlongo told us# FeesMustFall, or why the surface matters in Dog Eat Dog:
- Creator
- Dass, Minesh
- Date Issued
- 2018
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142609
- Identifier
- vital:38095
- Identifier
- DOI: 10.4314/eia.v45i3.6
- Description
- In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion – subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study’s unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline’s predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo’s text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.
- Format
- 20 pages
- Format
- Language
- English
- Relation
- English in Africa
- Relation
- Dass, M., 2018. Niq Mhlongo told us# FeesMustFall, or why the surface matters in Dog Eat Dog. English in Africa, 45(3), pp.119-138.
- Relation
- English in Africa volume 45 number 3 119 138 November 2018 0376-8902
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the English In Africa Copyright Statement (https://www.ajol.info/index.php/eia/about/submissions#copyrightNotice)
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Dass, Minesh (Dr)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Niq Mhlongo told us# FeesMustFall.pdf | 612 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |