An Interview with Ken Barris:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144050 , vital:38306 , DOI: 10.4314/eia.v41i1.9
- Description: Ken Barris was born in Port Elizabeth and lives in Cape Town, where he works at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. His writing includes two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and five novels, the most recent being What Kind of Child (2006) and Life Underwater (2012). His work has been translated into Turkish, Danish, German and Slovenian, and poetry and short fiction have appeared in various anthologies. More recently, he has turned to writing for academic journals. His research interests are postapartheid fiction and language education.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
The incurious seeker: waiting, and the search for the stranger in the fiction of Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143971 , vital:38299 , https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/22380/18161
- Description: In J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett, Patrick Hayes argues that Coetzee, while influenced by Beckett’s prose style, assimilates it in such a way that his writing not only departs from the latter’s solipsism but also provides “an anti-foundational imagining of moral community” (71). While there is much merit to this argument, Hayes’s distinction between Beckett’s solipsism and Coetzee’s concern with community downplays the extent to which the human subject’s conception of herself depends on the differential process through which community establishes itself. In the first section of this paper I show that, already in Murphy, we find evidence in support of Ileana Marculescu’s argument that Beckett inscribes solipsism in his writing only to subvert it. Murphy’s attempts at solipsistic knowledge fail precisely because he has been estranged from himself by language and community. What appears to be solipsism is, in fact, a search for the self from which he has been divided by community. In Beckett’s writing, the self’s concern with its ability to know itself is always a concern with community.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Necrophiliac Narration and the Business of Friends: Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144159 , vital:38316 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2014.918406
- Description: Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of the “new” South Africa, the novel’s treatment of friendship, which cuts across the distinction between the private and the public, reflects obliquely on the nature of the emerging democratic dispensation. In this paper, I explore the link that Galgut constructs between friendship and community, and argue that his portrayal of the former points to the possibility of a form of community that is premised on a “common strangeness.”
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Shame, divine cannibalism, and the spectacle of subaltern suffering in Ken Barris's What Kind of Child:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144028 , vital:38304 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171544
- Description: This essay examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Ken Barns's portrayal of the life of a street child in What Kind of Child. Responses to literary representations of subaltem suffering are sharply divided. On the one hand, there is the commonsense view that such representations require one to imagine what the situation of other people may be like, and that, in doing so, one opens oneself to their experience of life. To the extent that representations of suffering inspire one to reflect on one's relations to others, they are salutary. On the other hand, though, such depictions, like poverty tourism, may be accused of providing a spectacle of distant suffering that one vicariously experiences from a position of privilege and then dircards.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014