English in South Africa : effective communication and the policy debate : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: Communication -- South Africa , English language -- South Africa , South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1993-1994
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:683 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020752 , ISBN 0620031557
- Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
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- Date Issued: 1993
Guy Butler (obituary)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 1999
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7052 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007411
- Description: An obituary focusing on Guy Butler's Shakespearean preoccupations. The 1999/2000 volume of Shakespeare in Southern Africa only appeared in 2001. The Butler obituary was included as a 'stop-press' item as the volume went to print, which accounts for the apparent anomaly between the date of publication and the date of Guy Butler's death.
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- Date Issued: 1999
Confronting the African nightmare: Yael Farber’s SeZaR (theatre review)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7046 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007388
- Description: Yael Farber’s adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2001
Guy Butler: 21 January 1918 - 26 April 2001
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7053 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007413
- Description: [From Introduction]: For much of the last twenty-five years of his life, Butler’s thought and work were not perceived to be ‘current’ at all. His poetry was hardly read (what’s new there? – neither is anyone else’s); some of it lay in manuscript or obscure little publications until the Collected Poems appeared in 1999. The autobiographies attracted a loyal following amongst a small, educated reading public. His early dramas, though they met with initial success, were stifled by the poetic idiom to which they aspired, and by the racial claustrophobia against which they fought. (Demea, Butler’s South African reworking of the Medea, made it to the boards only in 1990 – the multi-racial cast, let alone the themes, kept it in hibernation until then.) The deluge of journalism and polemic suffered the usual fate of ephemera. Until resurrected by Stephen Watson in 1990, the essays and lectures remained buried in periodicals where they could not be assessed as a totality. His inspiring teaching was a gift to his students, hardly accessible to the wider society; and above all, much of his time was spent as homo commiticus, serving on the boards and sub-committees of numerous university institutions and other organizations, some of which he founded. In his autobiography, he observed wryly of his changed status following accession to the Chair of English at Rhodes in 1951: ‘Professors are not entirely themselves. Their interest as persons decreases because they are now public personages. Much of their time is spent on committees whose function is to pick the brains of individuals without giving them credit.’ Guy Butler gave generously of his brains in such circumstances.
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- Date Issued: 2001
Can formal language planning link to grassroots cultural initiatives?: an informal investigation
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7041 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007381
- Description: Formal language planning is inevitably a top-down, highly technical process. Success for such planning would seem to depend on engaging productively with existing or readily developed social motivation within the society. This article reports on an informal investigation into how ordinary language practitioners and cultural workers in South Africa view the possibilities of contributing to the country’s emerging language dispensation, what they regard as their most useful possible contributions, and what they expect from the language planners and ‘government’ in support of South Africa’s Language Policy and Plan.
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- Date Issued: 2002
Language as a ‘resource’ in South Africa: the economic life of language in a globalising society
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7035 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007370 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750285310031
- Description: preprint , We need to develop a much more refined and specific understanding of what is meant when people refer to language is a ‘resource’. If something can accurately be described as a resource, then by its very nature it carries with it or attracts, at least in potential, the social motivation associated with the utilization, development or exploitation of that resource. This is strikingly true where language is the resource in question, because language is so intimately bound up with human activity. Where it exists, such social motivation can be augmented and supported so as to realize the ends of language policy. Contrastingly, where it is seen that social motivation informing a particular language situation is at odds with the intent of language policy, then either implementation must retreat and move to other arenas, other points of influence, where intervention can be more effective, or those charged with implementation must resign themselves to costly and messy efforts to force unwanted change through legal authority.
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- Date Issued: 2002
Introduction [to the book "Scatter the Shrilling Bones" by Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana]
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7056 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007417
- Description: preprint , Scatter the Shrilling Bones by Sithembele Xhegwana comprises an ordered sequence of poems that conveys a journey both literal and spiritual. Revisitation is the organizing principle of the collection – the return to rural sources and origins by a consciousness estranged and illumined by modernity (cf. ‘The Return’). Underlying the collection is the theme of the night journey, whose archetype in western culture is Odysseus’ descent to the underworld – a pattern identified as such in the concluding essay ‘Starting from my Place: Notes on an Aesthetic’. The underworld here is literally the return to the home territory – a journey from Cape Town to the rural Eastern Cape – but also a revisiting of the mental world of traditional Africa: ‘Here at home, here all guilt begins’ (‘Homecoming’). The return journey is haunted by nightmare memories of mental illness, the schizophrenic episodes accompanying (or occasioned by?) the poet’s initial encounters with modernity. This illness is represented as both pathological and cultural – a price paid for challenging and rejecting the old certainties while grappling with new assumptions: “He undermines the ancestors, That’s why he suffers. Let him.” (‘To Himself’)
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- Date Issued: 2003
"My novel, Hill of Fools"
- Authors: Peteni, R L , Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7038 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007376 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47869
- Description: preprint , R.L. Peteni - 'There is a tendency in human beings to pay no heed to events in small remote areas. They would rather concern themselves only with those events which make headlines, with political upheavals and industrial conflicts centred in large metropolitan regions. Yet there is always drama and human conflict in the humblest rural village. In selecting a pastoral theme and small fictitious villages in an obscure corner of Keiskammahoek as the setting of the novel, I had an ironic intention. Themes illustrated in these obscure villages would, I believed, have more universal application than they would if I had selected a larger centre, identifiable personages and known political trends. I did not want anybody to sit back, complacent, feeling that the spotlight was on Lennox Sebe’s Ciskei alone, or Kaiser Matanzima’s Transkei, or John Vorster’s apartheid South Africa. The spotlight is on the Ciskei, yes, on Transkei, on South Africa, on any other country where public life and personal relationships are bedevilled by tribalism or racialism or any form of sectionalism.
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- Date Issued: 2004
An introduction: Peteni in context
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7036 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007372 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47870
- Description: preprint , It is rare for a writer to make a literary impact with only one novel. It is even more unusual when that work is written by a novice author in his early sixties. Yet such is the case of R.L. Peteni, whose novel, Hill of Fools, was published by David Philip in South Africa in 1976, and internationally in the same year by Heinemann in the African Writers Series. Four years later, in 1980, the book was translated by the author into Xhosa as Kwazidenge and published by the Lovedale Press. Twenty years after initial publication, in 1996, there came a television version of Kwazidenge broadcast by the SABC, starring Willie Thambo and Amanda Quwe, though the locale was translated – in the bizarre logic of television – to an urban environment on the Cape Flats. The transposition, though pragmatic in terms of television demographics, destroyed much of the point of Peteni’s work, for Hill of Fools is South Africa’s first regional novel in English by a black writer. It is also the first novel in English by a Xhosa-speaker.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Hill of Fools: a South African Romeo and Juliet?
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7039 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007377 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47866
- Description: preprint , What kind of debt does Hill of Fools owe to Shakespeare? Look up ‘Peteni’ in the Companion to South African English Literature (1986) and you will be told that Hill of Fools is “loosely based on the story of Romeo and Juliet” (155). Scan the first newspaper reviews (see “The Early Reception of Hill of Fools” in this volume) and it is noticeable that a great many journalists focus on the Shakespeare connection as a means of introducing the book to their readers. One of the publisher’s readers, Henry Chakava, urged before publication that once all references to tribe or tribalism had been excised “the result will be a Romeo and Juliet type story much more superior to Weep Not Child.” The author himself reportedly described the book as “a black Romeo and Juliet drama” (Tribune Reporter 1988). And, indeed, some kind of parallel is patent to anyone who reads Hill of Fools with Shakespeare’s play in mind.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Hill of Fools: notes towards a publishing history
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7037 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007373 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47868
- Description: preprint , Written in English in the early 70s, Hill of Fools was projected into the market for world literature among distinguished company in the Heinemann African Writers Series (HAWS), at a time when expectations for African writing in English reflected a certain orthodoxy; when the book’s origins in apartheid South Africa pressed certain ‘buttons’ in world readerships, and when the country’s increasing cultural isolation meant that even relatively well-versed literary Africanists were less than familiar with the milieu from which the story springs. The result has been that the novel acquired a rather odd penumbra of interpretation, ranging from the naïve to the dismissive or reductive.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Irony and transcendence on the Renaissance stage
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7067 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007455 , https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.3.4728
- Description: preprint , This is the concluding essay in a collection entitled 'This Earthly Stage'. The chapter argues that the peculiar task of the stage metaphor - the notion of the theatre as a metaphor for life,which involves complex interactions between rarefied intellectual constructions of life and mundane reality - is to interrogate the tension between an inscrutable cosmic order and the limited viewpoints of ordinary humanity.The piece moves from general considerations of irony and dramatic irony, via an analysis of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, to comments on Petrarch, Pico and Vives, culminating in a consideration of irony and transcendence in Shakespeare's last plays.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Language and value: towards accepting a richer linguistic ecology for South Africa
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7042 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007383 , https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.28.2.05wri
- Description: preprint , Language policy debate is often obscured by two factors: failure to acknowledge different time-frames attending contrasting positions, and failure to recognise that ordinary people are motivated by their perceived best interests in the present. This article argues that the key to more general public acceptance of linguistic ecological diversity in South Africa is to shift the emphasis from policy development to practical language cultivation issues. Provide the requisite cultivation support, and acceptance of a revitalised future for African languages becomes more assured. It should also be understood that the modernisation of African languages in South Africa has a political dimension concerning which South African language commentators are strangely silent. This political thrust may not be entirely congruent with the concerns of those whose brief for African languages is primarily cultural or ecological – if, indeed, they are even aware of it. Finally, it needs to be recognised that language development under conditions of controlled influence, as in the civil service or schooling, is potentially achievable (with whatever difficulty), but that this must be complemented by authentic contemporary intellectual work published in African languages if the linguistic dimension of the African Renaissance is to take off.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Politics, latent and overt, in Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7064 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007430
- Description: [From the text]: R. L. Peteni’s novel Hill of Fools (1976) is a work that benefits greatly when Collingwood’s maxim is observed. The author’s family history and the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication add a dimension of political and social meaning which its surface deliberately occludes. Perhaps more importantly, while the story can readily be enjoyed, the quality of sensibility behind the work is not readily accessed without understanding some of the socio-political background.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‘Omega’
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7029 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007216 , https://doi.org/10.1080/1368879042000210595
- Description: preprint , [Author's note]: This piece offers a discursive foray into some leading features of South African Shakespeare, framed between two symbolic ‘book-ends’: the first authenticated Shakespearean production which took place in Cape Town in 1801 (‘Alpha’), and a recent groundbreaking, multilingual version of Julius Caesar which premiered in 2001(“‘Omega’”). Focusing mainly on acts of translation, literal and cultural, the article follows a trajectory from colonial origins to explore some of the adaptive travail experienced by the Shakespeare text as it infiltrates, contests, melds into and sometimes illuminates a South African culture both potentially (and actually) very different from the colonial culture of, say, Australia or New Zealand. The article includes a brief prospectus for the future.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: performing history in the theatre of Charles Kean, Richard W. Schoch: book review
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7050 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007393 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48030
- Description: preprint , This book is a primarily a study of Charles Kean’s productions of Shakespeare’s English chronicle plays at the Princess’s Theatre between 1852 and 1859, a period crucial to the development of ideas of English nationalism. Schoch focuses on these particular stagings as more than drama; as performances of nineteenth century theories of history and historical representation. His project operates under the aegis of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural theory, and is suspicious of neo-marxian fundamentalism.
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- Date Issued: 2004
The early reception of Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7040 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007379 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
- Description: preprint , The early reception of Peteni’s novel is interesting because it illustrates the mind-sets and critical assumptions of those who first mediated the novel to different readerships. The book initially caused little stir either in South Africa or abroad, and it has made its way quietly in later years in no small part due to support from set-work prescription committees, and its translation into other media, radio and television. A one-off novel by an unknown writer is unlikely to gather critical momentum in international discussion, and the book has been more often noticed in academic studies focused on the Xhosa novel, some of which barely register that the work was first written in English. However, today it is certainly among the novels most widely-read by ordinary South Africans, not only those from the Eastern Cape, but for among many throughout the country who encountered it at school.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Umabatha: global and local
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7032 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007364 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138390408691324
- Description: preprint , There can be few shows that test the dimensions and pitfalls of 'globalised' theatre as thoroughly as Welcome Msomi's Umabatha. The worldwide success of the show, in box-office terms, can hardly be argued with. And yet, in its very conception, the vehicle is so riven by intrinsic cultural, theatrical, class and 'nationist' tensions that different audiences cannot but reap utterly different experiences, depending on their own cultural and intellectual inheritance.The show is an instance where theatre practice (sometimes) obfuscates political and aesthetic discourse, showing how easily cultures miss each other and fail to connect, and how easily specific historical, geographical and imperial associations are swamped by shallow 'globalised' audience response.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Book Review:‘These Traits Portend’: review of Thabo Mbeki and the Struggle for the Soul of the ANC by William Mervyn Gumede
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7049 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007391 , https://www.researchgate.net/publication/29807204_Book_Review_'These_Traits_Portend'_Review_of_Thabo_Mbeki_and_the_Struggle_for_the_Soul_of_the_ANC_by_William_Mervyn_Gumede_Cape_Town_Zebra_Press_2005
- Description: preprint , “The identity of the old ANC is changing fast and its soul is becoming harder to locate” – so writes William Gumede in his best-selling account of the Mbeki presidency. This is a thoroughly admirable book, critical, informed and deeply concerned with the welfare of the people of South Africa, especially the poor – with no taint of political hagiography. The central plank of the critique concerns the ANC’s management of the economy. Gumede’s account of the genesis of GEAR and the devious way it was sprung on the tri-partite alliance is illuminating. It was done under the rubric of necessary modernization, according to Gumede, and allegiance to the Blair/Schroeder Third Way. But there were huge ancillary consequences: the loss of influence by the ordinary ANC membership, neglect of branch activity, sidelining of the parliamentary caucus, centralization of policy development in the office of the president, increasing reliance on consultants and relentless cosying up to big business.
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- Date Issued: 2005
Introduction [to the book "Thuthula: Heart of the Labyrinth" by Chris Zithulele Mann]
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Book chapter
- Identifier: vital:7057 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007419
- Description: There are certain stories, the world over, that stir our hearts and minds to imaginings richer and deeper than the bald facts of history can easily satisfy. Such is the legend of Thuthula, the young Xhosa girl whose beauty and grace won the heart of Ngqika, chief of the Rharhabe Xhosa; the woman who was later married to his uncle Ndlambe, and then taken by Ngqika to become his wife. The events took place in or around the years 1806 and 1807 in what is now the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Prior to the central episode treated in the play, legend has it that Thuthula was out collecting firewood one day with her friends when she knelt at a spring to drink. Startled by the sudden appearance of a hunting dog crossing the stream below the spring, she looked up and saw a handsome young hunter chasing behind the dog. She was struck by his charm and good looks. Teasingly, as any young girl might do, she called her friends round her and challenged the young man to choose his favourite from among them. Amid much flirting and laughter, the object of all this girlish attention was pushed into making a choice. Inevitably, given her beauty, his playful decision fell on Thuthula. This was the first meeting of Thuthula, daughter of Mthunzana, with Ngqika, son of Chief Mlawu.
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- Date Issued: 2005