Browsing Research Publications (English Studies) by Title
Now showing items 47-66 of 81
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Making a case for the teaching of reading across the curriculum in higher education
(Education Association of South Africa (EASA), 2012)Over the past two decades there has been much written in the literature about the importance of reading and the importance of teaching students reading strategies to improve their reading comprehension. Reading is one ... -
“Modern prophets, produce a new bible”: Christianity, Africanness and the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2008)In this article I consider how one might approach the apparently singular figure of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Xhosa woman who produced an extraordinary series of Christian izibongo in newspapers in the 1920s: through what ... -
The muslim "who has faith" in Leila Aboulela's novels Minaret (2005) and Lyrics Alley (2009)
(Taylor & Francis, 2013)This essay analyses Leila Aboulela's narrative techniques when depicting a Muslim “who has faith” in her two most recent novels. In Minaret she presents religion as a source of strength for her female narrator-protagonist ... -
Notes towards a history of Khoi literature
(Taylor & Francis, 2011)This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature ... -
Oceans
(Routledge, 2021)One day, long ago, a little boy was killed. He was used up, and discarded, and thrown away, left for secret dumping, the nameless dead, floating in a sea of sinking secrets. -
Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the ... -
The path which goes beyond: Danger on Peaks responds to suffering
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Now well into his eighties, Gary Snyder continues to pursue lifetime habits of engagement and detachment in which the activities of literary work, spiritual practice, environmental activism, and family life are mutually ... -
Plotting marriage and love in Elechi Amadi's The concubine: Extended realism in the African novel.
(University of the Western Cape, 2019)Unlike most other 20th-century African writers, Elechi Amadi foregrounds the theme of romantic love in most of his fiction. Unlike the internationally canonized “village novels” of Chinua Achebe, Amadi’s “village novels” ... -
The polygynous household in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives: a haven in a heartless world
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)Despite Lola Shoneyin’s public condemnation of the impediments to female autonomy, equality, freedom, dignity, and self-realisation inherent in polygamy, the polyvalent nature of her contemporary Nigerian novel, The Secret ... -
Postnational paradoxes: Nuruddin Farah's recent novels and two life narratives in counterpoint
(Indiana University Press, 2018)Nuruddin Farah’s most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism ... -
The pregnant man: race, difference and subjectivity in Alan Paton’s Kalahari writing
(Taylor & Francis, co-published with Unisa Press, 2010)In South African imaginative writing and scholarly research, there is currently an extensive and wide-ranging interest in the ‘Bushman’, either as a tragic figure of colonial history, as a contested site of misrepresentation, ... -
Race, resistance and translation: the case of John Buchan’s UPrester John
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011)In postcolonial translation studies, increasing attention is being given to the asymmetrical relationships between dominant and indigenous languages. This paper argues that John Francis Cele’s UPrester John (1958), is not ... -
Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method
(Taylor & Francis, 2018)In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed ... -
The reading habits and practices of undergraduate students at a higher education institution in South Africa: a case study
(Independent Institute of Education, 2017)Research conducted in South Africa has shown that the reading literacy level of students entering higher education is lower than is desirable. In an attempt to gain an understanding of students’ reading habits and ... -
Reflecting on the process of teaching reflection in higher education
(Taylor and Francis, 2018)Higher education plays an important role in nurturing life-long learning and critical citizenry. One way to foster these is through developing a reflective practice. Given the importance of reflection, this article ... -
Reopening Agaat: Afrikaans, Encyclopedic Narrative, World Literature
(Routledger, 2021)This essay offers a meditation on Marlene van Niekerk’s 2004 novel Agaat as an encyclopedic (or, more exactly, a counter-encyclopedic) narrative, as defined–controversially–by Edward Mendelson in an influential 1976 polemic. ... -
Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A Mies Julie and Itsoseng
(Taylor & Francis, 2013)The concern about South African arts being - as Achille Mbembe claims - ‘stuck in repetition’ can be challenged by examining developments in the performance arts which deliberately employ repetition. In these cases ... -
Representations of revolutionary violence in recent Indian and South African fiction
(Taylor & Francis, 2017)Several recent novels in English by Indian and South African authors explore the theme of violent political resistance to the entrenched injustices of the hierarchical Indian social order and South Africa’s institutionalised ... -
The road not travelled: Tracking love in Frank Anthony’s the journey: The revolutionary anguish of Comrade B
(2023)The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for ... -
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood: Spaces of getting and becoming in post-apartheid Durban
(UNISA Press, 2016)Sifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid ...