Browsing Research Publications (English Studies) by Title
Now showing items 11-30 of 81
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Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
(University of Pretoria, 2018)This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to ... -
Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)
(Brill, 2020)Green Matters reflects on the ‘unique cultural function’ of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in ... -
The classics, African literature, and the critics
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa Rhodes University, 2017)Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this ... -
Co-constructing a rubric checklist with first year university students: A self-assessment tool
(University of Jyväskylä, 2017)This paper reports on a study in which students co-constructed a rubric checklist with their lecturer and which they used to assess themselves. Data were collected by means of a student questionnaire, tutor feedback, as ... -
Coming home, coming out: Achmat Dangor's journeys through myth and Constantin Cavafy
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2011)Despite his international status, the impact of Constantin Cavafy’s poetry on South African letters has gone largely unnoticed. This article draws attention to the range of Cavafy's, influence on the local poets, writers, ... -
A comparative reading of Elleke Boehmer’s Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins’ The Boy in the River: different attitudes towards the possibility of cultural ‘mixedness’
(Routledge, 2016)This article examines two contemporary texts that present different attitudes towards cultural diversity in Britain: Elleke Boehmer’s novel Nile Baby and Richard Hoskins’ memoir The Boy in the River. Boehmer, who is an ... -
Complicit refugees, cosmopolitans and xenophobia: Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' and Romesh Gunesekera's 'Reef' in conversation with texts on xenophobia in South Africa
(Common Ground, 2008)In the aftermath of the brutal xenophobic attacks in parts of South Africa against 'other' Africans between March and May this year, a fairly sustained (if repetitive) public debate has emerged in the local press. The aim ... -
“Connecting Mind to Pen, to Eyes, to Face, to Arms and Legs”: Toward a Performative and Decolonial Teaching Practice
(Cambridge University Press, 2020)The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities ... -
Der Aspekt der Einfühlungsästhetik in André Brinks The Other Side of Silence
(Peter Lang, 2014)There are many opinions about what constitutes a postcolonial novel. The act of representation is part of this controversy: which voices should be represented by the narrator and which should remain silent? This aspect ... -
Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni
(University of Pretoria, 2015)This broadly comparative essay contrasts environmentalism in the fiction in English translation of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim alKoni, with dominant trends in contemporary environmentalism. An analysis of three of the most ... -
Disappeared to Ethiopia’s Bermuda: Tales by a puppet
(University of the Western Cape, 2018)At the Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum (RTMMM) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, there sits upon a wall a chart of the torture houses used during a campaign of terror waged by the Derg regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to ... -
Dog sacrifice in Isidore Okpewho’s call me by my rightful name and the Works of Wole Soyinka: Ogun, race, identity and diaspora
(Ranchi: Glocal Colloquies, 2016)This essay considers the ways in which the significance of blood sacrifice in the propitiation of the Yoruba god Ogun is transformed in the context of international literature which asserts an endogenous African modernity, ... -
Drawing the dark
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)Day and night, night after night, deep in his prayer, he deliberated whether it was possible to draw the dark without ever looking at it.He had his head in his hands.His hands covered his eyes. His breath caught onwords ... -
Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2020)A comparative analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s Teir Eyes Were Watching God and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru suggests the importance of romantic love to the self actualization of the heroines of these novels, whose authors share ... -
Evaluation of assessment skills using essay rubrics in student self-grading at first year level in higher education: a case study
(South African Association for Language Teaching, 2018)This paper reports on a study in which students self-graded an assessment task with the aid of an assessment rubric. On comparing student selfgrades with those of the tutor it was found that majority (72.6%) of the students ... -
The everyday experience of xenophobia: performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa
(RoutledgeUNISA Press, 2010)Debates on the underlying causes of xenophobia in South Africa have proliferated since the attacks -between March and May 2008. Our article shows how exploring the everyday 'ordinariness' of xenophobia as performance can ... -
Facing the stranger in the mirror: Staged complicities in recent South African performances
(Routledge, 2011)The staging of complicity has developed into one of the most prevalent trends in recent South Africa theatre. The audience may become aware of their own complicity in injustice, or complicity may feature as a subject to ... -
Faded mountain
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)A faded mountain at the edge of a threadbare field. Smoke and dust trudging the last rungs of a sky. And now a narrow dirt road that twists between snatches of shivering trees and snatches of shadow. Then a gasping ... -
‘Foundational fictions’ Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa’s early Anglophone-Igbo novels
(Taylor & Francis, 2019)The Igbo marriage song recorded by Ifi Amadiume in her influential ethnographic study of the Nnobi in Southeastern Nigeria is a reminder of the cross-cultural, trans-historical significance of some form of marriage in the ... -
'A glimpse into Bushman mythology': interpretation, power and knowledge
(Routledge, 2017)In 1873, Qing, a young man of Bushman background, recounted a cycle of stories and commented on some of the rock paintings he and the magistrate Joseph Orpen saw on a journey through the Maloti mountains. A year later ...