Browsing Research Articles (English Studies) by Issue Date
Now showing items 1-5 of 5
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Field, Roger (Taylor & Francis Group, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: 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, critics and cultural activists, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, but directs most of its attention to two early short stories by Achmat Dangor, ‘The Homecoming’ and ‘Waiting for Leila’, and his most recent novel Bitter Fruit. In all of these works Dangor refers directly and indirectly to Cavafy’s poetry, his sexuality, his evocations of place and his use of Greek mythology, particularly in one of his most famous poems ‘Ithaka’. The article also addresses Dangor’s ambivalence towards Cavafy, particularly the disjuncture between Cavafy’s ironic, apolitical modernism, modernism’s appeal to Dangor, his desire to produce accessible protest literature and his need to justify recourse to the classics in Africa. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/521 Files in this item: 1
FieldConstantinCavafy2011.pdf (234.1Kb) -
Field, Roger (Taylor & Francis, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: The Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971) spent 10 months in South Africa during WWII as a senior diplomatic official attached to the Greek government in exile. Drawing on his diary entries, correspondence and poetry this article challenges earlier interpretations of his work best described as a ‘synchronic panoptic vision’ (Bhabha). Beginning with an exploration of the troubled relationship between the ‘glory that was Greece’ and the failure of its early 20thcentury nationalist, expansionist and modernization projects, the article argues that Seferis tried to overcome alienation from landscape and a crisis of creativity in two ways: he transcribed and commented on Cavafy’s poetry, but was unable to resolve his relationship with the latter; by reaching down into the ruins of ancient Greece and back into its mythological past, through a process of negative displacement he transforms these crises into a descent to the world of the dead. Unlike Odysseus, he receives no guidance from its inhabitants, for they speak only the language of flowers and there are none. Accompanying Seferis’ dual purpose use of classical mythology as national heritage and ironic device is a more problematic aspect of modernism – the relegation of Africa and its sub- Saharan inhabitants to a primitive otherness that, he felt, limited his ability to express himself, and which generated some of his greatest poetry. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/512 Files in this item: 1
FieldGeorgeSeferis2012.pdf (266.4Kb) -
Moolla, Fiona F. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, and the history of print and oral literary culture coexisting in Somalia is commented on. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/603 Files in this item: 2
MollarOratureBecomesLiterature2012_1.pdf (232.2Kb) -
Moolla, Fiona F. (Sage Publications, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically “opens” the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Aké is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka’s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/604 Files in this item: 2
Moolla2012The body unbound.pdf (424.1Kb)MoollaBodyUnbound2012.pdf (216.8Kb) -
Moolla, Fiona F. (Taylor & Francis, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the “boundaries” of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant contemporary idea of “Africa” as the inscrutable, savage continent. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/605 Files in this item: 2
Moolla2013BorderCrossing.pdf (120.5Kb)MoollaBordercrossings 2013.pdf (165.4Kb)
Now showing items 1-5 of 5