1,720,958 research outputs found
Emerging HIV communities and self : the representation of self and community in South African HIV/AIDS literature
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 73-75).HIV/AIDS is a prominent part of contemporary South African experience that has found expression in many forms, one of which is literature. This thesis analyses the relation between self and community as it is represented in South African HIV/AIDS literature. The argument of the thesis is underpinned by a dual theoretical strand
Writing Johannesburg into Being: Rituals of Mobility and the Uneven City in Mark Gevisser, Ivan Vladislavić and Lindsay Bremner’s Writing
Full text linkThis article explores the role of Johannesburg in the literary imagination of three contemporary South African writers, counterposing Mark Gevisser’s memoir Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014) and Ivan Vladislavić’s semi-autobiographical work of creative non-fiction Portrait with Keys (2006) with Lindsay Bremner’s collection of personal and architectural essays Writing the City into Being (2010). These white South African authors are keenly aware of their privileged position: they use the space offered by writing to make sense of their relation to Johannesburg and the access granted to them because they have the choice either to walk or to drive. I argue that this seemingly mundane choice is indicative of the continuing inequality of post-apartheid South African society, and that this is foregrounded in Bremner, Gevisser and Vladislavić’s literary writing as they use personal rituals of urban mobility to index and expose the boundaries and continuing unevenness of the city. 
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Introduction : The Body in Postcolonial Fiction after the Millennium
No full textSince the turn of the millennium, debates in postcolonial studies and world literature have repeatedly shown the realities of empire to be continuing, immediate and visceral. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the bodily has re-emerged in postcolonial cultural production as a receptor to, and vocabulary for, these immanent violences. Fictions from across the global south are drawing with apparently increasing frequency on corporeal lexica in their imaginings of on-going imperial circumstances. At the same time, the new millennium has witnessed the rise, in multiple postcolonial contexts, of speculative genres - science fiction and horror pre-eminent among them - to which the body is central. Together, all of this suggests the need for renewed reflection on the poetics and functions of the bodily in contemporary fictional engagements with empire. This special issue takes up this imperative. Our interest lies with the grammars and technologies offered by the corporeal in postcolonial cultural production since the millennium, and in the possibilities and limitations of these bodily registers. Over the course of this introduction, we outline the material, narrative and theoretical contexts within which we see the body re-emerging as a site of renewed critical and literary or cinematic potential. We return to established analytical categories for the corporeal in postcolonial literary studies, and show that current fictional handlings of the body and embodiment appear resistant to interpretation via these rubrics. Taking our cue both from a materialist theoretical (re)turn that corresponds to the turn of the millennium and from aesthetic developments in literature and film of the same period, we go on to lay the groundwork for an approach to the body as this is currently emerging in contemporary postcolonial and peripheral imaginaries.</p
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
“Lean[ing] into transcendence”: Transformations of the Sacred in South African, Zimbabwean and Nigerian Literatures
Full text linkEnchantment is a defining feature our postcolonial, globalised world and the literary is where much of this wonder is registered and celebrated. Thus this thesis attends to the postcolonial dynamic of sacred and secular experience as it is represented in contemporary African literatures. Debates around the secular and postsecular are long standing in the fields of religious studies, anthropology and philosophy, but as yet underappreciated in literary studies. I develop a hermeneutic of the imminent sacred as a way to read the constitutive and recuperative gestures subjects make as they assert a sense of belonging in spaces of globalised modernity. The texts are grouped thematically. In response to Chris Abani and Yvonne Vera’s work I articulate how the ritual dimensions of lyrical prose and ritual attention to the corporeal form sacralises the body. Phaswane Mpe and Teju Cole incorporate African epistemologies into the resignification of their cities and with Ivan Vladislavić, the streets are sacralised. Marlene van Niekerk and J. M. Coetzee convey the anxieties of settler colonialism and a love of land reinscribed as sublime. Collectively, the novels I discuss reflect patterns of existential anxiety that emerge from difficulties of belonging, and I trace the ritualised and sacralising strategies of incorporation that seek to locate the subject. These novels radically disrupt the epistemological and ontological modalities of globalised ‘secular’ literary production and intervene in the recuperation of the sacred as a mode of incorporation and resistance. Recent scholarship in African literatures has overlooked these distinctly postsecular negotiations and the ways in which the sacred is reinvested in contemporary African fiction in order to instantiate intimate, local alternatives to the teleology of secular modernity. Thus I use the imminent sacred as a reading strategy that foregrounds these postsecular negotiations and the interrelations of care and vulnerability that motivate sacralisation
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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