122 research outputs found
Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts. Uncanny Translocations in David's Story and The One That Got Away
No full textThis essay analyses Zoë Wicomb's novel David's Story and her latest collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, through the lense of cosmopolitanism and Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘hauntology’. Wicomb is a cosmopolitan author in a very precise sense: an author who embeds locally specific stories in a complex intertextual, historical and transnational web of cross-references. As settings, characters and objects move between Scotland and South Africa, it appears that the histories of these countries are mutually haunted by each other. Uncanny encounters with the past, and with memorials and art objects that take on a spectral quality, evoke an increasing sense of disorientation on the part of protagonists and readers alike. Assumptions about place, history and identity are thus constantly undermined and reconfigured
New French Extremity: Fat Girl & Twentynine Palms with Ali Taylor
No full textNew French Extremity is more than gore and violence; it is controversial, it is taboo and it is shocking. This episode looks at Catherine Breillat’s FAT GIRL (2001) and Bruno Dumont’s TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003). Host Zoë is joined by academic and author, Ali Taylor to discuss these boundary pushing films
Extreme Horror Essentials Pt 7: Irreversible
No full textIn this episode host Zoë Rose Smith is joined by academic writer Alison Taylor, author of Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema. Together they discuss one of the most controversial and hard to watch films, IRREVERSIBLE
Unter der Glasglocke: generationelle Befindlichkeiten in Zoë Jennys "Das Blütenstaubzimmer"
No full textZoë Jennys Debütroman Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997) schreibt sich einerseits in die literarische Tendenz des sogenannten ‚Fräuleinwunders‘, andererseits in die Tradition des Adoleszenzromans ein. Als Leistung des Textes ist seine plastische, sinnliche Sprache anzusehen, in der sich die nach innen gekehrte Perspektive der Ich-Erzählerin ausdrückt. Der hier vorgenommene Versuch einer differenzierten Analyse der Poetik des Textes ergibt eine verblüffende Nähe zu Sylvia Plaths autobiographischem Roman Die Glasglocke (1963). Der intertextuelle Ansatz wirft ein Licht auf den latenten Anspruch des Textes, über das Individuelle und Nationale hinauszugehen, sowie auf die universelle Botschaft über gegenwärtige Befindlichkeiten, die dem Text einen tragischen Unterton verleiht.Das Blütenstaubzimmer, a debut novel by Zoë Jenny published in 1997 (The Pollen Room, 1999, English translation by Elizabeth Gaffney), can be perceived as a book belonging to the ‚Fräuleinwunder‘ and adolescent novel traditions. What should be exceptionally appreciated is the artistic and sensuous language that reflects a looking inward first person narrative perspective. The thorough analysis of the poetics used by the Swiss author surprisingly bears resemblance to The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath (1963). An inter-textual approach sheds light on the latent intention of the text to go beyond an individual or national level and on the universal message on a contemporary condition of man and its tragic overtones.Debiutancka powieść Zoë Jenny Kwietny pył (1997, wydanie polskie w tłumaczeniu Reginy Tyszkiewicz, 1999) wpisuje się z jednej strony w tendencję literacką ‚Fräuleinwunder‘, z drugiej w tradycję powieści adolescencyjnej. Na uznanie zasługuje plastyczny, zmysłowy język powieści, w którym wyraża się zwrócona do wewnątrz, pierwszoosobowa perspektywa narracyjna. Podjęta tu próba szczegółowej analizy poetyki tekstu szwajcarskiej autorki wykazała zaskakujące pokrewieństwo do autobiograficznej powieści Sylvii Plath Szklany klosz (1963). Intertekstualne podejście rzuca światło na latentną intencję tekstu wyjścia poza horyzont indywidualny czy narodowy oraz na uniwersalny przekaz na temat współczesnej kondycji jednostki, który nadaje tekstowi wydźwięk tragiczny
Serious Play on the Fringes of Empire: Zoë Wicomb, Thomas Pringle, and the Transnational Author
No full textDiscusses the novel Still Life (2020) by the Scottish/South African writer Zoë Wicomb, which portrays a contemporary novelist researching the life and significance of the Scottish/South African poet Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) through an imaginative collaboration with an early 20th century bellelettristic biographer (referencing Virginia Woolf\u27s imaginative biography Orlando) and with the intervention of two African figures Pringle believed himself to have liberated, the West Indian ex-slave Mary Prince (c. 1788-1833) and Hinza, the Tswana boy memorialized in one of Pringle\u27s best-known South African poems, suggesting that Wicomb\u27s novel (and her oeuvre) present an important transnational version of authorial identity of wider significance in the current development of Scottish literary studies [PGS]
La représentation du corps féminin : ostracisme, stéréotypes et concupiscence dans David’s Story de Zoë Wicomb
No full textThis article explores Zoë Wicomb’s complex representation of the Black female body in her first novel David’s Story, which deals mainly with the condition of the female guerrilla fighter during and after the struggle for liberation. These women warriors have served the nation and have contribu-ted to its liberation through their bodies, but have also been silenced and ignored in the post-apartheid era. In addition, they have been subjected to multiple forms of physical and sexual violence by their own comrades within the Anti-apartheid Movement. The Black female body, as it appears in the novel, is a site of power, oppression, violence, and even complicity. The pre-sent work tasks itself, firstly, with analyzing not only how the author deconstructs the stereotypical images of the strong female guerrilla but also those concerning Coloured women’s bodies which have been marked by racial and sexual differences, focusing here especially on the question of concupiscence. Then, I will concentrate on the way the female body is represented and inscribed in language. Finally, I will analyze Zoë Wicomb’s narrative techniques by considering the impossibility of representing the body in the absence of discourse
A fragmented history: visual sites of traumav in Zoë Wicomb's works of fiction
No full textThis thesis examines key works of fiction by the South African author Zoë Wicomb, re-reading them as engagements with the country’s traumatic apartheid past. A crucial argument advanced is that Wicomb’s prose makes trauma readable and visible through several explicitly visual moments. The thesis argues that Wicomb creates pictures in words, shedding light on the traumatic struggles of people in apartheid and post-apartheid settings and that such ekphrastic descriptions of visual media can make visible states of inner being. Such pivotal visual moments in her fictions include references to images such as photographs, art, and sculpture, but also hallucinations, dreams, or visions. These visual descriptions in the fictions do not only point to historical traumas and acts of violence against black bodies, but are themselves narrated in a broken, dismembered, and discontinuous way, thereby staging a collapse of language. The thesis argues that Zoë Wicomb’s works of fiction consistently explore correspondences between literature and various visual media and that this is one of the hallmarks of her authorship
Who’s passing now? Mobility, race, and value in Zoë Wicomb’s playing in the light
No full textThis article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light (2006), arguing that the novel's representation of racial passing, linguistic performance, and value present a radical departure from standard accounts of racial passing. In Wicomb's novel, individual advancement and social mobility are central aspirations both to the "play-whites" in the novel as well as to the postapartheid author-figure. In this way Wicomb's novel highlights not only the economic underpinnings of racial identity, but the continuation of racial exclusion in postapartheid South Africa. The novel provides an especially perceptive representation of racial capitalism in which the linguistic dominance of English, the development of neoliberalism, and continued hyper-exploitation produce a context in which social mobility is still dependent on passing
An evaluation of contralateral hand involvement in the operation of the Delft Self-Grasping Hand, an adjustable passive prosthesis.
No full textThe Delft Self-Grasping Hand is an adjustable passive prosthesis operated using the concept of tenodesis (where opening and closing of the hand is mechanically linked to the flexion and extension of the wrist). As a purely mechanical device that does not require harnessing, the Self-Grasping Hand offers a promising alternative to current prostheses. However, the contralateral hand is almost always required to operate the mechanism to release a grasp and is sometimes also used to help form the grasp; hence limiting the time it is available for other purposes. In this study we quantified the amount of time the contralateral hand was occupied with operating the Self-Grasping Hand, classified as either direct or indirect interaction, and investigated how these periods changed with practice. We studied 10 anatomically intact participants learning to use the Self-Grasping Hand fitted to a prosthesis simulator. The learning process involved 10 repeats of a feasible subset of the tasks in the Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure (SHAP). Video footage was analysed, and the time that the contralateral hand was engaged in grasping or releasing was calculated. Functionality scores increased for all participants, plateauing at an Index of Functionality of 33.5 after 5 SHAP attempts. Contralateral hand involvement reduced significantly from 6.47 (first 3 attempts) to 4.68 seconds (last three attempts), but as a proportion of total task time remained relatively steady (increasing from 29% to 32%). For 9/10 participants most of this time was supporting the initiation of grasps rather than releases. The reliance on direct or indirect interactions between the contralateral hand and the prosthesis varied between participants but appeared to remain relatively unchanged with practice. Future studies should consider evaluating the impact of reliance on the contralateral limb in day-to-day life and development of suitable training methods
Complex Collaborations: Esla Joubert\u27s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena and Zoë Wicomb\u27s David\u27s Story.
No full textThis paper examines how South African author Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2001) critiques collaborative life writing. More specifically, this paper argues that the faltering collaboration between the protagonists David and the unnamed amanuensis in David’s Story serves as an illuminating critique of past collaborative works such as Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980) by shifting the focus from the end product to the collaborative writing process that precedes them. The analyses reveal that the fallability of language demonstrated in Wicomb’s novel serves as a reminder of the impossibility of the narrative project itself that the amanuensis and David have set out to work on. David\u27s Story thus questions the reliability of story-telling and narration, as well as the notion of truth. Moreover, this paper argues that Wicomb’s novel highlights what can be unequal power-relations between an amanuensis and an autobiographical subject in a collaborative process
- …
