1,720,963 research outputs found
Reading in the In-Between: Pre-Scripting the “Postscript” to Elizabeth Costello
No full textBy offering a close reading and analysis of “Postscript”, the text that concludes Coetzee’s collection of “lessons” in his 2003 book Elizabeth Costello, in conjunction with Hofmannsthal’s 1902 “Chandos Letter” (including brief reference to the Nobel Address “He and His Man”), the essay demonstrates the implications of palimpsest-tenuous reading. Informed by Gérard Genette’s study of the palimpsest as a mode of literary presentation particularly suited to poststructuralist understandings of the disassociation between author and protagonist, the essay argues, furthermore, that palimpsests writing articulates the conjunctive double of language and fiction as, philosophically speaking, the general and every single person’s writing/reading as particular at the point where mutually historicising and historicised imaginings intersect along an elliptical axis connecting diachronic distance and synchronic proximity.
Opsomming Die opstel bied \u27n dieptelesing en -ontleding van “Postscript”, die teks wat Coetzee se versameling "lesse" in sy 2003-werk Elizabeth Costello afsluit, tesame met Hofmannsthal se “Chandos Letter” van 1902 (met inbegrip van \u27n vlugtige verwysing na die Nobel-toespraak “He and His Man”), en toon die implikasies van die palimpsestiese lees van \u27n teks. Geïnspireer deur Gérard Genette se studie van die palimpses as \u27n literêre aanbiedingsvorm wat veral geskik is vir poststrukturalistiese begrip van die disassosiasie tussen outeur en protagonis, voer die opstel voorts aan dat palimpsestiese skryfwerk uiting gee aan die konjunktiewe dubbelwerking van taal en fiksie as, filosofies gesproke, die algemene en elke enkele persoon se skryf- of leeswerk as partikulier op die punt waar onderling historiserende en gehistori-seerde verbeeldinge mekaar sny op \u27n elliptiese as wat diachroniese afstand en sinchroniese nabyheid verbind
The fateful click : soft surveillance in today‘s control society
Get PDFWhat could be more persuasive in our everyday digital high-tech world than
the imperatives ―"google!" and (in Facebook-speak) ―"friend!"? Who would
suspect these two hortatory commands that on the one hand urge us to look
for information online, and on the other to join the 800 million active users of
the social networking site Facebook, of opening the arena of ever more
encompassing global surveillance? How can it be that an innocuous mouse
click makes me part of the act of observing while simultaneously allowing for
the condition of being observed? After all, neither my personal Internet search
for knowledge nor the reassurance with which "Facebook helps you connect
and share with the people in your life", as the site asserts, seem to have
anything to do with the proverbial, more sinister Orwellian Big Brother "hard"
surveillance with CCTV cameras, nowadays surreptitiously installed in shops
and on buildings along city streets and public squares.http://www.africanrhetoric.orgam201
On the Way to Language: Reading Celan Philologically
No full textThresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology, edited by Kristina Mendicino and Dominik ZechnerState University of New York Press. 2023. Literature … in Theory. ix + pp. 314. LCCN 2022053651, ISBN 9781438494418 (hardcover: alk. paper), ISBN 9781438494395 (ebook
Benjamin's Storyteller through African eyes: Rallying the experience of the "ordinary" in late modernity
No full textAfrican Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 9 March 1998.Benjamin's famous figure of "The Storyteller", uncoupled from its exemplary historical
representatives like Nicolai Leskov, Johann Peter Hebel and, among others, Herodotus, Poe
and Kipling, has become almost stock in trade in contemporary reflections on narrative.
Literary criticism in particular has engaged with the storyteller and, to a lesser extent, with
his artisan-like craft and the form of the tale as opposed to the novel. Yet, the importance of
experience as being both an enabling condition and an effect of narration which Benjamin's
essay foregrounds is often concealed. Nevertheless, it is the experience of modernity, as I
shall argue, which animates this text in as much as its companion piece, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", and numerous others of the later writings, not least
"On some Motifs in Baudelaire". Experience furthermore, as "The Storyteller" makes
abundantly clear, situates us and governs the way we conduct, what amounts to, the narrative
of our lives, or to put in Biblical terms: the way in which "We spend our years as a tale that is
told". Conversely, as Benjamin says in relation to Baudelaire's character: "For someone who
is past experiencing, there is no consolation. But it is nothing other than this inability which
denotes the actual essence of anger. The angry man 'does not want to listen'; his arch-image
(Urbild) Timon rages against people indiscriminately; he is no longer in a position to distinguish the proven friend from the mortal enemy". It is at this intersection between the
(historical) conditions of possibility of experiencing and 'non-experiencing' or 'raving'
where I wish to situate my reading of "The Storyteller" against the foil of a recent 'local',
that is a Black South African, appropriation of the well known text in order to examine the
figure of a narrator, Ndebele, who is, as yet, not fully detached from the oral tradition of his
community, unlike most Western novelists. In addition, Benjamin's concept of experience
(Erfahrung) in its two dimensions of theory and critical method of investigation will be of
major concern, as will be the quality and desirability of a 'transaction of experience' or
austauchbare Erfahrung today
Doing literature now
Get PDFFor over 35 years SAVAL-LASA's Journal of Literary Studies, ably assisted and directed by Andries Oliphant, devoted itself to examining literary texts. In the waxing and waning of theories it did a remarkable job reading and discussing a plethora of writings in English and Afrikaans. Thus, to honour Andries's work with a much-deserved Festschrift seems to me not only fitting but also a timely juncture to address anew the purpose of literary studies, a scholarly field split in South Africa between an English-speaking tradition of literary criticism and a Continental European lineage of critical thought more aptly named literatuurwetenskap, knowledge of and about literature. From within the legacy of the latter, I want to mark this commemorative occasion with a moment of reflection in the spirit of J.M. Coetzee's 2003 essay "The Humanities in Africa," particularly at a time when the humanities and with it their most important support structure, literary studies, are facing a global stress test. Poignantly noted by Coetzee's protagonist Elizabeth Costello, the humanities are not only "in Africa but in the wider world too [in] an embattled situation" (2003, 119). Once "the core of the university," she muses as "an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking" (125). Diminishing registrations and lack of financial support for literature-language departments worldwide testify to the sad state of a field in competition nowadays with, among others, cultural, gender, queer, women's, environmental, postcolonial, decolonial, critical race, and translation studies. In addition, current theory fatigue in the humanities largely hinders rigorous questioning of what it means to do literature. Such questioning, however, is vital at a time when in the grip of the digital revolution under the sway of technoscience we find ourselves at institutional and intellectual crossroads.https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/jlsam2023Philosoph
On the praxis of writing time : Bernard Stiegler's concept of the orthographic moment as necessary complement to numerical atemporality
Get PDFLiterary Theory’s latest embrace of the Hard Sciences by way of forgetting
the ‘‘orthotheses of memory’’, broadly understood as mnemotechnics, it is argued,
erases one of the most important aspects of the literary craft, namely its capacity to
render and preserve a past that we did not live. Stiegler’s conceptualization of writing
as historically mediated technics of orthographic practice emphasizes questions of
time and idiomatic subjectivity, precisely those notions usually obscured or absent in
the Human Sciences’ ‘other’: the natural sciences, particularly under the condition of
today’s ‘‘numerical, industrial moment’’. Instead of being merely seduced by economic
rationality to produce accelerated innovation in science and technology in order
to secure a competitive edge in the global market, both Kulturwissenschaften (cultural
sciences) in place of the old Human Sciences—and Naturwissenschaften (natural
sciences) need to remember that human life is both zoon (politicon) and idios bios.http://link.springer.comjournal/110592015-12-31hb201
"Local is Lekker": Or Why the New South African Parochialism Will Not Go
No full textBased upon brief comparisons with other literatures, the article examines the current debates on South African literature, isolating four symptoms which seem to indicate national self-assertion via the high road of literature. These are the pride taken in locally produced artefacts; an increasing "cross-over" and mingling of different languages which make any quests for purity of language a risky business, challenging control over dominant discursive formations; the attempt to find an "authentic" South African voice in literature, and, finally, a questioning of hitherto accepted critical traditions and boundaries. But although the intense focus upon the local seems both necessary and fruitful at this particular juncture in South African political history, the birthpangs of an emerging literature ought not to blind its practitioners into becoming parochial by cutting themselves off from the international debate.
Opsomming Uitgaande van \u27n kort vergelyking met ander literature as basis, word die huidige debatte in Suid-Afrikaanse letterkunde in hierdie artiket ondersoek aan die hand van vier losstaande simptome, wat oenskynlik dui op nasionate selfhandhawing via die verhewe weg van die literatuur. Hierdie simptome behels \u27n trots op ptaaslik vervaardigde kunswerke; \u27n toenemende "ineenvloeiing" en vermenging van verskillende tale, wat enige soeke na taalsuiwerheid \u27n riskante onderneming maak, omdat die beheer oor dominante diskursiewe formasies uitgedaag word; die poging om \u27n "outentieke" Suid-Afrikaanse stem in die letterkunde te vind; en, uiteindelik, \u27n bevraagtekening van tot hiertoe aanvaarde kritiese tradisies en grense. Maar alhoewel die intense fokus op die plaaslike skynbaar tegelyk nodig en vrugbaar is op hierdie bepaalde tydstip in die Suid-Afrikaanse politieke geskiedenis, behoort die geboortepyne van \u27n opkomende literatuur nie die beoefenaars daarvan te verblind om parogiaal te raak deur hulle afsnyding van die internasionale debat nie
The spectre of radical aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière
Get PDFThesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2015.This study aims to determine what is left of the philosophical belief in art’s
potential to bring about social emancipation and change early in the 21st
century. It does so by critically assessing one of the most elaborate, emphatic
and influential contemporary re-assertions of this potential by French
philosopher Jacques Rancière. It focuses on three components of Rancière’s
writings on aesthetics and politics that are key to such an evaluation. First, his
affirmation of an emancipatory core at the heart of Idealist-Romanticist
aesthetics, the aesthetic works of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller
in particular. Second, his reconceptualization of autonomous and
heteronomous forms of political art in the modern era. Third, his critical
analyses of dominant tendencies within political art from the 1960s until
today and his own proposals for a truly emancipatory contemporary art
practice.
With regard to the first component, the project problematizes Rancière’s
return to aesthetics mainly by comparing it with theories recently articulated
by other radical Leftist thinkers. It concerns theories that emphasize the
contradictory political status of aesthetics as both reactionary and liberating
(Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson) or point to a constitutive, original violence
at its heart (Dave Beech & John Roberts). Based on this, I argue that
Rancière’s redemptive approach toward aesthetics is too one-dimensional,
resulting in an overly positive assessment of the emancipatory value of
traditional conceptions of aesthetics.
In relation to the second key aspect of Rancière’s political aesthetics, I
demonstrate how he offers a typically third way solution to the problematic of
art’s autonomy and heteronomy. He does so by integrating some of the most
complex twentieth century theorizations of both autonomous (Theodor
Adorno) and heteronomous positions (Peter Bürger) into a dialectical working
model. I argue that, regrettably, Rancière hereby also takes on board deeply
tragic views on art’s political potential, resulting in an overcautious stance
towards radically heteronomous art practices. Apart from critiquing him on
this score, I point to alternative conceptualizations of art’s autonomy and
heteronomy more suited to thinking the key characteristics and political
potential of contemporary radicalized art. As to Rancière’s critique of recent political art practices and his proposed
alternative, I find it to be driven by a misguided attempt at conceiving the
radical political potential of art in purely aesthetic terms to the neglect of other
functions traditionally taken up by political artists such as representation and
activism. I contend that not only can such a purist view on art’s politics not be
upheld in fact - which even holds for Rancière’s own, alternative aesthetic
politics of art - neither is it desirable if one wants to devise a robust and
versatile theoretical framework for thinking contemporary politicized art. I do
so by pointing to the radical political value of representational artistic
strategies, as well as artistic practices that engage in activities beyond those
traditionally associated with art.tm2015PhilosophyDPhilUnrestricte
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