David Lurie's learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7063 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007428 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
- Description: preprint , One of the teasing characteristics of novels soused in literariness, like J.M. Coetzee’s, is their tendency to leak, to bleed, into vast inchoate terrains of intertextuality.The reader is constantly challenged to measure and assess their implications within or against the frail containing form of the story, much as Russian formalism taught us to keep sujet and fable in perpetual dialogue. However, it has become apparent that in the dense thickets of commentary occasioned by Coetzee’s most controversial novel, Disgrace (1999), insufficient attention has been paid to the intertextual implications of David Lurie’s learning, his scholarly preoccupations. Unless the reader attempts this kind of exploration, two of the most vexed issues freighting the novel’s central fabulation: Lucy’s curiously stoical, impassive response to her rape, together with her decision to stay on in South Africa; and David Lurie’s sudden, seemingly inexplicable care for the doomed dogs, from their last moments at the animal shelter until he lovingly consigns their corpses to the incinerator, must remain opaque. In particular, the final words of the novel, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220), uttered in relation to the immanent “Lösung” of the little dog Bev Shaw calls Driepoot, will tend to taunt the reader, rather than illuminate.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7063 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007428 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
- Description: preprint , One of the teasing characteristics of novels soused in literariness, like J.M. Coetzee’s, is their tendency to leak, to bleed, into vast inchoate terrains of intertextuality.The reader is constantly challenged to measure and assess their implications within or against the frail containing form of the story, much as Russian formalism taught us to keep sujet and fable in perpetual dialogue. However, it has become apparent that in the dense thickets of commentary occasioned by Coetzee’s most controversial novel, Disgrace (1999), insufficient attention has been paid to the intertextual implications of David Lurie’s learning, his scholarly preoccupations. Unless the reader attempts this kind of exploration, two of the most vexed issues freighting the novel’s central fabulation: Lucy’s curiously stoical, impassive response to her rape, together with her decision to stay on in South Africa; and David Lurie’s sudden, seemingly inexplicable care for the doomed dogs, from their last moments at the animal shelter until he lovingly consigns their corpses to the incinerator, must remain opaque. In particular, the final words of the novel, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220), uttered in relation to the immanent “Lösung” of the little dog Bev Shaw calls Driepoot, will tend to taunt the reader, rather than illuminate.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
Learning to be original
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7065 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007431
- Description: preprint , My topic suggested itself in response to a point made at a seminar on University autonomy. Someone observed that many people, even shack dwellers, are interested in the cosmos and they always would be. The remark came in the course of a debate concerning the cost of the SKA project, the massively expensive square kilometer array telescope for which South Africa is bidding against Australia, viewed in relation to the country’s huge list of social backlogs: Big science versus food and decent housing; a false opposition, or a grim choice? You can imagine the debate. The nugget that stayed with me was the tangential comment that ordinary people are always interested in the cosmos. If so, is this true merely because human cultures traditionally incorporate such an interest, or because humans themselves actually need a relation to the cosmos? What might this need be?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7065 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007431
- Description: preprint , My topic suggested itself in response to a point made at a seminar on University autonomy. Someone observed that many people, even shack dwellers, are interested in the cosmos and they always would be. The remark came in the course of a debate concerning the cost of the SKA project, the massively expensive square kilometer array telescope for which South Africa is bidding against Australia, viewed in relation to the country’s huge list of social backlogs: Big science versus food and decent housing; a false opposition, or a grim choice? You can imagine the debate. The nugget that stayed with me was the tangential comment that ordinary people are always interested in the cosmos. If so, is this true merely because human cultures traditionally incorporate such an interest, or because humans themselves actually need a relation to the cosmos? What might this need be?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
Third World Express: trains and “revolution” in Southern African poetry
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7066 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007453 , https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v31i1.34
- Description: preprint , This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The piece also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7066 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007453 , https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v31i1.34
- Description: preprint , This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The piece also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
'Iron on iron': modernism engaging apartheid in some South African railway poems
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7068 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007459 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2011.626177
- Description: preprint , Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7068 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007459 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2011.626177
- Description: preprint , Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
Guy Butler’s South Africanism: ‘Being present where you are’
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7069 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007460 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2012.730182
- Description: preprint , A peer-reviewed lecture delivered at Rhodes University on the occasion of the presentation to Professor Wright of the English Academy's Gold Medal, 16 November 2011. Guy Butler (1918-2001) has been gone some ten years. This lecture sets out to illuminate the thinking behind his important role in South Africa's national life. The institutions he created continue to make vital cultural contributions in South Africa's efforts to make sense of its own complex historical make-up, working towards a happier, richer, and more equal future. However, despite what he achieved, there is little surety that today the rationale informing his massive effort to foster processes of artistic and cultural endeavour has been appreciated or accurately understood.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7069 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007460 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2012.730182
- Description: preprint , A peer-reviewed lecture delivered at Rhodes University on the occasion of the presentation to Professor Wright of the English Academy's Gold Medal, 16 November 2011. Guy Butler (1918-2001) has been gone some ten years. This lecture sets out to illuminate the thinking behind his important role in South Africa's national life. The institutions he created continue to make vital cultural contributions in South Africa's efforts to make sense of its own complex historical make-up, working towards a happier, richer, and more equal future. However, despite what he achieved, there is little surety that today the rationale informing his massive effort to foster processes of artistic and cultural endeavour has been appreciated or accurately understood.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012