“A Sort of Arcadian Country”: Plant-Life in Some Early South African Travelogues
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458061 , vital:75713 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n1_a1
- Description: Various branches of current ecocriticism are exploring ways of dismantling or at least diminishing dominant anthropocentric ways of evaluating the relationships among humans, the non-human world, and the literary imagination. Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and multispecies ecocriticism endeavour to re-evaluate the roles, even agency, of non-human life, as represented in literary works. This article unpacks the depiction of plants in three early South African travelogues (1795–1836), illuminating the sources of some enduring assumptions and iconic imageries in our relations with the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458061 , vital:75713 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n1_a1
- Description: Various branches of current ecocriticism are exploring ways of dismantling or at least diminishing dominant anthropocentric ways of evaluating the relationships among humans, the non-human world, and the literary imagination. Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and multispecies ecocriticism endeavour to re-evaluate the roles, even agency, of non-human life, as represented in literary works. This article unpacks the depiction of plants in three early South African travelogues (1795–1836), illuminating the sources of some enduring assumptions and iconic imageries in our relations with the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
The dark surrealism of Phyllis Haring’s poetry
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458160 , vital:75720 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n3_a4
- Description: The slender poetic oeuvre of Phyllis Haring (1919–2016) is now almost forgotten. Only one collection, A Taste of Salt, was published in 1976, and a number of poems appeared in small magazines until 1991. Though she is unquestionably a “minor poet,” I argue that her dream-like, dark yet musical work is worth attention, especially as something of a local pioneer in Surrealist techniques. (Surrealism’s influence more broadly in South African poetry is apparently yet to be comprehensively explored.) This article aims to reintroduce Haring’s work, and suggest some possibilities for further, more precisely theorised study. Following a biographical sketch and brief history of her publications, I respond to selected poems to provide a preliminary taste of her salty, almost Nietzschean, world-view, her craft, and some persistent techniques, themes and images – notably of human cruelty, death, and the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458160 , vital:75720 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n3_a4
- Description: The slender poetic oeuvre of Phyllis Haring (1919–2016) is now almost forgotten. Only one collection, A Taste of Salt, was published in 1976, and a number of poems appeared in small magazines until 1991. Though she is unquestionably a “minor poet,” I argue that her dream-like, dark yet musical work is worth attention, especially as something of a local pioneer in Surrealist techniques. (Surrealism’s influence more broadly in South African poetry is apparently yet to be comprehensively explored.) This article aims to reintroduce Haring’s work, and suggest some possibilities for further, more precisely theorised study. Following a biographical sketch and brief history of her publications, I respond to selected poems to provide a preliminary taste of her salty, almost Nietzschean, world-view, her craft, and some persistent techniques, themes and images – notably of human cruelty, death, and the natural world.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Narrating Whales in Southern Africa
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458117 , vital:75717 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-173420664c
- Description: Though the whaling stations on the South African coast are now closed, whaling in the southern oceans, both ‘illegal’ and ‘scientific’, continues to be a matter of controversy. Exploitation clashes in complex ways with whale-watching as a touristic activity, now a major drawcard to South Africa’s coastline. It appears no thorough survey of the history and sociology of whaling has yet been written, nor of the progression of those emotional investments in the presence of whales that drive animal rights programmes and tourism alike. Such literature on whales as exists in southern Africa throws interesting sidelights on this presence. This article explores the issues through such literary works as Douglas Livingstone’s poetry and the fictions of Laurens Van Der Post, Zakes Mda, Lyall Watson and Mia Couto.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458117 , vital:75717 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-173420664c
- Description: Though the whaling stations on the South African coast are now closed, whaling in the southern oceans, both ‘illegal’ and ‘scientific’, continues to be a matter of controversy. Exploitation clashes in complex ways with whale-watching as a touristic activity, now a major drawcard to South Africa’s coastline. It appears no thorough survey of the history and sociology of whaling has yet been written, nor of the progression of those emotional investments in the presence of whales that drive animal rights programmes and tourism alike. Such literature on whales as exists in southern Africa throws interesting sidelights on this presence. This article explores the issues through such literary works as Douglas Livingstone’s poetry and the fictions of Laurens Van Der Post, Zakes Mda, Lyall Watson and Mia Couto.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Learning Zulu: a secret history of language in South Africa
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: book review , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255 , vital:27997 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
- Description: Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: book review , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255 , vital:27997 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
- Description: Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Mongrel: essays, William Dicey
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142748 , vital:38113 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/143393
- Description: If I had the liberty to run an introductory course on South African history, I might well start with William Dicey’s Borderline (2004). Borderline recounts Dicey and some friends’ canoe trip down the Orange River, from Orania to the sea. It’s by turns lyrical and funny, and rich with historical perspectives stimulated by people and places Dicey encounters en route.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142748 , vital:38113 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/143393
- Description: If I had the liberty to run an introductory course on South African history, I might well start with William Dicey’s Borderline (2004). Borderline recounts Dicey and some friends’ canoe trip down the Orange River, from Orania to the sea. It’s by turns lyrical and funny, and rich with historical perspectives stimulated by people and places Dicey encounters en route.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
Feral whispering, community and the reach of the literary
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458091 , vital:75715 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171542
- Description: Google "elephant + basenji" and you will observe a remarkable event. Every so often, on the edge of Cecil Kop Game Reserve, bordering my home town of Mutare, Zimbabwe, one of the reserve's two elephants approaches the fence of a private house. On the house side is a Basenji dog. The two animals get as close to one another as the electrified fence permits. They seem to take a great interest in each other. Neither the other elephant, nor the household's other dog, participate in the exchange; this is a communing between two unique individuals. Sometimes, the elephant lies down, and she and the dog continue staring at each other. Just what is passing between them is impossible to say, but something is going on. Curiosity at least, and a measure of trust. Albeit tentative, a new, wholly unpredictable social aggregation has come into being, neither quite wild nor tamed: feral.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458091 , vital:75715 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171542
- Description: Google "elephant + basenji" and you will observe a remarkable event. Every so often, on the edge of Cecil Kop Game Reserve, bordering my home town of Mutare, Zimbabwe, one of the reserve's two elephants approaches the fence of a private house. On the house side is a Basenji dog. The two animals get as close to one another as the electrified fence permits. They seem to take a great interest in each other. Neither the other elephant, nor the household's other dog, participate in the exchange; this is a communing between two unique individuals. Sometimes, the elephant lies down, and she and the dog continue staring at each other. Just what is passing between them is impossible to say, but something is going on. Curiosity at least, and a measure of trust. Albeit tentative, a new, wholly unpredictable social aggregation has come into being, neither quite wild nor tamed: feral.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Mountainous freedom: the awkward romance of two Capetonian poets
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458105 , vital:75716 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC156475
- Description: This was by way of commenting on Butler's view of Sydney Clouts's poetry. Clouts, considered by some the finest South African poet of his generation, had received a posthumous shredding in Watson's earlier essay, "Sydney Clouts and the Limits of Romanticism" (1986). Those limits were reached, in Watson's view, partly in Romanticism's "negation of modernity," and partly in failing to gain traction in the late-colonial dislocations of apartheid South Africa. Interestingly, Clouts had also contemplated the settler-inherited dilemmas of language and belonging via the thoughts of another South American poet, Jorge Luis Borges.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458105 , vital:75716 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC156475
- Description: This was by way of commenting on Butler's view of Sydney Clouts's poetry. Clouts, considered by some the finest South African poet of his generation, had received a posthumous shredding in Watson's earlier essay, "Sydney Clouts and the Limits of Romanticism" (1986). Those limits were reached, in Watson's view, partly in Romanticism's "negation of modernity," and partly in failing to gain traction in the late-colonial dislocations of apartheid South Africa. Interestingly, Clouts had also contemplated the settler-inherited dilemmas of language and belonging via the thoughts of another South American poet, Jorge Luis Borges.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Elephants, compassion, and the largesse of literature
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:582 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018924
- Description: [From the text] Why is it that we do not raise a monument, a mausoleum, nor even a humble gravestone, to mark the death of every elephant? We habitually, even compulsively, do this for other humans, occasionally for treasured pets. Yet we do not do it for the most charismatic, gigantic, culturally resonant land animal we will ever encounter. Why not? Some possible answers. One: too much work. Another: we regard other animals as less conscious than ourselves; we are the only creatures who deserve to have our deaths so commemorated. A third: wild animals are part of wild ecosystems; it is ‘natural’ for them to die and to be reabsorbed namelessly back into those ecosystems. We humans, on the other hand, consider ourselves somehow separate from those ecosystems: we shield ourselves from ‘Nature’ with bricks and literatures while we live, with marble and epitaphs after we die.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:582 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018924
- Description: [From the text] Why is it that we do not raise a monument, a mausoleum, nor even a humble gravestone, to mark the death of every elephant? We habitually, even compulsively, do this for other humans, occasionally for treasured pets. Yet we do not do it for the most charismatic, gigantic, culturally resonant land animal we will ever encounter. Why not? Some possible answers. One: too much work. Another: we regard other animals as less conscious than ourselves; we are the only creatures who deserve to have our deaths so commemorated. A third: wild animals are part of wild ecosystems; it is ‘natural’ for them to die and to be reabsorbed namelessly back into those ecosystems. We humans, on the other hand, consider ourselves somehow separate from those ecosystems: we shield ourselves from ‘Nature’ with bricks and literatures while we live, with marble and epitaphs after we die.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
The death of the animal in South African history
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450096 , vital:74882 , https://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v55n2/v55n2a21.pdf
- Description: Matthew Calarco in his contribution to Paola Cavalieri's collection, The Death of the Animal (2009). Running through the conversations comprising this book is a thread of dissention at the Socratic, rationalistic approach taken by analytic philosophy to the question of rights for animals.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450096 , vital:74882 , https://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v55n2/v55n2a21.pdf
- Description: Matthew Calarco in his contribution to Paola Cavalieri's collection, The Death of the Animal (2009). Running through the conversations comprising this book is a thread of dissention at the Socratic, rationalistic approach taken by analytic philosophy to the question of rights for animals.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
Louise Bethlehem. Skin Tight Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath: Review
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458132 , vital:75718 , https://tinyurl.com/226m5t3e
- Description: Louise Bethlehem, South African-born but now tenured at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has to be one of the sharpest intelligences working in Southern African literary studies today. This slender book is characteristically scintillating, dense with metatextual theory, and shot through with anger. It is a text upon metatexts: a series of coruscating snapshots of four or so key moments of literary critical discourse that emerged from the South African 'lit-crit' establishment during the apartheid years, and one following it (the TRC). It pretends neither to be a survey of the discipline, nor--somewhat disdainfully--to be supported by an empirical layering of evidence. Rather, it explores how the discursive structures and rhetoric of chosen literary critical texts have failed to enact the liberation to which they lay claim.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458132 , vital:75718 , https://tinyurl.com/226m5t3e
- Description: Louise Bethlehem, South African-born but now tenured at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has to be one of the sharpest intelligences working in Southern African literary studies today. This slender book is characteristically scintillating, dense with metatextual theory, and shot through with anger. It is a text upon metatexts: a series of coruscating snapshots of four or so key moments of literary critical discourse that emerged from the South African 'lit-crit' establishment during the apartheid years, and one following it (the TRC). It pretends neither to be a survey of the discipline, nor--somewhat disdainfully--to be supported by an empirical layering of evidence. Rather, it explores how the discursive structures and rhetoric of chosen literary critical texts have failed to enact the liberation to which they lay claim.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
Thomas Mofolo, Traveller to the East: Review
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458147 , vital:75719 , https://tinyurl.com/57nmnsmy
- Description: On the centenary of its first publication by the Morija Book Depot as Moeti oa bochabela, Mofolo's strange, muddled little parable, touted as the first novel ever written by a Mosotho, makes a welcome reappearance. Penguin Classics have reissued Harry Ashton's 1934 translation, with a couple of pages of illustrations and Mofolo's own autobiographical sketch, a letter to Mr Franz, as frontispieces.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458147 , vital:75719 , https://tinyurl.com/57nmnsmy
- Description: On the centenary of its first publication by the Morija Book Depot as Moeti oa bochabela, Mofolo's strange, muddled little parable, touted as the first novel ever written by a Mosotho, makes a welcome reappearance. Penguin Classics have reissued Harry Ashton's 1934 translation, with a couple of pages of illustrations and Mofolo's own autobiographical sketch, a letter to Mr Franz, as frontispieces.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
"Muscled Presence": Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake"
- Authors: Everitt, Mariss , Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2262 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004642
- Description: Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake" is an artwork which addresses precisely these questions, seeking a manner of portraying the snake which is neither grossly appropriative nor wholly detached, neither ethically empty nor preachy. In its multi-angled structure, Livingstone attempts aesthetically "to establish and embellish ... a contact zone with the nonhuman animals who share our world with us, but accepting also that there exist considerable venues on either side of this contact zone that are, on the one hand, only human, and on the other hand, only nonhuman". Even in his more formally scientific work, Livingstone argues for the inevitability of such limits to knowledge, and for the value of the imagination in addressing them.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Everitt, Mariss , Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2262 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004642
- Description: Douglas Livingstone's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake" is an artwork which addresses precisely these questions, seeking a manner of portraying the snake which is neither grossly appropriative nor wholly detached, neither ethically empty nor preachy. In its multi-angled structure, Livingstone attempts aesthetically "to establish and embellish ... a contact zone with the nonhuman animals who share our world with us, but accepting also that there exist considerable venues on either side of this contact zone that are, on the one hand, only human, and on the other hand, only nonhuman". Even in his more formally scientific work, Livingstone argues for the inevitability of such limits to knowledge, and for the value of the imagination in addressing them.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
Unconscious nobility: the animal poetry of Harold Farmer
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6122 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004705
- Description: I want to suggest that Harold Farmer's poetry works repeatedly in this area of ambiguity, a zone of tension triangulated, as it were, between three impulses. First : a notion (or even the fact) that a sense of community depends on 'knowing' what the 'other' is thinking or feeling, and on being able to articulate that knowledge. Second : suspecting, or even knowing, that certain reaches of the mind of the 'other' are fundamentally, and fascinatingly, unknowable - of the realm of the unconscious. And third : knowing (or just fearing or hoping) that any secure distinction between ourselves-as-humans and ourselves-as-sharing-animal-traits is artificial, or at least permeable. Hence, while Farmer's wild animals are perpetually on the brink of disappearing from sight and understanding, it is precisely that mysteriousness which attracts us, can sometimes envelop us, and even speak to us. In having spoken and been spoken to, we are somehow ennobled.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6122 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004705
- Description: I want to suggest that Harold Farmer's poetry works repeatedly in this area of ambiguity, a zone of tension triangulated, as it were, between three impulses. First : a notion (or even the fact) that a sense of community depends on 'knowing' what the 'other' is thinking or feeling, and on being able to articulate that knowledge. Second : suspecting, or even knowing, that certain reaches of the mind of the 'other' are fundamentally, and fascinatingly, unknowable - of the realm of the unconscious. And third : knowing (or just fearing or hoping) that any secure distinction between ourselves-as-humans and ourselves-as-sharing-animal-traits is artificial, or at least permeable. Hence, while Farmer's wild animals are perpetually on the brink of disappearing from sight and understanding, it is precisely that mysteriousness which attracts us, can sometimes envelop us, and even speak to us. In having spoken and been spoken to, we are somehow ennobled.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
The dassie and the hunter: a South African meeting, by Jeff Opland: book review
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6125 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004709
- Description: [From the intoduction]: In this fascinating if not quite fine book Professor Opland, doyen scholar of oral poetries, treads that razor-edged line, devil of all memoirists, between humility and hubris, between open honesty and wallowing in one’s own unavoidability. David Yali-Manisi, the other half of this “South African meeting,” helps Opland out with his almost indefatigably calming, selfcontained, wise and energised presence. The relationship between these two men is an extraordinary, strangely evolving, not always smooth dance through several decades of South African history, politics, and academia. It really is ‘South African’ in the way in which it serves as lightning-rod to so many racial, personal, party-political, and literary currents in our recent past.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6125 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004709
- Description: [From the intoduction]: In this fascinating if not quite fine book Professor Opland, doyen scholar of oral poetries, treads that razor-edged line, devil of all memoirists, between humility and hubris, between open honesty and wallowing in one’s own unavoidability. David Yali-Manisi, the other half of this “South African meeting,” helps Opland out with his almost indefatigably calming, selfcontained, wise and energised presence. The relationship between these two men is an extraordinary, strangely evolving, not always smooth dance through several decades of South African history, politics, and academia. It really is ‘South African’ in the way in which it serves as lightning-rod to so many racial, personal, party-political, and literary currents in our recent past.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
White writers and Shaka Zulu
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
- Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
- Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
Winter Solstice
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1994
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460516 , vital:75944 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_156
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1994
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1994
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460516 , vital:75944 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_156
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1994
Roy Holland, Insights and Outsights. Cape Town David Philip, 1989. Book Review
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460504 , vital:75943 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_183
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460504 , vital:75943 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_183
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
Celebration
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460412 , vital:75937 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460412 , vital:75937 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
Homes
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460462 , vital:75940 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460462 , vital:75940 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
Reading Thomas Merton
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460491 , vital:75942 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460491 , vital:75942 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988