"My novel, Hill of Fools"
- Authors: Peteni, R L , Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7038 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007376 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47869
- Description: preprint , R.L. Peteni - 'There is a tendency in human beings to pay no heed to events in small remote areas. They would rather concern themselves only with those events which make headlines, with political upheavals and industrial conflicts centred in large metropolitan regions. Yet there is always drama and human conflict in the humblest rural village. In selecting a pastoral theme and small fictitious villages in an obscure corner of Keiskammahoek as the setting of the novel, I had an ironic intention. Themes illustrated in these obscure villages would, I believed, have more universal application than they would if I had selected a larger centre, identifiable personages and known political trends. I did not want anybody to sit back, complacent, feeling that the spotlight was on Lennox Sebe’s Ciskei alone, or Kaiser Matanzima’s Transkei, or John Vorster’s apartheid South Africa. The spotlight is on the Ciskei, yes, on Transkei, on South Africa, on any other country where public life and personal relationships are bedevilled by tribalism or racialism or any form of sectionalism.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: performing history in the theatre of Charles Kean, Richard W. Schoch: book review
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7050 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007393 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48030
- Description: preprint , This book is a primarily a study of Charles Kean’s productions of Shakespeare’s English chronicle plays at the Princess’s Theatre between 1852 and 1859, a period crucial to the development of ideas of English nationalism. Schoch focuses on these particular stagings as more than drama; as performances of nineteenth century theories of history and historical representation. His project operates under the aegis of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural theory, and is suspicious of neo-marxian fundamentalism.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Irony and transcendence on the Renaissance stage
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7067 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007455 , https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.3.4728
- Description: preprint , This is the concluding essay in a collection entitled 'This Earthly Stage'. The chapter argues that the peculiar task of the stage metaphor - the notion of the theatre as a metaphor for life,which involves complex interactions between rarefied intellectual constructions of life and mundane reality - is to interrogate the tension between an inscrutable cosmic order and the limited viewpoints of ordinary humanity.The piece moves from general considerations of irony and dramatic irony, via an analysis of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, to comments on Petrarch, Pico and Vives, culminating in a consideration of irony and transcendence in Shakespeare's last plays.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Language and value: towards accepting a richer linguistic ecology for South Africa
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7042 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007383 , https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.28.2.05wri
- Description: preprint , Language policy debate is often obscured by two factors: failure to acknowledge different time-frames attending contrasting positions, and failure to recognise that ordinary people are motivated by their perceived best interests in the present. This article argues that the key to more general public acceptance of linguistic ecological diversity in South Africa is to shift the emphasis from policy development to practical language cultivation issues. Provide the requisite cultivation support, and acceptance of a revitalised future for African languages becomes more assured. It should also be understood that the modernisation of African languages in South Africa has a political dimension concerning which South African language commentators are strangely silent. This political thrust may not be entirely congruent with the concerns of those whose brief for African languages is primarily cultural or ecological – if, indeed, they are even aware of it. Finally, it needs to be recognised that language development under conditions of controlled influence, as in the civil service or schooling, is potentially achievable (with whatever difficulty), but that this must be complemented by authentic contemporary intellectual work published in African languages if the linguistic dimension of the African Renaissance is to take off.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Language policy and planning: general constraints and pressures
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7043 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007385
- Description: preprint , The general idea of language policy and planning is easily expressed. Christopher Brumfit, for one, defines language planning as “The attempt to control the use, status, and structure of a language through a language policy developed by a government or other authority” (see the Oxford Companion to the English Language). The Random House Dictionary of the English Language concurs, but adds some detail: language planning is “the development of policies or programmes designed to direct or change language use, as through the establishment of an official language, the standardization or modernization of a language, or the development or alteration of a writing system”. Such definitions could easily be multiplied, and they differ only slightly in nuance and depth.Language Policy is the formal, often legally entrenched, expression of language planning.
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- Date Issued: 2007
The relevance of (South African) Renaissance studies
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7055 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007416 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sisa/article/view/40550
- Description: preprint , This paper is part of a longer piece devoted to the elucidation of two related propositions. The first is that in South Africa the humanities in general, and Renaissance Studies in particular, are stymied by a lack of strategic thinking from those in the academy. The second is that the humanities, and Renaissance Studies, and Shakespeare, are valid and needed in this country, possibly as never before. This paper tackles the latter question, the challenge of intrinsic relevance. What possible bearing have art and literature, politics and religion, customs and technologies developed 10,000 kilometres away and nearly half a millennium ago to do with South Africa in the 21st century? I steal up on the main issue by outlining an abbreviated rhetoric of relevance, establishing a framework within which intrinsic relevance can be conceptualised for Renaissance Studies today.
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- Date Issued: 2005
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.
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- Date Issued: 2010
The humanities, vocationalism and the public good: exploring 'the Hamlet factor'
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7028 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007214 , https://doi.org/10.1080/17535360712331393503
- Description: preprint , This paper argues that the social mission of the humanities is no longer well understood by the public, sometimes not even by the very institutions seeking to attract students to these disciplines, the universities. It becomes difficult to argue for the cogency of research in the humanities, let alone for a specific national research agenda, when the general relation between the humanities and society is widely mistaken. To address such misapprehensions, the discussion outlines as clearly as possible the characteristic procedures of the humanities, the manner in which they inform individual and social transformation, and the contemporary predicament which makes them more rather than less needed in society’s repertoire of educational resources. With this understanding in place, the paper then puts forward suggestions for strengthening research in the humanities as part of a broader programme to renovate the humanities in the South African education system.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Nathaniel Merriman’s lecture: “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History”
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7060 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007424 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48132
- Description: preprint , “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” is the second of two lectures on Shakespeare given by Archdeacon Nathaniel Merriman in Grahamstown in 1857. The first was delivered in the Court House on the 2nd September 1857, and the second two months later, on Friday 6th November that same year, again in the Court House. The lecture was published in 1858. An article placing the lectures in their local context appeared in Shakespeare in Southern Africa 20 (2008): 25-37, accompanying an annotated edition of the first lecture, “On the Study of Shakspeare”. Readers desiring details of the editorial principles adopted in producing annotated editions of the two lectures are referred to the introductory material prefacing the first lecture.
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- Date Issued: 2009
'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.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‘Omega’
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7029 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007216 , https://doi.org/10.1080/1368879042000210595
- Description: preprint , [Author's note]: This piece offers a discursive foray into some leading features of South African Shakespeare, framed between two symbolic ‘book-ends’: the first authenticated Shakespearean production which took place in Cape Town in 1801 (‘Alpha’), and a recent groundbreaking, multilingual version of Julius Caesar which premiered in 2001(“‘Omega’”). Focusing mainly on acts of translation, literal and cultural, the article follows a trajectory from colonial origins to explore some of the adaptive travail experienced by the Shakespeare text as it infiltrates, contests, melds into and sometimes illuminates a South African culture both potentially (and actually) very different from the colonial culture of, say, Australia or New Zealand. The article includes a brief prospectus for the future.
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- Date Issued: 2004
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.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Introduction [to the book "Scatter the Shrilling Bones" by Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana]
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7056 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007417
- Description: preprint , Scatter the Shrilling Bones by Sithembele Xhegwana comprises an ordered sequence of poems that conveys a journey both literal and spiritual. Revisitation is the organizing principle of the collection – the return to rural sources and origins by a consciousness estranged and illumined by modernity (cf. ‘The Return’). Underlying the collection is the theme of the night journey, whose archetype in western culture is Odysseus’ descent to the underworld – a pattern identified as such in the concluding essay ‘Starting from my Place: Notes on an Aesthetic’. The underworld here is literally the return to the home territory – a journey from Cape Town to the rural Eastern Cape – but also a revisiting of the mental world of traditional Africa: ‘Here at home, here all guilt begins’ (‘Homecoming’). The return journey is haunted by nightmare memories of mental illness, the schizophrenic episodes accompanying (or occasioned by?) the poet’s initial encounters with modernity. This illness is represented as both pathological and cultural – a price paid for challenging and rejecting the old certainties while grappling with new assumptions: “He undermines the ancestors, That’s why he suffers. Let him.” (‘To Himself’)
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- Date Issued: 2003
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?
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- Date Issued: 2010
Mussolini's moment: Roy Sargeant directs The Merchant of Venice at Maynardville, January, 2007
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7047 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007389 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48107
- Description: preprint , What an inspired choice of play for this year’s Maynardville offering! With the national scene strewn with trials and rumours of trials, all of them vital to the quality of life citizens of this fair city beneath the beautiful mountain (‘Belmont’) may hope to enjoy in the future, Shakespeare’s cliff-hanger about the use and abuse of the law couldn’t be more apt.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Umabatha: global and local
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7032 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007364 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138390408691324
- Description: preprint , There can be few shows that test the dimensions and pitfalls of 'globalised' theatre as thoroughly as Welcome Msomi's Umabatha. The worldwide success of the show, in box-office terms, can hardly be argued with. And yet, in its very conception, the vehicle is so riven by intrinsic cultural, theatrical, class and 'nationist' tensions that different audiences cannot but reap utterly different experiences, depending on their own cultural and intellectual inheritance.The show is an instance where theatre practice (sometimes) obfuscates political and aesthetic discourse, showing how easily cultures miss each other and fail to connect, and how easily specific historical, geographical and imperial associations are swamped by shallow 'globalised' audience response.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Hill of Fools: a South African Romeo and Juliet?
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7039 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007377 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47866
- Description: preprint , What kind of debt does Hill of Fools owe to Shakespeare? Look up ‘Peteni’ in the Companion to South African English Literature (1986) and you will be told that Hill of Fools is “loosely based on the story of Romeo and Juliet” (155). Scan the first newspaper reviews (see “The Early Reception of Hill of Fools” in this volume) and it is noticeable that a great many journalists focus on the Shakespeare connection as a means of introducing the book to their readers. One of the publisher’s readers, Henry Chakava, urged before publication that once all references to tribe or tribalism had been excised “the result will be a Romeo and Juliet type story much more superior to Weep Not Child.” The author himself reportedly described the book as “a black Romeo and Juliet drama” (Tribune Reporter 1988). And, indeed, some kind of parallel is patent to anyone who reads Hill of Fools with Shakespeare’s play in mind.
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- Date Issued: 2004
The early reception of Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7040 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007379 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
- Description: preprint , The early reception of Peteni’s novel is interesting because it illustrates the mind-sets and critical assumptions of those who first mediated the novel to different readerships. The book initially caused little stir either in South Africa or abroad, and it has made its way quietly in later years in no small part due to support from set-work prescription committees, and its translation into other media, radio and television. A one-off novel by an unknown writer is unlikely to gather critical momentum in international discussion, and the book has been more often noticed in academic studies focused on the Xhosa novel, some of which barely register that the work was first written in English. However, today it is certainly among the novels most widely-read by ordinary South Africans, not only those from the Eastern Cape, but for among many throughout the country who encountered it at school.
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- Date Issued: 2004
Inventing the Human: Brontosaurus Bloom and “the Shakespeare in us”
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7045 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007387 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351963534/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315264264-15
- Description: preprint , This essay was occasioned by the casual reading of a book called Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (2002), a collection of responses, pro, ante and puzzled, to Bloom’s Shakespearean magnum opus. The more I browsed in the assembled essays, some of them originally reviews and conference papers, others specially commissioned responses, the more curious I became. On the whole, the contributors seemed not to understand Bloom, at least not to understand him adequately, which is a devastating handicap when the task in hand is to pass judgment. The problem seems to be that few academic commentators take Bloom seriously, accepting that he means what he says; more accurately, they find it hard to entertain with full seriousness matters Bloom intends should be taken entirely seriously. Shakespeareans, locked into their various ways of understanding the world and critical activity, generally try to find Shakespeare (or “Shakespeare”) through reading Bloom, whereas he wants us to find ourselves through reading Shakespeare: to uncover what Emerson called ‘the Shakespeare in us’ (‘Shakespeare, or The Poet’, 256). The difference is stupendous. We ought first to ask in regard to Bloom’s blockbuster the question Bloom tells us he learned from Kenneth Burke, ‘What is the author trying to do for himself or herself by writing this work?’ (Shakespeare, 412).
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- Date Issued: 2008
An introduction: Peteni in context
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7036 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007372 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47870
- Description: preprint , It is rare for a writer to make a literary impact with only one novel. It is even more unusual when that work is written by a novice author in his early sixties. Yet such is the case of R.L. Peteni, whose novel, Hill of Fools, was published by David Philip in South Africa in 1976, and internationally in the same year by Heinemann in the African Writers Series. Four years later, in 1980, the book was translated by the author into Xhosa as Kwazidenge and published by the Lovedale Press. Twenty years after initial publication, in 1996, there came a television version of Kwazidenge broadcast by the SABC, starring Willie Thambo and Amanda Quwe, though the locale was translated – in the bizarre logic of television – to an urban environment on the Cape Flats. The transposition, though pragmatic in terms of television demographics, destroyed much of the point of Peteni’s work, for Hill of Fools is South Africa’s first regional novel in English by a black writer. It is also the first novel in English by a Xhosa-speaker.
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- Date Issued: 2004