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Intellectual challenge is as necessary as breathing: an interview with Laurence Wright

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence , Pearce, B
  • Date: 2009
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Article
  • Identifier: vital:7059 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007422
  • Description: Professor Laurence Wright is Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. In 2009, he will have completed 25 years of research, teaching and scholarship at Rhodes University and this interview marks the occasion. A Rhodes Scholar and a Commonwealth Scholar, he studied at the universities of Rhodes, Warwick and Oxford. He is also Honorary Life President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. He has published widely in literary studies and is the Managing Editor of two academic journals as well as of the poetry magazine New Coin. He currently serves on the Council of the English Academy and is a co-opted member of the English National Language Body. He has taken a broad interest in the role of English in this country, ranging from language policy and teacher education matters, to archival research and the role of the humanities in public life. I thought that it would be worthwhile to interview him as his knowledge of literature is substantial, while his incisive and engaging thoughts on a range of topics are worth hearing. The interview was conducted intermittently by email between July and October, 2008.
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  • Date Issued: 2009

Politics, latent and overt, in Hill of Fools

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2004
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: vital:7064 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007430
  • Description: [From the text]: R. L. Peteni’s novel Hill of Fools (1976) is a work that benefits greatly when Collingwood’s maxim is observed. The author’s family history and the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication add a dimension of political and social meaning which its surface deliberately occludes. Perhaps more importantly, while the story can readily be enjoyed, the quality of sensibility behind the work is not readily accessed without understanding some of the socio-political background.
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  • Date Issued: 2004

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

Confronting the African nightmare: Yael Farber’s SeZaR (theatre review)

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2001
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: vital:7046 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007388
  • Description: Yael Farber’s adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
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  • Date Issued: 2001

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

English in South Africa : effective communication and the policy debate : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

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

"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

Repositioning Renaissance studies in South Africa: strategic thinking or 'business-as-usual

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2006
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: vital:7054 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007415
  • Description: Increasingly, in many leading South African tertiary departments of literature, early modern studies have a fairly slim hold on the core curriculum. More and more, departmental offerings concentrate on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, perhaps in the belief either that today’s students are so poorly prepared that they will never be able to cope with the mental shifts necessary to appreciate pre-industrial literature and its language, or, worse, that nothing before the C19 colonial incursion into South Africa can really matter very much to undergraduates. Whatever the reason, in such departments, it is no longer possible to get to grips with the contribution of the renaissance to the formation of the modern world. The significance of the broader nomenclature, early modern studies, doesn’t appear to strike home, especially the point that, if students want to understand the world we live in, they have to know this period particularly well. Indeed, they need to have some idea of the interaction between early modern Europe and the literature and ideas of the ancient civilizations of Rome and Greece. If we fail them in this regard, as I believe we are doing to an increasing extent, the result will be generations of intellectual sleepwalkers, denizens of mental landscapes they are responding to, or ‘reading’, in terms of an inner life unaware of important historical continuities and disjunctions; cut off, moreover, from understanding essential features of modernity.
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  • Date Issued: 2006

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

Introduction [to the book "Thuthula: Heart of the Labyrinth" by Chris Zithulele Mann]

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2005
  • Language: English
  • Type: Book chapter
  • Identifier: vital:7057 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007419
  • Description: There are certain stories, the world over, that stir our hearts and minds to imaginings richer and deeper than the bald facts of history can easily satisfy. Such is the legend of Thuthula, the young Xhosa girl whose beauty and grace won the heart of Ngqika, chief of the Rharhabe Xhosa; the woman who was later married to his uncle Ndlambe, and then taken by Ngqika to become his wife. The events took place in or around the years 1806 and 1807 in what is now the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Prior to the central episode treated in the play, legend has it that Thuthula was out collecting firewood one day with her friends when she knelt at a spring to drink. Startled by the sudden appearance of a hunting dog crossing the stream below the spring, she looked up and saw a handsome young hunter chasing behind the dog. She was struck by his charm and good looks. Teasingly, as any young girl might do, she called her friends round her and challenged the young man to choose his favourite from among them. Amid much flirting and laughter, the object of all this girlish attention was pushed into making a choice. Inevitably, given her beauty, his playful decision fell on Thuthula. This was the first meeting of Thuthula, daughter of Mthunzana, with Ngqika, son of Chief Mlawu.
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  • Date Issued: 2005

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

Umabatha: Zulu play or Shakespeare translation?

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2009
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: vital:7062 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007426 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351963381/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315264219-12
  • Description: preprint , There can be few recent theatrical productions in greater need of interpretative effort than Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha. From its inception debate has raged over the cultural status of the production: was it an authentic expression of Zulu culture, or a tacky piece of ‘blacksploitation’? – to use Russell Vandenbroucke’s term. Was the production pleasing evidence of Shakespeare’s universality, a gift to the colonies returning joyfully to the motherland with interest accruing? Could it perhaps be a case of Zulu culture triumphing over Shakespeare, native invention swamping and overwhelming a colonially-imposed ‘high culture’? Was the show performing ‘Africa’ for the world and, if so, was this the way Africa ought to be represented in the twentieth century? Or were we perhaps looking at a fetishized theatrical commodity, wrenched from any authentic cultural roots, and circulating aimlessly but profitably through a globalised theatrical cosmopolis? Such speculative questions – and there are many others – have regularly jostled each other in the bulky heritage of Umabatha’s reception history. The central problem underlying this chapter is whether it might not be possible to define a basis for a more objective response to some of them, so that the issues involved no longer rest quite so slackly in the realm of mere critical opinion.
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  • Date Issued: 2009

Cultivating Grahamstown: Nathaniel Merriman, Shakespeare and Books

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: vital:7033 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007367
  • Description: In 1857, Archdeacon Nathaniel Merriman delivered two public lectures on Shakespeare under the auspices of the “General Institute” of Grahamstown. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare”, was given on 2 September and “Shakspeare, As Bearing on English History” two months later, on Friday 6 November. This article sets out to place the lectures in their local context, by providing a brief sketch of literary and cultural life in the town, in which the appreciation of Shakespeare played no small part.
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  • Date Issued: 2008

South African Shakespeare in the twentieth century

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2009
  • Language: English
  • Type: Book chapter
  • Identifier: vital:7061 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007425
  • Description: This special section of the Shakespearean International Yearbook asks a series of questions about South African Shakespeare, chapter by chapter, focusing on the twentieth century. The temporal emphasis is deliberate, because it was particularly in the last century that Shakespeare became an issue, albeit a minor one, in relation to the titanic political and ideological struggles that convulsed the country throughout the period. The articles set out to examine and re-assess, in historical sequence, some of the acknowledged highlights of Shakespeare in South Africa in the last century. These are the moments when, for a range of different reasons, Shakespeare troubles the public sphere to claim attention in excess of that normally accorded ‘routine Shakespeare,’ that haphazard succession of productions, tours, educational debates, academic publications, reviews and commentary that comprises the internal history of the subject.
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  • Date Issued: 2009

Ecological thinking: Schopenhauer, J M Coetzee and who we are in the world

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: vital:7031 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007362 , https://doi.org/10.5848/CSP.0926.00001
  • Description: preprint , For the ecological agenda to make substantive progress, we will have to see powerful people and social agencies turning away from the ecological insanity that threatens us all, and for this to happen, people need to embrace voluntary renunciation, on the understanding that this is not self-sacrifice, but a different and more satisfying way of being in the world. The paper offers some thought, provoked by reading J.M. Coetzee and Arthur Schopenhauer, about what would make this change possible, what might enable it; and secondly why it is implausible that any such ideal might actually come to pass.
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  • Date Issued: 2008

Introduction: Stimela: railway poems of South Africa

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: vital:7058 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007420
  • Description: preprint , A collection of railway poems is an unusual undertaking. More than an exercise in nostalgia, this anthology captures a large slice of modern South African life, viewed from different perspectives. Many of South Africa’s best poets have written railway poems. This is unsurprising, for railways hold special meaning for a variety of people – people in all walks of life – who find them not only fascinating but emotionally sympatico. The place of railways in the South African economy is changing rapidly, and it will be interesting to see in the coming years whether the less personal, more streamlined business model that is taking shape will attract the same naïve fascination engendered by South African railways over the past two centuries.
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  • Date Issued: 2008

Language as a ‘resource’ in South Africa: the economic life of language in a globalising society

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2002
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: vital:7035 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007370 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750285310031
  • Description: preprint , We need to develop a much more refined and specific understanding of what is meant when people refer to language is a ‘resource’. If something can accurately be described as a resource, then by its very nature it carries with it or attracts, at least in potential, the social motivation associated with the utilization, development or exploitation of that resource. This is strikingly true where language is the resource in question, because language is so intimately bound up with human activity. Where it exists, such social motivation can be augmented and supported so as to realize the ends of language policy. Contrastingly, where it is seen that social motivation informing a particular language situation is at odds with the intent of language policy, then either implementation must retreat and move to other arenas, other points of influence, where intervention can be more effective, or those charged with implementation must resign themselves to costly and messy efforts to force unwanted change through legal authority.
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  • Date Issued: 2002

Disgrace as J.M.Coetzee's Tempest

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: Book chapter
  • Identifier: vital:7030 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007217
  • Description: Amid the deluge of criticism and commentary evoked by Disgrace, quite remarkably nobody has noticed that the book re-engages exactly the energies Shakespeare deployed in The Tempest, a play which has become an icon, if not the icon, of colonial and post-colonial studies.
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  • Date Issued: 2008

Archdeacon Merriman, ‘Caliban’, and the Cattle-Killing of 1856–57

  • Authors: Wright, Laurence
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: Article
  • Identifier: vital:7026 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007212 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020180802242574
  • Description: [From the introduction]: Did Archdeacon Merriman accept that Mhlakaza was Wilhelm Goliath? The short answer is that we don’t know. However, historical problems sometimes yield, or at least buckle slightly, when approached from unusual, tangential perspectives.I believe it can be shown that in the terrible aftermath of the Cattle-Killing, Nathaniel Merriman was brooding on his former servant, Wilhelm Goliath, and that evidence of this preoccupation emerges indirectly in a very open and unexpected forum: a public lecture on Shakespeare.
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  • Date Issued: 2008
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