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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
A research prospectus for the humanities
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Book chapter , text
- Identifier: vital:7027 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007213
- Description: The humanities in South Africa, as elsewhere, face a crisis of credibility.There is pressing need for the humanities to articulate their social and educational purpose more clearly, so that their academic value is recognised beyond the confines of academia.The aim of reshaping human character and society remains the foundational impulse of the humanities. This is achieved through the careful study of specially selected exemplary 'texts': literary works, fine art, social schemes, intellectual movements, historical episodes, and philosophical and religious outlooks.Students are required to respond in person to both 'text' and the discourse of which it is an exemplary instantiation. This is the manner in which they act to influence character and society.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Book chapter , text
- Identifier: vital:7027 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007213
- Description: The humanities in South Africa, as elsewhere, face a crisis of credibility.There is pressing need for the humanities to articulate their social and educational purpose more clearly, so that their academic value is recognised beyond the confines of academia.The aim of reshaping human character and society remains the foundational impulse of the humanities. This is achieved through the careful study of specially selected exemplary 'texts': literary works, fine art, social schemes, intellectual movements, historical episodes, and philosophical and religious outlooks.Students are required to respond in person to both 'text' and the discourse of which it is an exemplary instantiation. This is the manner in which they act to influence character and society.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
Book review: Derek Barker: English Academic Literary Discourse in South Africa 1958-2004: A Review of 11 Academic Journals
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7044 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007386
- Description: Barker’s book concerns the evolution and publishing trajectories of South African journals devoted to English literary studies between the years 1958 (when the first such journal, English Studies in Africa, came into being) and 2004, the end-date of the survey. In other words, his work coincides with the period in South African history when apartheid’s protagonists were pushing for total political and social ascendancy through to the nation’s emergence into the arena of democratic possibility.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7044 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007386
- Description: Barker’s book concerns the evolution and publishing trajectories of South African journals devoted to English literary studies between the years 1958 (when the first such journal, English Studies in Africa, came into being) and 2004, the end-date of the survey. In other words, his work coincides with the period in South African history when apartheid’s protagonists were pushing for total political and social ascendancy through to the nation’s emergence into the arena of democratic possibility.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
As You Like It: directed by Helen Flax. Mannville, Port Elizabeth. 2007: theatre review
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , review
- Identifier: vital:7051 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007410 , https://journals.co.za/content/iseasosa/19/1/EJC48089
- Description: preprint , This was a stylish, well-conceived production, which made sense and meaning from what is probably Shakespeare’s most delicate, and ‘English’, of comedies. The piece calls for strong ensemble playing, a full stage of equals rather than a few strong parts dominating the story. The Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival pulled it off marvelously.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , review
- Identifier: vital:7051 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007410 , https://journals.co.za/content/iseasosa/19/1/EJC48089
- Description: preprint , This was a stylish, well-conceived production, which made sense and meaning from what is probably Shakespeare’s most delicate, and ‘English’, of comedies. The piece calls for strong ensemble playing, a full stage of equals rather than a few strong parts dominating the story. The Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival pulled it off marvelously.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
"Something rotten in this age of hope": Wesley Deintje directs The HamletMachine (Rhodes University Theatre, 28 September 2007)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7048 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007390
- Description: Heiner Müller’s most famous play (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977) has evolved into something of a familiar war-horse for student theatre. The United States in particular has taken to the work; indeed, it was meant in part for them: “Heil Coca-cola!” says the script. For today’s South African ears this has become, very aptly, “Hail the Rainbow Nation!” What young director can resist it? Only eight pages in extent, the sparse yet densely referential text offers unfettered scope for interpretation and contextualization. Sure, the original offered Muller’s despairing take on the collapse of western civilisation, typified in the East German predicament where intellectuals felt trapped between the total failure of ‘actually existing socialism’ – that ideological mirage – in the German Democratic Republic, and the horrors of emergent bandit capitalism presaging an uncomfortable future. But the spaces in the text are so capacious that almost any claim to climactic despair can be entertained: idiot consumerism, gender oppression and aggression, political treachery and malfeasance, fascism, existential angst, intellectual cowardice, the postmodern condition, the rejection of hope.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7048 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007390
- Description: Heiner Müller’s most famous play (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977) has evolved into something of a familiar war-horse for student theatre. The United States in particular has taken to the work; indeed, it was meant in part for them: “Heil Coca-cola!” says the script. For today’s South African ears this has become, very aptly, “Hail the Rainbow Nation!” What young director can resist it? Only eight pages in extent, the sparse yet densely referential text offers unfettered scope for interpretation and contextualization. Sure, the original offered Muller’s despairing take on the collapse of western civilisation, typified in the East German predicament where intellectuals felt trapped between the total failure of ‘actually existing socialism’ – that ideological mirage – in the German Democratic Republic, and the horrors of emergent bandit capitalism presaging an uncomfortable future. But the spaces in the text are so capacious that almost any claim to climactic despair can be entertained: idiot consumerism, gender oppression and aggression, political treachery and malfeasance, fascism, existential angst, intellectual cowardice, the postmodern condition, the rejection of hope.
- Full Text:
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
Nathaniel Merriman's lecture: "On the study of Shakspeare".
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008-09-23
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7034 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007368
- Description: Nathaniel Merriman’s lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1857 and 1858. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare,” was delivered in the Court House, Grahamstown on the 2nd September 1857 to an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. The second, “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History,” was given in the same venue two months later, on Friday, 6 November 1857, and was also well attended. The lectures were published under the auspices of the Committee of “The General Institute,” which sponsored the lectures, and printed at the Anglo-African Office in the High Street. The two lectures and their context are little known in Shakespeare studies because the original pamphlets are rare. The first lecture appears in Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910), while the second is picked up only in the 1979 revision of that work. Copies of “On the Study of Shakspeare” are held by the Mendelssohn Library in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town; by The South African Library, Cape Town; and in the Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg. Copies of “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” are held by the Mendelssohn Library; by the University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg; and by the Kimberley Public Library. The purpose of preparing annotated editions of these lectures is to make them more accessible to scholars and draw them further into the mainstream of international discussion on colonial Shakespeare.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008-09-23
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7034 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007368
- Description: Nathaniel Merriman’s lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1857 and 1858. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare,” was delivered in the Court House, Grahamstown on the 2nd September 1857 to an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. The second, “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History,” was given in the same venue two months later, on Friday, 6 November 1857, and was also well attended. The lectures were published under the auspices of the Committee of “The General Institute,” which sponsored the lectures, and printed at the Anglo-African Office in the High Street. The two lectures and their context are little known in Shakespeare studies because the original pamphlets are rare. The first lecture appears in Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910), while the second is picked up only in the 1979 revision of that work. Copies of “On the Study of Shakspeare” are held by the Mendelssohn Library in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town; by The South African Library, Cape Town; and in the Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg. Copies of “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” are held by the Mendelssohn Library; by the University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg; and by the Kimberley Public Library. The purpose of preparing annotated editions of these lectures is to make them more accessible to scholars and draw them further into the mainstream of international discussion on colonial Shakespeare.
- Full Text:
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009