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"De Kock, Leon"
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The love song of Andrâe P. Brink : A biography
The love song of Andrâe P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel Garcâia Mâarquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source - running to a million words - Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road. De Kock's biographical study of the author who came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature not only synthesises the journals but also subjects them to searching critical analysis. In addition, the biographer measures the journals against additional sources, scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimonies of Brink's friends, family, wives and lovers. The Love Song of Andrâe P Brink subjects Brink's literary legacy to a bracing academic reevaluation, making this major new biography a crucial addition to scholarship on Brink.
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To a dubious critical salvation : Etienne Leroux and the canons of South African English criticism
This article presents a case study in cross-cultural literary reception following the act of literary translation - in this instance, of author Etienne Leroux - from Afrikaans into English. It describes the literary reception of Leroux in general terms, in Afrikaans and Dutch in the first place and subsequently in English (South Africanist) criticism. Our focus falls on the translation and subsequent reception of Leroux's major novel, Sewe dae by die Silbersteins, first published in Afrikaans in 1962, and crowned with the Hertzog Prize in 1964. The novel's rendering into English by poet Charles Eglington (Seven Days at the Silbersteins) in 1964 provides the centrepoint of our study. We argue that this translation, along with the several forms of what André Lefevere calls \"rewriting\" (in literary-critical registers) that it engendered, created disjunctive moments of cross-lingual critical reception in which dubious conclusions hardened into routine paraphrase or accepted \"wisdom\" in English criticism. By \"rewriting\" in this case, following Lefevere, we mean inter-lingual re-descriptions of literary works within literary-critical histories or reviews that are often based on translations, and on readings of them in relative isolation from their fuller context in the original language (here, Afrikaans).
Journal Article
The Confessio of an Academic Ahab: Or, How I Sank My Own Disciplinary Ship
First of all, what I would call the (somewhat belated) \"postcolonial moment\" in South Africa, beginning in the late 1980s - and fully anticipated by Coetzee's Foe in 1986 - was firmly buttressed by the poststructuralist emphasis on decentring regimes of knowledge. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, as Leonard Cohen said. [...]I would like to pose the following two questions, which I will leave open: According to the Proceedings: Those who opposed the inclusion [of South African production in the English literature course] did so on the following grounds: that such a practice might lead to some loss in the value of a literature course (local writers might displace Shakespeare, Milton and others) . . . and that local writers might be rated above their worth\" (187).
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The call of the wild : speculations on a white counterlife in South Africa
If whiteness is a condition which has historically found its (moving) focus in a dialectic with wildness - as I have proposed elsewhere - then the first point one should observe is that the term 'whiteness' as a sign should be seen as a trace and not an essence. This is a key qualification, at the outset, as it sets my project apart from any sense that it is possible easily or fully to capture and contain a category description as referentially fractured as 'whiteness.' By contrast, an acknowledgment that any installation of a referent must be regarded as provisional and potentially complicit in the process of erasure, paradoxically affords one a greater play of nuance and variation, a bigger range of potential meaning. For surely, in a context of heterogeneity as marked as that in southern Africa, the signifier 'whiteness' (along with all its proxy signifiers), despite equally persistent tropes of sameness and rock-solid marks of identity, must be regarded as a shuttling moniker, a hot potato variously juggled and differently handled, grasped, welcomed or rendered problematic across time and space. Otherwise we might find ourselves unwillingly repeating the naming game of the nineteenth, as well as the twentieth century, when the word 'Kaffir' (or 'Kafir') was similarly homogenised to the detriment, precisely, of nuance, variation and difference. The hypostasis entailed in the naming, throughout the nineteenth century, of a vast array of human specificity under the term 'Kaffir,' an act of epistemological violence against difference in the historical, cultural and ethnological sense, and against différance in the poststructuralist sense, created not only a stunted and sorry scene of intercultural embattlement along the South African 'frontier' (in my terms, the 'seam'), but it was also literally inscribed in blood, in the untold number of murders done in its name, its essentialising will to power.
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Freedom on a Frontier?: The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature
The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely “freed from the past” and exhibits a wide range of divergences from “struggle” writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualisation and argues that some of the literature’s key dynamics are founded in “mashed-up temporalities.” My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal’s appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question—in this case, white post-transitional writing—is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call “detection mode”—providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills—is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.
Journal Article
Freedon on a frontier? The double bind of (white) postapartheid South African Literature
The trend in analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is largely \"freed from the past\" and exhibits a wide range of divergences from \"struggle\" writing. This article provides a differently nuanced conceptualisation and argues that some of the literature's key dynamics are founded in \"mashed-up temporalities.\" My analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamal's appropriation of art historian Hal Foster's \"future anterior\" or a \"will have been\" In my reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less \"free from the past\" than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question - in this case, white post-transitional writing - is inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I suggest that much postapartheid literature written in what I call \"detection mode\" - providing accounts of \"crime\" and other social ills - is distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibits features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution. OA
Journal Article
To a dubious critical salvation: Etienne Leroux and the canons of South African English criticism/To a dubious critical salvation: Etienne Leroux and the canons of South African English criticism
Cassandra Perrey); in the same year came what is generally considered Leroux's supreme achievement as regards international exposure: the single-volume publication of the Welgevonden trilogy as To a Dubious Salvation, in Penguin Modern Classics-\"die enigste Afrikaanse skrywer wat so vereer is\" (\"the only Afrikaans novelist to be thus honoured\") (Kannemeyer, Leroux 471). [...]in 1973, Stephen Gray could confidently state of Etienne Leroux that \"his controversial work has reached a wider audience than that of any other Afrikaans author\" (197). According to Brink, Leroux had created in Magersfontein \"dalk sy heel sinrykste Suid-Afrikaanse 'mite' tot dusver: deur naamlik die stuk Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis self te mitifiseer en dan paradigmas daarop te baseer\" (\"perhaps his most meaningful South African 'myth' until now: more particularly by mythologizing a piece of South African history itself and then building paradigms on the basis of it\"; Kannemeyer, Leroux 579). [...]the reference to \"theological terror \" and \"abstract\" fear stems from \"Tegnieke, temas en toekomsplanne\" (\"Techniques, themes and future plans\"), a speech Leroux gave at the Sestiger Symposium at the University of Cape Town in February 1973. Any South African novel that ignores Apartheid is relegated to the rubbish bin or is regarded at most as a historically relevant document. Since the 1970s, information about the fortunes of South Africa have been communicated in such a strongly detailed manner in the European media that the expectations of the European reading public with regard to fictional prose coming out of South Africa have changed substantially.\"
Journal Article
The
I must confess, superficially and straight up, that I could not enter into the writing of this inaugural lecture - my second, and please, let it be my last - without first looking into the history of the \"inaugural lecture\" as a form. So I did some fairly quick digital browsing, the advantage of which is that the internet's synchronic purview of everything and anything available right this instant implicitly invokes, also, the inbuilt diachrony of time-bound expressions of form and value.
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NOTES ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF 'SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH WRITING'
Since this is a commentary piece of restricted length, let me put my cards on the table. [...]there are happy intersections between writers and critics where the interests of both coalesce, and where this happens, it is good for all concerned. [...]perhaps most importantly, non-aligned, Writerly authors have restricted access to the forums of public deliberation convened by the elite educational fortresses, where their (the writers' value) is very often decided upon - if they're lucky - or where (more likely) they are ignored while the Readerly critic-writers create vast scenarios of literary-cultural reckoning ('world' literature, 'transnational' literature and culture, and so on) in which (1) they (the Readerly critic-writers) preside as meaning-makers; and (2) the Writerly independent authors, apart from a few favourites, are generally edged out of the debate. [...]English South African writing' in its variation, difference and multiplicity, outside of the deductive (and reductive?) frames of reference that us academics settle upon, ceases to exist in the symbolically charged deliberative spaces which the universities convene, shape and fund with their generally powerful financial resources.
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