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"Visions Fiction."
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Writing Crime in the New South Africa: Negotiating Threat in the Novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford
The explosion of crime fiction in contemporary South Africa requires explanation in terms of its relations with actual crime in that country, with crime novels from elsewhere, and with trends in South African literary history. Taking issue with recent criticism which sees in the genre a turning away from historicity and the political, the article argues that the novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford display an engagement with major post-apartheid themes, and a politics that is, for the most part, liberal in nature. There is a striking correlation to be drawn between the proposals of South African criminologists and what contemporary crime novelists themselves explore in their fictions. Specifically, both return to the figure of the detective as an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty. This essay interprets the meaning of the post-apartheid crime fiction phenomenon in terms of the novels' capacity to negotiate threat, and to profit from doing so.
Journal Article
Public and Private Space in Contemporary South Africa: Perspectives from Post-Apartheid Literature
Starting from a reading of Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, this article examines the changing nature of social space in South Africa since 1994 as reflected in recent writing by Galgut, Ivan Vladislavić, Jonny Steinberg, K.S. Duiker and J.M. Coetzee. Adapting Mikael Karlström's distinction between 'dystopian' and 'eutopian' responses to social phenomena, I argue that post-apartheid literature bears witness to the perpetuation of a fundamentally dystopian society. South Africa, by these lights, has seen no significant opening up and making public of space either physically or otherwise. Discussing the urban environment, crime, xenophobia, gender relations and sexuality, the article shows that power remains in the private sphere, with space still constructed in terms of exclusion rather than inclusion.
Journal Article
The ruined house : a novel
Andrew P. Cohen, a professor of comparative culture at New York University, is at the zenith of his life. Adored by his classes and published in prestigious literary magazines, he is about to receive a coveted promotion--the crowning achievement of an enviable career. He is on excellent terms with Linda, his ex-wife, and his two grown children admire and adore him. His girlfriend, Ann Lee, a former student half his age, offers lively companionship. A man of elevated taste, education, and culture, he is a model of urbanity and success. But the manicured surface of his world begins to crack when he is visited by a series of strange and inexplicable visions involving an ancient religious ritual that will upend his comfortable life. Beautiful, mesmerizing, and unsettling, The Ruined House unfolds over the course of one year, as Andrew's world unravels and he is forced to question all his beliefs. Ruby Namdar's brilliant novel embraces the themes of the American Jewish literary canon as it captures the privilege and pedantry of New York intellectual life in the opening years of the twenty-first century.
Book
Age of Iron: The Collective Dimension of Shame and of Responsibility
Age of Iron has received much critical attention; most interpretations of the novel revolve around themes such as trust, the silence of the victim-figures, or the fictional treatment of real, historical events. Derek Attridge, for example, discusses the question of trust and responsibility towards the other represented in the novel by Vercueil and John; Jane Poyner analyses the connection between confession and truth, on the one hand, and the historical situation Mrs Curren lives in, on the other; Michael Neill focuses on the novel's representativeness for the period of 'interregnum' in South Africa. The concept of shame as dramatised in Coetzee's work in general and in this novel in particular has received little attention. The present article is devoted to an analysis of shame in Age of Iron, shame derived from a corrupted sense of community and justice. It will look into the effects shame causes, as dramatised in the person of the protagonist of the novel. Another concern of the following discussion consists in an analysis of the imagery the narrator's discourse creates in order to designate moral wrongs, both individual and social. The novel teems with repulsive images evoked by the frequent use of references to insects or aggressive animals and birds, images that translate the narrator's ample rage against the times, her sense of helplessness and abhorrence of the injustices occurring around her. The last part of the essay offers an interpretation of the narrator's failure to burn herself and thus convert her death into a meaningful event. Rather than regarding her death as salvation facilitated by Vercueil, as Benita Parry suggests, the following reading will consider her death and the struggle preceding it as an impossibility of redemption.
Journal Article
A shining
\"A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, \"the Beckett of the twenty-first century\" (Le Monde).\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Stephen King's technophobia puts him in good company, author says
A. \"Frankenstein\" is usually considered a horror novel, but it's also technophobic science fiction. An artificial human is a technological creation. My special favorites are \"Metropolis,\" one of the earliest science fiction films that shows the horrors of industrialization, and more recent stuff like Margaret Atwood's \"Oryx and Crake,\" which looks at the horrors of biotechnology taken to extremes. There are also examples from video games like \"Resident Evil\" -- a military-corporate creation of a bio-epidemic.
Newspaper Article
This is how it ends
After Riley and his friends see some disturbing visions through a mysterious pair of binoculars, they soon realize these hallucinations are coming true, especially as one of Riley's closest friends becomes the prime suspect of a gruesome murder.
Book
Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook
In recent years, news media has been greatly disrupted by the potential of technologically driven approaches in the creation, production, and distribution of news products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from the realm of science fiction and has become a very real tool that can aid society in addressing many issues, including the challenges faced by the news industry. The ubiquity of computing has become apparent and has demonstrated the different approaches that can be achieved using AI. We analyzed the news industry’s AI adoption based on the seven subfields of AI: (i) machine learning; (ii) computer vision (CV); (iii) speech recognition; (iv) natural language processing (NLP); (v) planning, scheduling, and optimization; (vi) expert systems; and (vii) robotics. Our findings suggest that three subfields are being developed more in the news media: machine learning, computer vision, and planning, scheduling, and optimization. Other areas have not been fully deployed in the journalistic field. Most AI news projects rely on funds from tech companies such as Google. This limits AI’s potential to a small number of players in the news industry. We made conclusions by providing examples of how these subfields are being developed in journalism and presented an agenda for future research.
Journal Article