- Title
- The “Pleasure Streets” of exile: queer subjectivities and the body in Arthur Nortje’s London poems
- Creator
- Thorpe, Andrea
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/68432
- Identifier
- vital:29255
- Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2018.1447865
- Description
- Publisher version
- Description
- In this article, I aim to expand our understanding of Arthur Nortje as a poet of “exile” by exploring the dialectic between self-loathing and pleasure, as well as between engagement and isolation, which he portrays performatively through his London poetry. While critics have emphasised Nortje’s “marginality” or “liminality”, both as an “exile” and a “coloured” South African, I draw on the critical writing of Zoë Wicomb in order to extend readings of his poetry beyond this tragic paradigm. I furthermore take up Sarah Nuttall’s suggestion that Nortje’s London poetry describes a degree of immersion within the city and that this aspect of his work demands further study. After tracing Nortje’s playful use of literary influences and his reworking of the trope of flânerie, I provide a series of close readings of poems in which Nortje depicts an exploration of queer subjectivities, staged within the city. In his London poetry, Nortje subverts and eludes fixed racial, sexual, national and class identities. Nortje’s London poetry exemplifies how South African literature was developed in response to the alienating condition of exile, but also through engagement with the places where exile occurred.
- Format
- 20 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Journal of Literary Studies, Thorpe, A. (2018) The “Pleasure Streets” of Exile: Queer Subjectivities and the Body in Arthur Nortje’s London Poems, Journal of Literary Studies, 34:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2018.1447865, Journal of Literary Studies volume 34 number 1 1 20 2018 1753-5387
- Rights
- Journal of Literary Studies
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the National Library of South Africa Copyright Act
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