Willem Anker’s Red Dog, Cormac McCarthy, and the Enigma of Coenraad de Buys
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458217 , vital:75724 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n2_a1
- Description: Willem Anker has been accused of stealing from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) in his novel Red Dog (2018), the English translation of his award-winning Buys (2014). I defend Anker on the charge of plagiarism, while conceding that his novel could not have been the book that it is without the precedent of Blood Meridian. I go on to voice other reservations about Red Dog via discussion, inter alia, of Anker’s characterisation of Coenraad Buys and the rendering in English of his Afrikaans original. I conclude that the historical Coenraad Buys appears intractable to novelistic treatment, and that Anker signals his awareness of this while at the same time making a valiant attempt to bring the character to life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458217 , vital:75724 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v48_n2_a1
- Description: Willem Anker has been accused of stealing from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) in his novel Red Dog (2018), the English translation of his award-winning Buys (2014). I defend Anker on the charge of plagiarism, while conceding that his novel could not have been the book that it is without the precedent of Blood Meridian. I go on to voice other reservations about Red Dog via discussion, inter alia, of Anker’s characterisation of Coenraad Buys and the rendering in English of his Afrikaans original. I conclude that the historical Coenraad Buys appears intractable to novelistic treatment, and that Anker signals his awareness of this while at the same time making a valiant attempt to bring the character to life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Cormac McCarthy and the South Africans
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458189 , vital:75722 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-184061729f
- Description: In his well-known interview with Richard Woodward, Cormac McCarthy had occasion to remark: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books” (Woodward). Using his words as the point of departure for a detailed investigation of a multi-stranded case of intertextuality, I examine the influence of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on three South African novels – Mike Nicol’s Horseman, Damon Galgut’s The Quarry and James Whyle’s The Book of War – in a way that I hope sheds light on the provenance, literariness and meaning of these texts.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458189 , vital:75722 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-184061729f
- Description: In his well-known interview with Richard Woodward, Cormac McCarthy had occasion to remark: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books” (Woodward). Using his words as the point of departure for a detailed investigation of a multi-stranded case of intertextuality, I examine the influence of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on three South African novels – Mike Nicol’s Horseman, Damon Galgut’s The Quarry and James Whyle’s The Book of War – in a way that I hope sheds light on the provenance, literariness and meaning of these texts.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe: An Anatomy
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458233 , vital:75725 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-f74f98d81
- Description: Turbott Wolfe (1925) was indubitably the most controversial South African novel of its day, and – whatever their opinion of its merits – contemporary reviewers were unanimous in recording the excitement, shock or at least discomfort of a revelatory experience.1 Almost a century later, the novel’s stylistic exuberance and formal eccentricity, its grammatica jocosa, seem as fresh as ever. And while we cannot hope to recover an adequate sense of its original iconoclastic impact, historical distance offers us the compensation of perspective: specifically, a perspective in which Turbott Wolfe appears less politically radical than at first supposed, and one that may help us to understand the explosions of recidivist racism that continue to undermine social relations in South Africa, almost a quarter of a century after the advent of democracy.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458233 , vital:75725 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-f74f98d81
- Description: Turbott Wolfe (1925) was indubitably the most controversial South African novel of its day, and – whatever their opinion of its merits – contemporary reviewers were unanimous in recording the excitement, shock or at least discomfort of a revelatory experience.1 Almost a century later, the novel’s stylistic exuberance and formal eccentricity, its grammatica jocosa, seem as fresh as ever. And while we cannot hope to recover an adequate sense of its original iconoclastic impact, historical distance offers us the compensation of perspective: specifically, a perspective in which Turbott Wolfe appears less politically radical than at first supposed, and one that may help us to understand the explosions of recidivist racism that continue to undermine social relations in South Africa, almost a quarter of a century after the advent of democracy.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018
Three texts and the moral economy of race in South Africa, c. 1890-1910
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458202 , vital:75723 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC128408
- Description: In the years since the Second World War, most attempts at explaining manifestations of racism have hinged on the trope of displacement intrinsic to the concept of "ideology." What is posited is a historical process in which social groups rationalize their pursuit of advantage by displacing it onto contiguous, justificatory discourses. While gesturing towards the origins of racism in pre-modern, rigidly stratified forms of social organization, such a narrative emphasizes the modernity of the phenomenon as it is generally understood today by construing it as a product of the competition for advantage - power, status, authority, material well-being - in a (world) system which is based on such competition, capitalism.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458202 , vital:75723 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC128408
- Description: In the years since the Second World War, most attempts at explaining manifestations of racism have hinged on the trope of displacement intrinsic to the concept of "ideology." What is posited is a historical process in which social groups rationalize their pursuit of advantage by displacing it onto contiguous, justificatory discourses. While gesturing towards the origins of racism in pre-modern, rigidly stratified forms of social organization, such a narrative emphasizes the modernity of the phenomenon as it is generally understood today by construing it as a product of the competition for advantage - power, status, authority, material well-being - in a (world) system which is based on such competition, capitalism.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2012
"A teaspoon of milk in a bucketful of coffee": the discourse of race relations in early twentieth-century South Africa
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458175 , vital:75721 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC119350
- Description: This year, 2010, marks the centenary of the creation of the Union of South Africa (and the modern South African state). From our vantage point, the South Africa Act of 1909 and the formal event of Union on 31 May 1910 cannot but seem shabby milestones in the country's long shabby history of racially discriminatory legislation. But it may be salutary to be reminded of just how far the public discourse on race and race relations has shifted over the past century. In this essay I canvass a range of popular contemporary English-language sources, mainly non-literary, in order to adumbrate the discourse in which, in the years between the South African War and the First World War (and beyond), white South Africans discussed the politics and future of race relations in the country.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458175 , vital:75721 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC119350
- Description: This year, 2010, marks the centenary of the creation of the Union of South Africa (and the modern South African state). From our vantage point, the South Africa Act of 1909 and the formal event of Union on 31 May 1910 cannot but seem shabby milestones in the country's long shabby history of racially discriminatory legislation. But it may be salutary to be reminded of just how far the public discourse on race and race relations has shifted over the past century. In this essay I canvass a range of popular contemporary English-language sources, mainly non-literary, in order to adumbrate the discourse in which, in the years between the South African War and the First World War (and beyond), white South Africans discussed the politics and future of race relations in the country.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
Don Maclennan (1929-2009): obituary
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6118 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004620
- Description: Donald Alasdair Calum Maclennan, the South African playwright, poet and critic, died in Port Elizabeth on February 9, 2009, at the age of 79. He will be remembered chiefly for the poetry that he published in the last three decades of his life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6118 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004620
- Description: Donald Alasdair Calum Maclennan, the South African playwright, poet and critic, died in Port Elizabeth on February 9, 2009, at the age of 79. He will be remembered chiefly for the poetry that he published in the last three decades of his life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
"He and His Man": allegory and catachresis in J. M. Coetzee's Nobel Lecture
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2261 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004619
- Description: This essay offers a reading of J.M. Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Lecture, "He and His Man," a narrative featuring the characters of Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe that borrows extensively from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). In it Coetzee whimsically explores several concerns of central importance for the activities of reading and writing, most notably the seemingly unavoidable (though ostensibly disabling) phenomenon of displacement or substitution that -- at its most generalizable level -- is best characterized as catachresis.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:2261 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004619
- Description: This essay offers a reading of J.M. Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Lecture, "He and His Man," a narrative featuring the characters of Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe that borrows extensively from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). In it Coetzee whimsically explores several concerns of central importance for the activities of reading and writing, most notably the seemingly unavoidable (though ostensibly disabling) phenomenon of displacement or substitution that -- at its most generalizable level -- is best characterized as catachresis.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
Disgraceland: history and the humanities in frontier country
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6117 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004618
- Description: This paper explores the significance of Coetzee's choice of Salem in the Eastern Cape as the (part) setting for his novel Disgrace. A determinedly local and historical reading of the text suggests that Lucy's conduct represents an "ideal" solution to the historical issues of wrong and reparation raised in the novel. This finding is scrutinized through a reading of "The Humanities in Africa" from Elizabeth Costello, and it is concluded that whatever hope for rehabilitation or redemption the novel holds out for white South Africans necessarily exists beyond the discourse of the humanities, indeed, outside of history itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6117 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004618
- Description: This paper explores the significance of Coetzee's choice of Salem in the Eastern Cape as the (part) setting for his novel Disgrace. A determinedly local and historical reading of the text suggests that Lucy's conduct represents an "ideal" solution to the historical issues of wrong and reparation raised in the novel. This finding is scrutinized through a reading of "The Humanities in Africa" from Elizabeth Costello, and it is concluded that whatever hope for rehabilitation or redemption the novel holds out for white South Africans necessarily exists beyond the discourse of the humanities, indeed, outside of history itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
George Webb Hardy's the Black Peril and the social meaning of ‘Black Peril’ in early twentieth-century South Africa
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1996
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:6116 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004240 , https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079608708504
- Description: preprint , The 'Black Peril' — the threatened rape of white women by black men — was an important factor in the moral economy underpinning colonial debate about the 'Native Question' in early twentieth-century South Africa. This essay gives sympathetic consideration to studies which have attempted to link the recurrence of Black Peril panics with specific disturbances in the economy or body politic, before offering symptomatic readings of two pieces of writing by George Webb Hardy, the article 'The Black Peril' (1904) and the novel The Black Peril (1912). These readings suggest that the rape threat was essentially a rationalization of white men's fear of sexual competition from black men. The imagery of purity and contagion, in terms of which the 'endogamous imperative' is typically represented in such texts, suggests that the idea of caste may usefully be invoked in attempts to explain the seemingly irrational public hysteria surrounding the Black Peril phenomenon.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1996
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:6116 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004240 , https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079608708504
- Description: preprint , The 'Black Peril' — the threatened rape of white women by black men — was an important factor in the moral economy underpinning colonial debate about the 'Native Question' in early twentieth-century South Africa. This essay gives sympathetic consideration to studies which have attempted to link the recurrence of Black Peril panics with specific disturbances in the economy or body politic, before offering symptomatic readings of two pieces of writing by George Webb Hardy, the article 'The Black Peril' (1904) and the novel The Black Peril (1912). These readings suggest that the rape threat was essentially a rationalization of white men's fear of sexual competition from black men. The imagery of purity and contagion, in terms of which the 'endogamous imperative' is typically represented in such texts, suggests that the idea of caste may usefully be invoked in attempts to explain the seemingly irrational public hysteria surrounding the Black Peril phenomenon.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
Douglas Reid Skinner, The Unspoken. Cape Town The Carrefour Press,1988: Book Review
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460138 , vital:75895 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_216
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460138 , vital:75895 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_216
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
Poems That Doubt
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460154 , vital:75896 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460154 , vital:75896 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_464
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
Beauty with Cruelty
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460124 , vital:75894 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_426
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460124 , vital:75894 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_426
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
A Secular Mystic
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1985
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460109 , vital:75893 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_414
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1985
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1985
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460109 , vital:75893 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_414
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1985
Book Review: Seductive Signifiers
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1984
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460168 , vital:75897 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_407
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1984
- Authors: Cornwell, Gareth D N
- Date: 1984
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/460168 , vital:75897 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_407
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1984
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