"My novel, Hill of Fools"
- Authors: Peteni, R L , Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7038 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007376 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47869
- Description: preprint , R.L. Peteni - 'There is a tendency in human beings to pay no heed to events in small remote areas. They would rather concern themselves only with those events which make headlines, with political upheavals and industrial conflicts centred in large metropolitan regions. Yet there is always drama and human conflict in the humblest rural village. In selecting a pastoral theme and small fictitious villages in an obscure corner of Keiskammahoek as the setting of the novel, I had an ironic intention. Themes illustrated in these obscure villages would, I believed, have more universal application than they would if I had selected a larger centre, identifiable personages and known political trends. I did not want anybody to sit back, complacent, feeling that the spotlight was on Lennox Sebe’s Ciskei alone, or Kaiser Matanzima’s Transkei, or John Vorster’s apartheid South Africa. The spotlight is on the Ciskei, yes, on Transkei, on South Africa, on any other country where public life and personal relationships are bedevilled by tribalism or racialism or any form of sectionalism.
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An introduction: Peteni in context
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7036 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007372 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47870
- Description: preprint , It is rare for a writer to make a literary impact with only one novel. It is even more unusual when that work is written by a novice author in his early sixties. Yet such is the case of R.L. Peteni, whose novel, Hill of Fools, was published by David Philip in South Africa in 1976, and internationally in the same year by Heinemann in the African Writers Series. Four years later, in 1980, the book was translated by the author into Xhosa as Kwazidenge and published by the Lovedale Press. Twenty years after initial publication, in 1996, there came a television version of Kwazidenge broadcast by the SABC, starring Willie Thambo and Amanda Quwe, though the locale was translated – in the bizarre logic of television – to an urban environment on the Cape Flats. The transposition, though pragmatic in terms of television demographics, destroyed much of the point of Peteni’s work, for Hill of Fools is South Africa’s first regional novel in English by a black writer. It is also the first novel in English by a Xhosa-speaker.
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Hill of Fools: a South African Romeo and Juliet?
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7039 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007377 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47866
- Description: preprint , What kind of debt does Hill of Fools owe to Shakespeare? Look up ‘Peteni’ in the Companion to South African English Literature (1986) and you will be told that Hill of Fools is “loosely based on the story of Romeo and Juliet” (155). Scan the first newspaper reviews (see “The Early Reception of Hill of Fools” in this volume) and it is noticeable that a great many journalists focus on the Shakespeare connection as a means of introducing the book to their readers. One of the publisher’s readers, Henry Chakava, urged before publication that once all references to tribe or tribalism had been excised “the result will be a Romeo and Juliet type story much more superior to Weep Not Child.” The author himself reportedly described the book as “a black Romeo and Juliet drama” (Tribune Reporter 1988). And, indeed, some kind of parallel is patent to anyone who reads Hill of Fools with Shakespeare’s play in mind.
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Hill of Fools: notes towards a publishing history
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7037 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007373 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47868
- Description: preprint , Written in English in the early 70s, Hill of Fools was projected into the market for world literature among distinguished company in the Heinemann African Writers Series (HAWS), at a time when expectations for African writing in English reflected a certain orthodoxy; when the book’s origins in apartheid South Africa pressed certain ‘buttons’ in world readerships, and when the country’s increasing cultural isolation meant that even relatively well-versed literary Africanists were less than familiar with the milieu from which the story springs. The result has been that the novel acquired a rather odd penumbra of interpretation, ranging from the naïve to the dismissive or reductive.
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Irony and transcendence on the Renaissance stage
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7067 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007455 , https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.3.4728
- Description: preprint , This is the concluding essay in a collection entitled 'This Earthly Stage'. The chapter argues that the peculiar task of the stage metaphor - the notion of the theatre as a metaphor for life,which involves complex interactions between rarefied intellectual constructions of life and mundane reality - is to interrogate the tension between an inscrutable cosmic order and the limited viewpoints of ordinary humanity.The piece moves from general considerations of irony and dramatic irony, via an analysis of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, to comments on Petrarch, Pico and Vives, culminating in a consideration of irony and transcendence in Shakespeare's last plays.
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Language and value: towards accepting a richer linguistic ecology for South Africa
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7042 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007383 , https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.28.2.05wri
- Description: preprint , Language policy debate is often obscured by two factors: failure to acknowledge different time-frames attending contrasting positions, and failure to recognise that ordinary people are motivated by their perceived best interests in the present. This article argues that the key to more general public acceptance of linguistic ecological diversity in South Africa is to shift the emphasis from policy development to practical language cultivation issues. Provide the requisite cultivation support, and acceptance of a revitalised future for African languages becomes more assured. It should also be understood that the modernisation of African languages in South Africa has a political dimension concerning which South African language commentators are strangely silent. This political thrust may not be entirely congruent with the concerns of those whose brief for African languages is primarily cultural or ecological – if, indeed, they are even aware of it. Finally, it needs to be recognised that language development under conditions of controlled influence, as in the civil service or schooling, is potentially achievable (with whatever difficulty), but that this must be complemented by authentic contemporary intellectual work published in African languages if the linguistic dimension of the African Renaissance is to take off.
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Politics, latent and overt, in Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7064 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007430
- Description: [From the text]: R. L. Peteni’s novel Hill of Fools (1976) is a work that benefits greatly when Collingwood’s maxim is observed. The author’s family history and the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication add a dimension of political and social meaning which its surface deliberately occludes. Perhaps more importantly, while the story can readily be enjoyed, the quality of sensibility behind the work is not readily accessed without understanding some of the socio-political background.
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Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‘Omega’
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7029 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007216 , https://doi.org/10.1080/1368879042000210595
- Description: preprint , [Author's note]: This piece offers a discursive foray into some leading features of South African Shakespeare, framed between two symbolic ‘book-ends’: the first authenticated Shakespearean production which took place in Cape Town in 1801 (‘Alpha’), and a recent groundbreaking, multilingual version of Julius Caesar which premiered in 2001(“‘Omega’”). Focusing mainly on acts of translation, literal and cultural, the article follows a trajectory from colonial origins to explore some of the adaptive travail experienced by the Shakespeare text as it infiltrates, contests, melds into and sometimes illuminates a South African culture both potentially (and actually) very different from the colonial culture of, say, Australia or New Zealand. The article includes a brief prospectus for the future.
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Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: performing history in the theatre of Charles Kean, Richard W. Schoch: book review
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7050 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007393 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48030
- Description: preprint , This book is a primarily a study of Charles Kean’s productions of Shakespeare’s English chronicle plays at the Princess’s Theatre between 1852 and 1859, a period crucial to the development of ideas of English nationalism. Schoch focuses on these particular stagings as more than drama; as performances of nineteenth century theories of history and historical representation. His project operates under the aegis of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural theory, and is suspicious of neo-marxian fundamentalism.
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The early reception of Hill of Fools
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7040 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007379 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
- Description: preprint , The early reception of Peteni’s novel is interesting because it illustrates the mind-sets and critical assumptions of those who first mediated the novel to different readerships. The book initially caused little stir either in South Africa or abroad, and it has made its way quietly in later years in no small part due to support from set-work prescription committees, and its translation into other media, radio and television. A one-off novel by an unknown writer is unlikely to gather critical momentum in international discussion, and the book has been more often noticed in academic studies focused on the Xhosa novel, some of which barely register that the work was first written in English. However, today it is certainly among the novels most widely-read by ordinary South Africans, not only those from the Eastern Cape, but for among many throughout the country who encountered it at school.
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Umabatha: global and local
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7032 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007364 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138390408691324
- Description: preprint , There can be few shows that test the dimensions and pitfalls of 'globalised' theatre as thoroughly as Welcome Msomi's Umabatha. The worldwide success of the show, in box-office terms, can hardly be argued with. And yet, in its very conception, the vehicle is so riven by intrinsic cultural, theatrical, class and 'nationist' tensions that different audiences cannot but reap utterly different experiences, depending on their own cultural and intellectual inheritance.The show is an instance where theatre practice (sometimes) obfuscates political and aesthetic discourse, showing how easily cultures miss each other and fail to connect, and how easily specific historical, geographical and imperial associations are swamped by shallow 'globalised' audience response.
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