- Title
- Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: A Review Essay
- Creator
- Klopper, Dirk
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2023
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458573
- Identifier
- vital:75753
- Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n2_a5
- Description
- The poetics of Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature (2020) is intimated in the title of the book, where the infinitude of ‘finding’ and the provisionality of ‘reflections’ anticipate what, in the introductory chapter “Finding My Way”, is described as an avoidance of the “monumentalising study” in favour of a more “mobile, tentative, suggestive scholarship” that is comfortable with “paradox and open-endedness” (12). The chapters that follow explore ways in which the notion of South African literature and the notion of the literary may be reimagined, and explicate a mode of reading ‘with’ the text, showing how this may be applied to ways of reading belief. They also examine the notion of creative non-fiction, revisit orality in South African literature, describe an autobiographical history with a book, and end with a reflection on postapartheid South African literature as “a place of radical newness and obsessive return” (175). What the book omits in its coverage, but which is nevertheless present in its ways of thinking, is Brown’s environmental concern with ‘wildness’ and ‘rewilding’, described in his book Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019), published a year earlier. As is the case with the essays in the earlier book, the essays in Finding My Way speak to one another, disclosing of a way of thinking, of finding one’s way, that is recursive in style and attentive to the thing under scrutiny.
- Format
- 18 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- English in Africa, Klopper, D., 2023. Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: A Review Essay. English in Africa, 50(2), pp.95-112, English in Africa volume 50 number 2 95 112 2023 0376-8902
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the English in Africa Statement (https://www.ru.ac.za/isea/publications/journals/englishinafrica/)
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Collections
Klopper, Dirk (Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way A Review Essay.pdf | 615 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |