Ecological thinking: Schopenhauer, J M Coetzee and who we are in the world
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7031 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007362 , https://doi.org/10.5848/CSP.0926.00001
- Description: preprint , For the ecological agenda to make substantive progress, we will have to see powerful people and social agencies turning away from the ecological insanity that threatens us all, and for this to happen, people need to embrace voluntary renunciation, on the understanding that this is not self-sacrifice, but a different and more satisfying way of being in the world. The paper offers some thought, provoked by reading J.M. Coetzee and Arthur Schopenhauer, about what would make this change possible, what might enable it; and secondly why it is implausible that any such ideal might actually come to pass.
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Introduction: Stimela: railway poems of South Africa
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7058 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007420
- Description: preprint , A collection of railway poems is an unusual undertaking. More than an exercise in nostalgia, this anthology captures a large slice of modern South African life, viewed from different perspectives. Many of South Africa’s best poets have written railway poems. This is unsurprising, for railways hold special meaning for a variety of people – people in all walks of life – who find them not only fascinating but emotionally sympatico. The place of railways in the South African economy is changing rapidly, and it will be interesting to see in the coming years whether the less personal, more streamlined business model that is taking shape will attract the same naïve fascination engendered by South African railways over the past two centuries.
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Inventing the Human: Brontosaurus Bloom and “the Shakespeare in us”
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7045 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007387 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351963534/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315264264-15
- Description: preprint , This essay was occasioned by the casual reading of a book called Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (2002), a collection of responses, pro, ante and puzzled, to Bloom’s Shakespearean magnum opus. The more I browsed in the assembled essays, some of them originally reviews and conference papers, others specially commissioned responses, the more curious I became. On the whole, the contributors seemed not to understand Bloom, at least not to understand him adequately, which is a devastating handicap when the task in hand is to pass judgment. The problem seems to be that few academic commentators take Bloom seriously, accepting that he means what he says; more accurately, they find it hard to entertain with full seriousness matters Bloom intends should be taken entirely seriously. Shakespeareans, locked into their various ways of understanding the world and critical activity, generally try to find Shakespeare (or “Shakespeare”) through reading Bloom, whereas he wants us to find ourselves through reading Shakespeare: to uncover what Emerson called ‘the Shakespeare in us’ (‘Shakespeare, or The Poet’, 256). The difference is stupendous. We ought first to ask in regard to Bloom’s blockbuster the question Bloom tells us he learned from Kenneth Burke, ‘What is the author trying to do for himself or herself by writing this work?’ (Shakespeare, 412).
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Mussolini's moment: Roy Sargeant directs The Merchant of Venice at Maynardville, January, 2007
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: vital:7047 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007389 , http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48107
- Description: preprint , What an inspired choice of play for this year’s Maynardville offering! With the national scene strewn with trials and rumours of trials, all of them vital to the quality of life citizens of this fair city beneath the beautiful mountain (‘Belmont’) may hope to enjoy in the future, Shakespeare’s cliff-hanger about the use and abuse of the law couldn’t be more apt.
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Something rotten in this age of hope, The HamletMachine: directed by Wesley Deintje. Rhodes University Theatre. 28 September 2007: theatre reviews
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455808 , vital:75458 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC48108
- Description: Heiner Müller's most famous play (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977) has evolved into something of a familiar war-horse for student theatre. The United States in particular has taken to the work; indeed, it was meant in part for them : "Heil Coca-cola!" says the script. For today's South African ears this has become, very aptly, "Hail the Rainbow Nation!" What young director can resist it? Only eight pages in extent, the sparse yet densely referential text offers unfettered scope for interpretation and contextualization.
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