List of Titles

Showing items 56001 - 56020 of 63364

Quick View

Quick View

Ecological thinking: Schopenhauer, J M Coetzee and who we are in the world

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2008

Quick View

Quick View

Introduction [to the book "Scatter the Shrilling Bones" by Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana]

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2003
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7056 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007417
Description: preprint , Scatter the Shrilling Bones by Sithembele Xhegwana comprises an ordered sequence of poems that conveys a journey both literal and spiritual. Revisitation is the organizing principle of the collection – the return to rural sources and origins by a consciousness estranged and illumined by modernity (cf. ‘The Return’). Underlying the collection is the theme of the night journey, whose archetype in western culture is Odysseus’ descent to the underworld – a pattern identified as such in the concluding essay ‘Starting from my Place: Notes on an Aesthetic’. The underworld here is literally the return to the home territory – a journey from Cape Town to the rural Eastern Cape – but also a revisiting of the mental world of traditional Africa: ‘Here at home, here all guilt begins’ (‘Homecoming’). The return journey is haunted by nightmare memories of mental illness, the schizophrenic episodes accompanying (or occasioned by?) the poet’s initial encounters with modernity. This illness is represented as both pathological and cultural – a price paid for challenging and rejecting the old certainties while grappling with new assumptions: “He undermines the ancestors, That’s why he suffers. Let him.” (‘To Himself’)
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2003

Quick View

Language and value: towards accepting a richer linguistic ecology for South Africa

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2004

Quick View

Repositioning Renaissance studies in South Africa: strategic thinking or 'business-as-usual

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2006
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:7054 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007415
Description: Increasingly, in many leading South African tertiary departments of literature, early modern studies have a fairly slim hold on the core curriculum. More and more, departmental offerings concentrate on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, perhaps in the belief either that today’s students are so poorly prepared that they will never be able to cope with the mental shifts necessary to appreciate pre-industrial literature and its language, or, worse, that nothing before the C19 colonial incursion into South Africa can really matter very much to undergraduates. Whatever the reason, in such departments, it is no longer possible to get to grips with the contribution of the renaissance to the formation of the modern world. The significance of the broader nomenclature, early modern studies, doesn’t appear to strike home, especially the point that, if students want to understand the world we live in, they have to know this period particularly well. Indeed, they need to have some idea of the interaction between early modern Europe and the literature and ideas of the ancient civilizations of Rome and Greece. If we fail them in this regard, as I believe we are doing to an increasing extent, the result will be generations of intellectual sleepwalkers, denizens of mental landscapes they are responding to, or ‘reading’, in terms of an inner life unaware of important historical continuities and disjunctions; cut off, moreover, from understanding essential features of modernity.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2006

Quick View

A research prospectus for the humanities

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2006
Language: English
Type: Book chapter , text
Identifier: vital:7027 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007213
Description: The humanities in South Africa, as elsewhere, face a crisis of credibility.There is pressing need for the humanities to articulate their social and educational purpose more clearly, so that their academic value is recognised beyond the confines of academia.The aim of reshaping human character and society remains the foundational impulse of the humanities. This is achieved through the careful study of specially selected exemplary 'texts': literary works, fine art, social schemes, intellectual movements, historical episodes, and philosophical and religious outlooks.Students are required to respond in person to both 'text' and the discourse of which it is an exemplary instantiation. This is the manner in which they act to influence character and society.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2006

Quick View

Quick View

Quick View

Hill of Fools: notes towards a publishing history

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2004

Quick View

The early reception of Hill of Fools

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2004

Quick View

The humanities, vocationalism and the public good: exploring 'the Hamlet factor'

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2007
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7028 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007214 , https://doi.org/10.1080/17535360712331393503
Description: preprint , This paper argues that the social mission of the humanities is no longer well understood by the public, sometimes not even by the very institutions seeking to attract students to these disciplines, the universities. It becomes difficult to argue for the cogency of research in the humanities, let alone for a specific national research agenda, when the general relation between the humanities and society is widely mistaken. To address such misapprehensions, the discussion outlines as clearly as possible the characteristic procedures of the humanities, the manner in which they inform individual and social transformation, and the contemporary predicament which makes them more rather than less needed in society’s repertoire of educational resources. With this understanding in place, the paper then puts forward suggestions for strengthening research in the humanities as part of a broader programme to renovate the humanities in the South African education system.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2007

Quick View

Third World Express: trains and “revolution” in Southern African poetry

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7066 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007453 , https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v31i1.34
Description: preprint , This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The piece also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2010

Quick View

Quick View

Irony and transcendence on the Renaissance stage

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2004

Quick View

Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‘Omega’

- Wright, Laurence

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.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2004

Quick View

Nathaniel Merriman's lecture: "On the study of Shakspeare".

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2008-09-23
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:7034 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007368
Description: Nathaniel Merriman’s lectures on Shakespeare were published in 1857 and 1858. The first, “On the Study of Shakspeare,” was delivered in the Court House, Grahamstown on the 2nd September 1857 to an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. The second, “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History,” was given in the same venue two months later, on Friday, 6 November 1857, and was also well attended. The lectures were published under the auspices of the Committee of “The General Institute,” which sponsored the lectures, and printed at the Anglo-African Office in the High Street. The two lectures and their context are little known in Shakespeare studies because the original pamphlets are rare. The first lecture appears in Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography (1910), while the second is picked up only in the 1979 revision of that work. Copies of “On the Study of Shakspeare” are held by the Mendelssohn Library in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town; by The South African Library, Cape Town; and in the Oppenheimer Collection, Johannesburg. Copies of “Shakspeare, as Bearing on English History” are held by the Mendelssohn Library; by the University of the Witwatersrand Library, Johannesburg; and by the Kimberley Public Library. The purpose of preparing annotated editions of these lectures is to make them more accessible to scholars and draw them further into the mainstream of international discussion on colonial Shakespeare.
Full Text:

Quick View

Learning to be original

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7065 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007431
Description: preprint , My topic suggested itself in response to a point made at a seminar on University autonomy. Someone observed that many people, even shack dwellers, are interested in the cosmos and they always would be. The remark came in the course of a debate concerning the cost of the SKA project, the massively expensive square kilometer array telescope for which South Africa is bidding against Australia, viewed in relation to the country’s huge list of social backlogs: Big science versus food and decent housing; a false opposition, or a grim choice? You can imagine the debate. The nugget that stayed with me was the tangential comment that ordinary people are always interested in the cosmos. If so, is this true merely because human cultures traditionally incorporate such an interest, or because humans themselves actually need a relation to the cosmos? What might this need be?
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2010

Quick View

Quick View

'Iron on iron': modernism engaging apartheid in some South African railway poems

- Wright, Laurence

Authors: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2011
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:7068 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007459 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2011.626177
Description: preprint , Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2011

‹ › ×