In search of self explorations of identity in the work of Paul Auster

Paul Auster is regarded by some as an important novelist. He has, in a relatively short space of time, produced an intriguing body of work, which has attracted comparatively little critical attention. This study is based on the premise that Auster's art is the record of an entertaining, intelligent and utterly serious engagement with the possibilities of conceiving of the identity of an individual subject in the contemporary, late-twentieth century moment. This study, focussing on Auster's novels, but also considering selected poetry and critical prose, explores the representation of identity in his work. The short Foreword introduces Paul Auster and sketches in outline the concerns of the study. Chapter One explores the manner in which Auster's early (anti-),detective' fiction develops a concern with identity. It is suggested that Squeeze Play, Auster's pseudonymous 'hard-boiled' detective thriller, provided the author with a testing ground for his subsequent appropriation and subversion of the detective genre in The New York Trilogy. Through a close consideration of City of Glass, and an examination of elements in Ghosts, it is shown how the loss of the traditional detective's immunity, and the problematising of strategies which had previously guaranteed him access to interpretive and narrative closure, precipitates a collapse which initiates an interrogation of the nature and construction of ideas about individual identity. Chapter Two develops a suggestion that City of Glass was written in response to particular emotional concerns of the author by turning to an examination of the memoir-novel, The Invention of Solitude. This chapter examines the extent to which Auster's Jewishness is implicated in his understanding of identity, and in the techniques with which he expresses his concerns. It is argued that Auster's engagement with texts and memories important to him in order to find a voice adequate to the task which he assumes in The Invention of Solitude, reveals the ethical imperative of recognizing and accepting a relationship to alterity. The influence on Auster of certain Jewish writers, like Edmond Jabes, is considered in the course of the chapter. The third chapter addresses the issue of the description of Auster's work as postmodernist, in the light of what the study has presented as Auster's ethical engagement with alterity. Critical responses to Auster's texts are canvassed, before it is suggested that aspects of the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas may be useful in considering these important issues in Auster's oeuvre. Chapter Four returns to a consideration of The New York Trilogy, examining its final part, The Locked Room, before discussing In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace. All three novels are narrated by first-person narrators who, in very different situations, come (consciously and unconsciously) to negotiate their own identities in relation either to other people or to adverse circumstances. The chapter thus considers the manner in which these texts figure Auster's concern with relationships between individuals and otherness. Chapter Five seeks, as a means of concluding the study, to consider aspects of Auster's presentation of the manner in which identity is connected to perception, and to an engagement with that which is other than the self This chapter focuses on Auster's figuration of necessary responses to the otherness of the objective world and to chance as a radical alterity. Beginning with a consideration of an early essay, the chapter explores relevant aspects of Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan and Mr Vertigo, considers elements in Auster's poetry, and demonstrates the usefulness of exploring the influence on his work of the 'objectivist' poets and aspects of Dada and Surrealist poetics. The seemingly punitive severity of the fates of some of Auster's protagonists is shown ultimately to be positive, and (potentially) redemptive, reflecting Auster's profoundly ethical conception of the responsibilities and possibilities of selfhood

Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe

Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on

I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.DHE

Art as archive: Queer activism and contemporary South African visual cultures

This essay reflects principally on the work of South African artist Nicholas Hlobo, born in Cape Town in 1975, who has, in a relatively short space of time, achieved international art-world visibility for his sculptural objects made from rubber, fabric, and found objects (often including wood, soap, and colonial-era furniture). I draw for the purposes of comparison on the work of photographer Zanele Muholi (born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban), an artist-activist whose primary concern is, in her own words, to present ‘positive imagery of black queers (especially lesbians) in South African society and beyond’ (Muholi 2010 online; Williamson 2009 130). Both artists are well known in South African art circles for work that, although in different media, intervenes in the fields of local gender politics and anxieties about the body politic and the politics of the body — this in a country in which, despite guarantees of freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexuality, it remains dangerous to be identified publicly as lesbian, gay, or transgender

Beyond Impasse: Affect and Language Community in Select Contemporary Afrikaans Lyric Poetry

Early in Apart (2012), American poet Catherine Taylor’s formally hybrid meditation on the first visit she made as an adult to South Africa (the country of her birth), the poem’s narrating persona (Taylor; let us dispense with that critical-rhetorical vocabulary hereafter) recalls overhearing a disagreement about race and identity on the streets of Cape Town. A flower seller and customer argue about the promise of the new nation, and Taylor remarks uneasily: “They are at an impasse” (16). Taylor’s book-length meditation on trauma and inheritance asks what it means to attempt to recuperate a sense of identity linked to a place one cannot in conscience call entirely one’s own, but which is central to one’s family’s history.[i] Concomitantly, Apart ponders how a new communal identity might be forged in the aftermath of a period of collective trauma – in this case, apartheid (and the colonial era that preceded it). Unspoken in the encounter described above, however, is the question of language: in what tongue is the business of belonging in a new political – and temporal-affective – order to be worked through? For if English (the language of Taylor’s family, new life in the United States, and Apart) is also the lingua franca of the reconstituted nation state, it is only one of South Africa’s eleven official spoken and written languages, not including sign-language; according to the 2011 Census, English is only the fourth most widely spoken first language, well behind isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Afrikaans (Lehohla 23-25).[ii] Of these, Afrikaans was almost certainly the first language of Taylor’s flower seller, implicitly coded as Coloured.[iii] It was likely not the language of her customer, implicitly Black. Why does this matter, and why should such figures find themselves at an “impasse”?   Notes   [i] Taylor’s mother had been an anti-apartheid activist in the women’s Black Sash movement. [ii] The figures were reported as 11,587,374 (isiZulu, 22.7% of the population), 8,154,258 (isiXhosa, 16%), 6,855,082 (Afrikaans, 13.5%), 4,892,623 (English, 9.6%, only marginally ahead of Sepedi’s 4,618,576, constituting 9.1%) (Lehohla 23-24). In only two of South Africa’s nine provinces did English have more first-language speakers than Afrikaans: Gauteng (including Johannesburg and Pretoria, where the difference was less than a percentage point); and KwaZulu-Natal (where the margin was 13.2 to 1.6%, both greatly outnumbered by isiZulu’s 77.8%) (Lehohla 25). [iii] A complicated and contested term variously naming autochthonous peoples who do not identify as Black African, in addition to mixed-race people having indigenous, Black African, white, and/or south-east Asian ancestry. Note the South African English spelling to differentiate from the loaded term “Colored,” with its particular US history. While Coloured (capitalized) is a term often associated with apartheid classificatory logic (and law), coloured (lowercase) was during the middle and later 1990s used more frequently as a term of self- and communal identification. See Attridge and Attwell (xvii) for an example of how standard reference texts have engaged with the difficult legacies of the term for literary scholarship. The logic of denying the term an uppercase initial letter in the age of Black Lives Matter seems to this author to require revisiting, and it is capitalized throughout this essay, while subject to the caveat that it does not reflect a commitment to the use of terms of racial differentiation. It serves in the imperfect interim not to refuse to notice that racial, ethnic, and cultural variety exists, but to draw attention to the fact that a range of identifiable characteristics continues to affect life experience

Constructing South African literatures in Britain, 1880-1980

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Novel Dialogue 3.2 Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut with Andrew van der Vlies (CH)

Guest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South African literature and global modernisms at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Andrew and Damon tunnel down into the structures of Damon’s newest novel, The Promise to locate the ways in which a generational family story reflects broadly on South Africa’s present moment. The two discuss how lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic invoke for some the limitations on movement during the Apartheid era in South Africa. The Promise is a departure from Damon’s previous two novels, which were peripatetic in their global movement and range. Damon describes the ways in which this novel operates cinematically, as four flashes of a family’s long history, with the disembodied narrator being the one on the move. Damon provocatively divides novels into two traditions: those that provide consolation, and those that can provide true insight on the world but must do so with a cold distance. While he does not call The Promise an allegory, Damon admits to the fun that he has with inside jokes that play with allegorical connections, as long as the reader is in on the joke. Damon directly takes on his choice to leave a pregnant absence in the narrative’s insight into his black characters “sitting at the very heart of the book.