22 research outputs found
Coetzee In and Out of Cape Town
This paper is an attempt to see J.M. Coetzee’s emigration from South Africa to Australia as a logical step within his career, and to understand Coetzee’s relationship with the city and university of Cape Town. It also tries to set out the nature of Coetzee’s self-assertion and self-canonization, and the interplay between Coetzee and the Coetzeean critics.
Imraan Coovadia’s Metonymic Aesthetics and the Idea of Newness in the South African Cultural Imaginary
Writers reading: favourite books
What books do writers read for pleasure? This course will reveal which recent books five prominent South African writers - Finuala Dowling, Michiel Heyns, Yewande Omotoso, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Imraan Coovadia - are currently enjoying and why. For anyone interested in learning more about what prominent SA writers read for pleasure
The Logic of the Looking Glass: Representations of Time and Temporality in Agaat and High Low In-between
Cosmopolitan Criminality: Cultural Entanglements and Globalised Crime in Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves
The happiest women have no history: Womens Writing of the British Women Writers and George Eliot
The essay presents a recuperative reading of George Eliots The Mill on
the Floss, a controversial feminist text for its heroines renunciation
buttressed by the authors deterministic outlook. The novels fatalistic
drive, the essay discovers, is an illuminating outcome of Eliots complex
engagement with the notion of womens place in history. With her
strategic appropriation of the comprehensive, indiscriminating, all-encompassing
capacity of History, Eliot regards it as a sort of ultimate horizon to which
every single life and every single meaning must surrender itself. History
requires her female characters to be absorbed eventually into the stream of
time, which is poetically metaphorized in the novel through the
overwhelming image of the Floss river.
The essay begins with a dialogue with Virginia Woolfs thoughtprovoking
idea of integrity of womens writing; Woolfs thesis that
women writers should transcend their sexuality in order to command
artistic control over their writing resonates with Eliots deeply sensitive
treatment of distance from female characters she creates. Then the essay
analyzes how Eliot formulates realism as an important and enabling
principle to embody the vision of History. Eliots devotion to detached and
realistic representation of womens lives, a quintessential hallmark of her
writing, signifies her desire to position herself as a decent figure of letters
distinguished from lady novelists whose writing can be easily branded as
simply female writing. And the essay goes on to argue that Eliot, in her
stark refusal to write as a woman, explores womens writing that cannot
be reduced to some type of gender-specific mode of writing which is
customary and definable. To sum up, in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
attempts to place women in History, paradoxically enough, by erasing
women from so-called natural history; such a poignant paradox of womens
writing is well captured in one of the most impressive quotes from the
novel, The happiest women have no history