82 research outputs found

    The archival turn: rereading the Guy Butler Collection in the National English Literary Museum

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    This thesis takes as its theoretical springboard the ‘archival turn’ in South African historical studies, a moment that arguably reached its culmination in 2002 with the publication of Refiguring the Archive. The archival turn posits that, rather than using it as an unproblematic source of original material, scholars might begin to investigate the archive itself, including its processes of construction and organisation. This theoretical model also proposes that the archive might reflect the cultural beliefs and epistemologies common to the era in which it was set up. It seems that the time is ripe for a reconsideration of the insights gleaned from this academic moment in South Africa, given the recent contestation over the meanings of history and our cultural markers of heritage in the public domain, largely grouped under the term ‘Fallism.’ As such, a fresh look at South African museums, which in this country are often rooted in colonial practices of knowledge production, seems apt. This work uses the case of Guy Butler, founder of many South African English cultural institutes and arts bodies, as a conduit and lens for thinking through these problematics. One of Butler’s institutional ‘offspring,’ born from his overarching work on behalf of the English cultural and literary cause in South Africa in the twentieth century, is the National English Literary Museum (NELM). Investigating the founding context and practices of NELM is a useful way of exploring the impact of Butler’s life’s work on literary heritage in South Africa. Issues such as the way in which NELM and Grahamstown continue to signify as loci of thought and practice in the contemporary South African literary landscape will be addressed. The study draws extensively on the Butler collection at NELM, and spends much time investigating Butler’s positioning in a South African literary historical context in the twentieth century, to better understand the forces at work during the time of NELM’s coming-into-being. Derrida’s seminal work on the function of archives, in Archive Fever, is mined for a theoretical basis for the study, as is Deleuze and Guattari’s thought on how bodies (taking the NELM institution here to represent a ‘body’) form, change, and interact, explicated in the work A Thousand Plateaus. The study offers some insights into how the NELM archive was formed, and which forces continue to shape its work in the South African spheres of English literature and heritage

    The interface of history and fiction in Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the plagues, Ingrid Winterbach’s To hell With Cronjé, and Etienne van Heerden’s The long silence of Mario Salviati

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    Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history

    Effect of burning on soil chemical and physical properties of loamy upland bluestem range

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    Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industrie

    MODE OF ACTION OF 2,4-D AND GLYPHOSATE IN COMMON MILKWEED AND HEMP DOGBANE.

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    Absorption and Translocation of Buthidazole

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