“A Step Towards Silence”: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and the Problem of Following the Stranger
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144205 , vital:38320 , DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2016.1249617
- Description: In this article, I argue that Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable evinces the kind of aesthetic ambivalence that Theodor Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, ascribes to the artwork’s location both in and outside of society. By tracing the metaphors used in the narrator’s depiction of the act of narration, I demonstrate that this novel self-reflexively articulates and meditates on its ambivalent position in society. Thereafter, I relate the work’s suspicion of its medium, and therefore its estrangement from itself, to its critique of community’s norms of recognition, which are embedded in language. Finally, I reflect on the potential effect of the text’s aesthetic ambivalence on the reader.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144205 , vital:38320 , DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2016.1249617
- Description: In this article, I argue that Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable evinces the kind of aesthetic ambivalence that Theodor Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, ascribes to the artwork’s location both in and outside of society. By tracing the metaphors used in the narrator’s depiction of the act of narration, I demonstrate that this novel self-reflexively articulates and meditates on its ambivalent position in society. Thereafter, I relate the work’s suspicion of its medium, and therefore its estrangement from itself, to its critique of community’s norms of recognition, which are embedded in language. Finally, I reflect on the potential effect of the text’s aesthetic ambivalence on the reader.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
Necrophiliac Narration and the Business of Friends: Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144159 , vital:38316 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2014.918406
- Description: Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of the “new” South Africa, the novel’s treatment of friendship, which cuts across the distinction between the private and the public, reflects obliquely on the nature of the emerging democratic dispensation. In this paper, I explore the link that Galgut constructs between friendship and community, and argue that his portrayal of the former points to the possibility of a form of community that is premised on a “common strangeness.”
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144159 , vital:38316 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2014.918406
- Description: Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of the “new” South Africa, the novel’s treatment of friendship, which cuts across the distinction between the private and the public, reflects obliquely on the nature of the emerging democratic dispensation. In this paper, I explore the link that Galgut constructs between friendship and community, and argue that his portrayal of the former points to the possibility of a form of community that is premised on a “common strangeness.”
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Bastards and bodies in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144264 , vital:38326 , https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021989405056969
- Description: The Population Registration Act of 1950, in the apartheid period of South African history, defined a coloured person as “a person who is not a White person or a Black”. In differentiating coloured from white, coloured from black, and black from white, somatic appearance obviously played a crucial role. So, for instance, a white person was defined as “a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a White person, and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a White person and is not in appearance obviously not a White person”.1 It follows that the body of the individual was read as a signifier of racial identity, a hermeneutic practice still prevalent in present-day South Africa. My argument in this essay is that Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story2 shows how the trope of “pure blood” in the discourse of race not only reduces the body of the individual coloured person to a material sign of racial difference, but also inscribes a history of shame on that body.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144264 , vital:38326 , https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021989405056969
- Description: The Population Registration Act of 1950, in the apartheid period of South African history, defined a coloured person as “a person who is not a White person or a Black”. In differentiating coloured from white, coloured from black, and black from white, somatic appearance obviously played a crucial role. So, for instance, a white person was defined as “a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a White person, and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a White person and is not in appearance obviously not a White person”.1 It follows that the body of the individual was read as a signifier of racial identity, a hermeneutic practice still prevalent in present-day South Africa. My argument in this essay is that Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story2 shows how the trope of “pure blood” in the discourse of race not only reduces the body of the individual coloured person to a material sign of racial difference, but also inscribes a history of shame on that body.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
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