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Articles and book chapters by Rick de Villiers
Notes and Queries, 2025
HAMLET, OPPENHEIMER, AND CORMAC MCCARTHY'S LAST NOVELS Given their concern with madness, guilt, s... more HAMLET, OPPENHEIMER, AND CORMAC MCCARTHY'S LAST NOVELS Given their concern with madness, guilt, suicide, and a retreat from decisive action, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cormac McCarthy's twinned final works, The Passenger and Stella Maris, make obsessive reference to Hamlet. The grave Dane emerges as a kindred spirit for the novels' sibling prodigies, Bobby and Alicia Western, who are troubled in their own way by the ghost of a father-one whose contribution to the Manhattan Project rests on their shoulders like a curse. Bobby obliquely seeks to atone for the inherited sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by renouncing physics for activities with a redemptive if not restorative purpose: salvage diving and, later, the life of a hermit. A close friend regards his central flaw as that of the 'nonparticipant', expressly yoking him with Shakespeare's notoriously noncommittal young prince: 'There's something in life which you've forsworn, Squire. And while it may be true that I in turn envy you your classic stance, I dont envy it much. Trimalchio is wiser than Hamlet.' 1 Alicia, a mathematician manqu� e who contemplates and eventually commits the ultimate abdication, appears to have Hamlet's grim cast of mind. Her plan to disappear without a trace ('Plan 2-A') is subtitled 'or not 2-B'. 2 At another point, with less humour in her gallows talk, she again nods to Hamlet's soliloquy on suicide: 'To wish oneself never to have been. Again, not the same as no longer to be.' 3 And her principal hallucination, the Thalidomide Kid, also recalls this speech when Alicia hints that she will not be around for much longer: 'Off to the bourne from whence no traveler whatever the fuck.' 4 But it is another of the Kid's allusions that is my main concern here, since it triangulates Hamlet, McCarthy's last 1 NOTES AND QUERIES 2025 Notes and Queries
True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness
Journal of Modern Literature, 2024
If Samuel Beckett's 'Company'—with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprec... more If Samuel Beckett's 'Company'—with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprecedented unguardedness within the Beckett canon, then a special case may be made for its sincerity: that it resides in the novella’s very gambits, decoys and “true feints.” To arrive at such sincerity, Beckett may be read as the modernist novelist of voice—of a confessional voice that exposes its speaker without the buffetings of character, plot, or self-dramatization. Such deprivations are, paradoxically, the product of a poetics of interiority and the practice of exagoreusis, a confessional mode in which a penitent verbalizes his thoughts without recourse to thematizing arrangement. Company’s sincere loneliness is therefore not found in any “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” as Lionel Trilling’s seminal definition goes. Rather, it emerges as something inferential: that which remains when the impossibility of
company is subtracted from a desire for it.
Critical Quarterly, 2024
‘Poverty porn’ supposedly names a kind of representation that trades in oversaturated images, blu... more ‘Poverty porn’ supposedly names a kind of representation that trades in oversaturated images, blunt realism, and a crude mix of morbidity and pathos. It caters to low tastes and base desires on the one hand, and to disingenuously altruistic sentiments on the other. Yet such definition neglects how poverty can be differently fetishised. It ignores a type of writing that turns abjection into artistic ideals, a type that fails to trigger moral-aesthetic outrage precisely because of an emphatic literariness. This article attempts to define the features of this other type of poverty fiction. It pays special attention to South African author Marlene van Niekerk’s short story collection, The Snow Sleeper, which features the recurring figure of a vagrant steeped in European traditions of vagrant literature – traditions that mine poverty for artistic treasures and blur the boundaries between poetic licence and poetic licentiousness.
Textual Practice, 2023
What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our respon... more What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our responses to improper literary behaviour? Addressing these questions against the backdrop of South African author Willem Anker’s substantial ‘borrowings’ from Samuel Beckett, this article proposes three alternative avatars – the catfish, hacker, and emperor – to displace Martial’s archetypal plagiarius or enslaver. The catfish is an impostor, an appropriator and aggregator of identities who aims to seduce. The hacker is a digital bandit whose daring encroachments are as much admired as feared. And the emperor is that cipher either clothed by common consent or stripped at the cost of our own exposure. Whatever their vices, these figures have the virtue of nudging discussion of plagiarism away from rights and ownership towards identity, trust and exposure. Where the enslaver tends to ringfence the wronged and the wrong-doer, the alternative avatars open towards the reader. They ask us to consider our role in constituting, condoning or condemning acts of literary deceit, to mark the connections between our moral judgements and our affective responses, and, ultimately, to reflect on our position as hypocrites lecteurs when confronted with plagiarism.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2023
This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its functi... more This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist.
Critical Arts, 2023
The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic stat... more The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic status as assessment tool in the humanities, this relativity is sometimes overlooked. Such modal inflexibility is still more puzzling given that syllabus changes have recently been driven by inclusivity and varieties of learning experience. Opening onto this variety, the present article asks whether students' critical thinking could be strengthened by their imaginative capacity, and how modal shifts in assessment practice can expand academic meaning-making. Specifically, it weighs the benefits, risks and responsibilities of translating or "regenring" the academic essay into alternative forms. Underpinned by recent theories of assessment practice, the article also situates "regenring" in relation to the disruptive, digressive, even errant formal energies of modernist literature.
English Studies in Africa, 2022
English Studies in Africa, 2022
This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilog... more This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.
Samuel Beckett, Max Nordau, and the Worms of How It Is
The Explicator, 2021
Literature and Theology, 2020
Despite the coy designation of ‘Interlude’, the sermon in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral pr... more Despite the coy designation of ‘Interlude’, the sermon in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral presents a nexus of tension. On the one hand, it constitutes a crucial dramatic component of a play that balances on the knife-edge between pride and humility. On the other hand, it retraces certain theological assimilations found elsewhere in Eliot’s writing which collectively shape his understanding of Christian humility and good will. In circling around recurring phrases and influences, this article traces a conceptual genealogy behind the play’s sermon and offers a revaluation of Murder in the Cathedral as the creative culmination of Eliot’s ongoing engagement with secular humanism.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2019
Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often co... more Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often courted—both in the fictional worlds themselves where suffering is at a constant, and also in the sometimes overly-familiar narratives of surrounding scholarship. Given this conflict, how does humiliation—and responses to it—define Beckett's individual “creatures”? In Molloy, despite the many likenesses between the title character and his near-doppelgänger, humiliation manifests as an ontologically determining phenomenon that disallows the conflation and consolidation of private suffering. Alongside the many instances of wretchedness and abuse, the novel quietly posits humility as ethical imperative when approaching the suffering of others.
![Research paper thumbnail of “What can you do with a Story Like This[?]”: The Expectations and Explicitations of South African Fiction](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/61273776/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, Aug 2019
The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do wi... more The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do with a special kind of mimesis and asks whether formal aspects of the ‘documentary’ mode are directive for fictional modes. Another question pertains to motives. This article addresses the latter, but with an eye on criticism itself. It argues against instrumental readings that promote aesthetic values on the basis of ethical values, not because this is inherently problematic, but because such an approach risks neglecting the degree to which fiction and nonfiction alike partake in mimetic strategies that promote a ‘truth-effect’ with compelling and sometimes troubling immediacy. Without positioning it as representative of “fiction’s response”, Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room is considered here as exemplary in its ability to disrupt the charms of mimesis through its estranging use of punctuation, self-representation, and intertextuality.
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, edited by Jason Harding, Nov 30, 2017
‘Of the Same Species’: T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
English Studies in Africa, Oct 2012
The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though ... more The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though these authors are not commonly thought of as bedfellows, it is argued that there are two overlapping concerns in the plays under discussion, namely, the idea of original sin and the significance of indeterminate endings. Unlike Eliot's, Beckett's idea of original sin is not (exclusively) the product of a Judaeo-Christian perspective, and does not necessarily imply transgression against some absolute law or being. His understanding of the consequences of original sin, however, is remarkably close to Eliot's, particularly in terms of his conception of time. In both plays there is a tendency towards stasis, which is best reflected in the unresolved endings. Eliot's and Beckett's respective inbuilt frustrations disrupt our habitual experiences and expectations in art, and their philosophy of original sin and use of indeterminate conclusions come together to loosen the grip convention has on audience and reader.
A Deepened Hunger for Seriousness: ‘Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service’
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, May 2013
For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied ... more For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied a comparatively peripheral space within the enterprise of Eliot studies. Despite the frequency with which some of them have been anthologized, these poems have
elicited far fewer critical responses than most of Eliot’s other work. The primary reason for this neglect is that the quatrain poems are largely regarded as satirical or comical meanderings that do not conform to the more ‘serious’ agenda of Eliot’s oeuvre. ‘Mr.
Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ is a case in point, since it has the appearance of a learned and almost unintelligible joke. However, it is the aim of this article to demonstrate that Eliot’s growing indignation with perverted spiritual practices is couched within the satire of the poem. It is further argued that the poem shows Eliot’s hunger for seriousness to have grown since ‘The Hippopotamus’, a poem written two years prior which also deals the corruption of established religion. In this poem, Eliot’s vituperation is sustained and is ultimately indicative the poet’s distaste for spiritual apathy, a theme which will reach its zenith some three years later in The Waste Land.
A Hunger for Seriousness? T. S. Eliot's ‘The Hippopotamus’
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, Oct 2011
T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though enterta... more T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though entertaining, they have been accused of being pseudo-scholarly and superficial, and have on these bases suffered comparable neglect.‘The Hippopotamus’ is no exception. Though binary and more simplistic than the other quatrain poems, the poem marks the genesis of Eliot's endeavour to ‘set his lands in order’. On the surface its handling of established religion and theology appears facetious and, at times, almost blasphemous. And yet, the poem's power of scepticism most forcefully manifests in Eliot's obstinate determination to present a final answer through a swirling network of intertextuality. The aim of this paper is to show that ‘The Hippopotamus’ is not anarchic but that it represents an early version of the impulse to ‘not cease from exploration’, though it fails to sustain its seriousness throughout.
Interactions: Literary Creation, Authorial Development and Literature's Shaping Influences
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, Oct 20, 2013
Key concerns for readers and interpreters of literary works have frequently been, and arguably co... more Key concerns for readers and interpreters of literary works have frequently been, and arguably continue to be, the origin and emergence of the literary work or body of work as creation; the development of the writer and his/her role within that process of
creation; the ontological status of fictional spaces and the characters that occupy them; and the reception and influence of these creations in shaping the world within which they themselves emerge. Although this was not a themed issue of the journal, several of its articles deal in some way or another with these complex considerations.
Narrative (De)construction: Mr Coetzee, in the Basement, with the Quill: A Discussion of Authorial Complicity in J.M. Coetzee's Foe
Journal of Literary Studies, May 2010
The article offers a deconstructive reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and attempts both to explain an... more The article offers a deconstructive reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and attempts both to explain and to reveal the abusive writing employed by each of the “authors” (Susan Barton, Foe, Daniel Defoe, J.M. Coetzee) in the novel. It operates within a Derridean framework, tracing the concepts of supplementation and origin in the text to indicate how the novel simultaneously collapses and conceals its own narrative practices. Like its object, the analysis presents itself as a piece of intertextual writing which questions not only the construction of the novel (and the apparent presence of meaning inherent in it), but also its own modes of composition. A detailed discussion of Susan Barton's credibility as author is proffered, and a close inspection of Coetzee's use of punctuation aims to suggest that the author, as a fictional being, is present in the novel before Part IV. Ultimately, this article attempts to illustrate, through its self-reflexive nature, the various ways in which Foe betrays the fallibility of language and representation.
Reviews, essays, blogs by Rick de Villiers
The Conversation, 2025
At last, the most infamous latecomer in all of literature has arrived-not in the flesh, but in So... more At last, the most infamous latecomer in all of literature has arrived-not in the flesh, but in South Africa's Afrikaans language. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's best-known drama, Waiting for Godot, now also lives as Ons Wag vir Godot.
Notes and Queries, 2025
HAMLET, OPPENHEIMER, AND CORMAC MCCARTHY'S LAST NOVELS Given their concern with madness, guilt, s... more HAMLET, OPPENHEIMER, AND CORMAC MCCARTHY'S LAST NOVELS Given their concern with madness, guilt, suicide, and a retreat from decisive action, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cormac McCarthy's twinned final works, The Passenger and Stella Maris, make obsessive reference to Hamlet. The grave Dane emerges as a kindred spirit for the novels' sibling prodigies, Bobby and Alicia Western, who are troubled in their own way by the ghost of a father-one whose contribution to the Manhattan Project rests on their shoulders like a curse. Bobby obliquely seeks to atone for the inherited sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by renouncing physics for activities with a redemptive if not restorative purpose: salvage diving and, later, the life of a hermit. A close friend regards his central flaw as that of the 'nonparticipant', expressly yoking him with Shakespeare's notoriously noncommittal young prince: 'There's something in life which you've forsworn, Squire. And while it may be true that I in turn envy you your classic stance, I dont envy it much. Trimalchio is wiser than Hamlet.' 1 Alicia, a mathematician manqu� e who contemplates and eventually commits the ultimate abdication, appears to have Hamlet's grim cast of mind. Her plan to disappear without a trace ('Plan 2-A') is subtitled 'or not 2-B'. 2 At another point, with less humour in her gallows talk, she again nods to Hamlet's soliloquy on suicide: 'To wish oneself never to have been. Again, not the same as no longer to be.' 3 And her principal hallucination, the Thalidomide Kid, also recalls this speech when Alicia hints that she will not be around for much longer: 'Off to the bourne from whence no traveler whatever the fuck.' 4 But it is another of the Kid's allusions that is my main concern here, since it triangulates Hamlet, McCarthy's last 1 NOTES AND QUERIES 2025 Notes and Queries
True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness
Journal of Modern Literature, 2024
If Samuel Beckett's 'Company'—with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprec... more If Samuel Beckett's 'Company'—with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprecedented unguardedness within the Beckett canon, then a special case may be made for its sincerity: that it resides in the novella’s very gambits, decoys and “true feints.” To arrive at such sincerity, Beckett may be read as the modernist novelist of voice—of a confessional voice that exposes its speaker without the buffetings of character, plot, or self-dramatization. Such deprivations are, paradoxically, the product of a poetics of interiority and the practice of exagoreusis, a confessional mode in which a penitent verbalizes his thoughts without recourse to thematizing arrangement. Company’s sincere loneliness is therefore not found in any “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” as Lionel Trilling’s seminal definition goes. Rather, it emerges as something inferential: that which remains when the impossibility of
company is subtracted from a desire for it.
Critical Quarterly, 2024
‘Poverty porn’ supposedly names a kind of representation that trades in oversaturated images, blu... more ‘Poverty porn’ supposedly names a kind of representation that trades in oversaturated images, blunt realism, and a crude mix of morbidity and pathos. It caters to low tastes and base desires on the one hand, and to disingenuously altruistic sentiments on the other. Yet such definition neglects how poverty can be differently fetishised. It ignores a type of writing that turns abjection into artistic ideals, a type that fails to trigger moral-aesthetic outrage precisely because of an emphatic literariness. This article attempts to define the features of this other type of poverty fiction. It pays special attention to South African author Marlene van Niekerk’s short story collection, The Snow Sleeper, which features the recurring figure of a vagrant steeped in European traditions of vagrant literature – traditions that mine poverty for artistic treasures and blur the boundaries between poetic licence and poetic licentiousness.
Textual Practice, 2023
What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our respon... more What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our responses to improper literary behaviour? Addressing these questions against the backdrop of South African author Willem Anker’s substantial ‘borrowings’ from Samuel Beckett, this article proposes three alternative avatars – the catfish, hacker, and emperor – to displace Martial’s archetypal plagiarius or enslaver. The catfish is an impostor, an appropriator and aggregator of identities who aims to seduce. The hacker is a digital bandit whose daring encroachments are as much admired as feared. And the emperor is that cipher either clothed by common consent or stripped at the cost of our own exposure. Whatever their vices, these figures have the virtue of nudging discussion of plagiarism away from rights and ownership towards identity, trust and exposure. Where the enslaver tends to ringfence the wronged and the wrong-doer, the alternative avatars open towards the reader. They ask us to consider our role in constituting, condoning or condemning acts of literary deceit, to mark the connections between our moral judgements and our affective responses, and, ultimately, to reflect on our position as hypocrites lecteurs when confronted with plagiarism.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2023
This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its functi... more This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist.
Critical Arts, 2023
The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic stat... more The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic status as assessment tool in the humanities, this relativity is sometimes overlooked. Such modal inflexibility is still more puzzling given that syllabus changes have recently been driven by inclusivity and varieties of learning experience. Opening onto this variety, the present article asks whether students' critical thinking could be strengthened by their imaginative capacity, and how modal shifts in assessment practice can expand academic meaning-making. Specifically, it weighs the benefits, risks and responsibilities of translating or "regenring" the academic essay into alternative forms. Underpinned by recent theories of assessment practice, the article also situates "regenring" in relation to the disruptive, digressive, even errant formal energies of modernist literature.
English Studies in Africa, 2022
English Studies in Africa, 2022
This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilog... more This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.
Samuel Beckett, Max Nordau, and the Worms of How It Is
The Explicator, 2021
Literature and Theology, 2020
Despite the coy designation of ‘Interlude’, the sermon in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral pr... more Despite the coy designation of ‘Interlude’, the sermon in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral presents a nexus of tension. On the one hand, it constitutes a crucial dramatic component of a play that balances on the knife-edge between pride and humility. On the other hand, it retraces certain theological assimilations found elsewhere in Eliot’s writing which collectively shape his understanding of Christian humility and good will. In circling around recurring phrases and influences, this article traces a conceptual genealogy behind the play’s sermon and offers a revaluation of Murder in the Cathedral as the creative culmination of Eliot’s ongoing engagement with secular humanism.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2019
Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often co... more Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often courted—both in the fictional worlds themselves where suffering is at a constant, and also in the sometimes overly-familiar narratives of surrounding scholarship. Given this conflict, how does humiliation—and responses to it—define Beckett's individual “creatures”? In Molloy, despite the many likenesses between the title character and his near-doppelgänger, humiliation manifests as an ontologically determining phenomenon that disallows the conflation and consolidation of private suffering. Alongside the many instances of wretchedness and abuse, the novel quietly posits humility as ethical imperative when approaching the suffering of others.
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, Aug 2019
The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do wi... more The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do with a special kind of mimesis and asks whether formal aspects of the ‘documentary’ mode are directive for fictional modes. Another question pertains to motives. This article addresses the latter, but with an eye on criticism itself. It argues against instrumental readings that promote aesthetic values on the basis of ethical values, not because this is inherently problematic, but because such an approach risks neglecting the degree to which fiction and nonfiction alike partake in mimetic strategies that promote a ‘truth-effect’ with compelling and sometimes troubling immediacy. Without positioning it as representative of “fiction’s response”, Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room is considered here as exemplary in its ability to disrupt the charms of mimesis through its estranging use of punctuation, self-representation, and intertextuality.
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, edited by Jason Harding, Nov 30, 2017
‘Of the Same Species’: T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
English Studies in Africa, Oct 2012
The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though ... more The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though these authors are not commonly thought of as bedfellows, it is argued that there are two overlapping concerns in the plays under discussion, namely, the idea of original sin and the significance of indeterminate endings. Unlike Eliot's, Beckett's idea of original sin is not (exclusively) the product of a Judaeo-Christian perspective, and does not necessarily imply transgression against some absolute law or being. His understanding of the consequences of original sin, however, is remarkably close to Eliot's, particularly in terms of his conception of time. In both plays there is a tendency towards stasis, which is best reflected in the unresolved endings. Eliot's and Beckett's respective inbuilt frustrations disrupt our habitual experiences and expectations in art, and their philosophy of original sin and use of indeterminate conclusions come together to loosen the grip convention has on audience and reader.
A Deepened Hunger for Seriousness: ‘Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service’
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, May 2013
For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied ... more For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied a comparatively peripheral space within the enterprise of Eliot studies. Despite the frequency with which some of them have been anthologized, these poems have
elicited far fewer critical responses than most of Eliot’s other work. The primary reason for this neglect is that the quatrain poems are largely regarded as satirical or comical meanderings that do not conform to the more ‘serious’ agenda of Eliot’s oeuvre. ‘Mr.
Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ is a case in point, since it has the appearance of a learned and almost unintelligible joke. However, it is the aim of this article to demonstrate that Eliot’s growing indignation with perverted spiritual practices is couched within the satire of the poem. It is further argued that the poem shows Eliot’s hunger for seriousness to have grown since ‘The Hippopotamus’, a poem written two years prior which also deals the corruption of established religion. In this poem, Eliot’s vituperation is sustained and is ultimately indicative the poet’s distaste for spiritual apathy, a theme which will reach its zenith some three years later in The Waste Land.
A Hunger for Seriousness? T. S. Eliot's ‘The Hippopotamus’
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, Oct 2011
T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though enterta... more T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though entertaining, they have been accused of being pseudo-scholarly and superficial, and have on these bases suffered comparable neglect.‘The Hippopotamus’ is no exception. Though binary and more simplistic than the other quatrain poems, the poem marks the genesis of Eliot's endeavour to ‘set his lands in order’. On the surface its handling of established religion and theology appears facetious and, at times, almost blasphemous. And yet, the poem's power of scepticism most forcefully manifests in Eliot's obstinate determination to present a final answer through a swirling network of intertextuality. The aim of this paper is to show that ‘The Hippopotamus’ is not anarchic but that it represents an early version of the impulse to ‘not cease from exploration’, though it fails to sustain its seriousness throughout.
Interactions: Literary Creation, Authorial Development and Literature's Shaping Influences
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, Oct 20, 2013
Key concerns for readers and interpreters of literary works have frequently been, and arguably co... more Key concerns for readers and interpreters of literary works have frequently been, and arguably continue to be, the origin and emergence of the literary work or body of work as creation; the development of the writer and his/her role within that process of
creation; the ontological status of fictional spaces and the characters that occupy them; and the reception and influence of these creations in shaping the world within which they themselves emerge. Although this was not a themed issue of the journal, several of its articles deal in some way or another with these complex considerations.
Narrative (De)construction: Mr Coetzee, in the Basement, with the Quill: A Discussion of Authorial Complicity in J.M. Coetzee's Foe
Journal of Literary Studies, May 2010
The article offers a deconstructive reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and attempts both to explain an... more The article offers a deconstructive reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and attempts both to explain and to reveal the abusive writing employed by each of the “authors” (Susan Barton, Foe, Daniel Defoe, J.M. Coetzee) in the novel. It operates within a Derridean framework, tracing the concepts of supplementation and origin in the text to indicate how the novel simultaneously collapses and conceals its own narrative practices. Like its object, the analysis presents itself as a piece of intertextual writing which questions not only the construction of the novel (and the apparent presence of meaning inherent in it), but also its own modes of composition. A detailed discussion of Susan Barton's credibility as author is proffered, and a close inspection of Coetzee's use of punctuation aims to suggest that the author, as a fictional being, is present in the novel before Part IV. Ultimately, this article attempts to illustrate, through its self-reflexive nature, the various ways in which Foe betrays the fallibility of language and representation.
The Conversation, 2025
At last, the most infamous latecomer in all of literature has arrived-not in the flesh, but in So... more At last, the most infamous latecomer in all of literature has arrived-not in the flesh, but in South Africa's Afrikaans language. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's best-known drama, Waiting for Godot, now also lives as Ons Wag vir Godot.
Philosophy and Literature, 2022
Beckett’s Humility/Humiliation Nexus
Indiana University News Blog, 2019
Blog: A Closer Look at JML 42.4
English Academy Review 35:2, 2018
Review: Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms
English Academy Review 35:2, 2018
The Scores: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, 2017
Review: Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights by Katherine Ebury
Make Literary Magazine, Jul 7, 2015
A Scattering of leaves: Geoffrey Haresnape's Where the Wind Wills
English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, Oct 2012
Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare for Southern Africa
The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare for Southern Africa
Features: - the full text of the play with clear notes and illustrations alongside it - ... more Features:
- the full text of the play with clear notes and illustrations alongside it
- an introduction to the background and themes
- a short, fascinating account of Shakespeare and his times
- a glossary of literary terms that are invaluable for interpreting and answering questions well
- a very clear plot summary
- excellent notes on the characters
- exam-style questions, with suggested answers, plus guidance on answering essay questions well
- ideas for further activities linked to the curriculum.