Dirk Klopper
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1244751 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Dirk Klopper |
| NOMBRES | Dirk |
| APELLIDO | Klopper |
| FIRMA | KLOPPER D |
| AFILIACIONES | Stellenbosch University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 24 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 7 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 24 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1986 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way
No Abstract
Ghosts of Books
Focusing on the figures of Makanna, the ‘Bushman’, Vytjé Vaal, Hinza Marossi, Arend Plessis, and Johannes van der Kemp in Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, the paper traces their refiguration in Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834 and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life. The figures make interesting company. While Makanna and the ‘Bushman’ resist colonial rule and denounce the hypocrisy …
A life elsewhere
Wilma Stockenström’s novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree provides a first-person account of a fifteenth-century slave woman who was abducted in childhood from her forest village, sold in a Swahili coastal city to a succession of masters, and has come to inhabit the hollow of a baobab tree in the interior of the land after a failed expedition to find a trade route to a mercantile city rumored to be located in the distant northwest of the conti…
The Twice-Told Tale
This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheles…
Dry bones
The secular having prevailed over the sacred, paleoanthropology rather than scripture is now invoked to provide narratives of human origins. Nevertheless, given its “occult” method of making inferences about an invisible past, as opposed to an invisible future, the sacred continues to inhabit the secular in paleoanthropological discourse. This is not to suggest that the method is mistaken, but it does mean that it is subjected to ongoing revision…
Between man, woman and dog
The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and t…
Conditional Tense
Antjie Krog is in the first instance an Afrikaans poet, who has been publishing books of poetry since 1970. Her international reputation rests, however, on her prose writings. Country of My Skull (
The Place of Nostalgia in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light
Much recent South African fiction deploys the motif of returning to a place associated with the past. Medalie claims that this motif justifies characterising these fictions as a literature of nostalgia, and is critical of their idealising the past rather than engaging critically with the process of constructing the past. My article examines Wicomb's Playing in the Light as a novel of return that similarly concerns itself with nostalgia, though it…
Boer, Bushman, and Baboon
British occupation of the Cape in the late eighteenth century coincided with the rise of natural history as global knowledge of the created world. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) had provided a t
Between nature and culture
While earlier studies of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness have drawn attention to the way in which the novel challenges the binary opposition of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, and have expounded on the novel's ecological theme, none have thus far examined the significance of prophecy in the novel, the mode of thought that informed the Xhosa cattle killing of the 1850s and the logic of which the narrative sets out to explore. Draw…
In pursuit of the primitive
Van der Post has provoked considerable controversy in recent years around what are seen as the fictionalisations and the mystifications evident in his work. In this article I provide a reading of The Lost World of the Kalahari that seeks to understand rather than excoriate these features of his writing. For purposes of my argument, the relevant question is not so much whether Van der Post's representation of the Bushman is true, but what the cont…
Critical Fictions in JM Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth
This paper explores the way in which Coetzee's Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) interrogate the conventions of self-representation in autobiographical writing. It begins by drawing attention to how Coetzee sees the question of subject, truth and writing as a concern that runs through all his works, suggesting that autobiography is not a privileged genre in presenting the truth of the subject, and then looks at contemporary theoretical studies of a…
Travel and Transgression
Jacobson maintains that, as a child growing up in Kimberley, he had invested with fantasy the landscape of the historical route from the Cape Colony to the African interior, one that is said to have registered an unconscious anxiety that there might, in fact, ‘be nothing there’. On his return as adult to this landscape, he wonders whether or not he will discover a void in the heart of the imagined plenitude. In this paper, I explore the relations…
Self and community in the poetry of Arthur Nortje
Many studies of Arthur Nortje's poetry have commented on the prevalence in his work of images of alienation, seeing this as a function either of political conditions in South Africa in his lifetime or of Nortje's exile from his home country. In this paper, I maintain that Nortje's depictions of alienation are more fundamental than suggested by earlier studies, inasmuch as his depictions point to primordial loss as constitutive of identity. I argu…
In pursuit of the subject
This article presents the conceptual framework and methodological approach I have adopted in my research towards a biography of the South African poet Arthur Nortje (1942–1970). It begins by identifying the principles of biographical unity advocated by James Boswell, and adopted by subsequent biographers, and proceeds to question the validity of these principles in the light of contemporary reflections on the nature of the subject, language, and …
The Body in Biography
This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which…
Narrative Time and the Space of the Image
The article begins by examining the relationship between truth and reconciliation as propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It contrasts a linear conception of this relationship with an iterative conception and equates these conceptions with the narrative and the image,respectively. The article then proceeds to explore the implications of the image, or the imaginary, as the “other” of the TRC narrative. It argues that the di…
Making a difference
A libidinal zone
The presence of an absence
Death, resistance and liberation in Peter Horn's “The Plumstead Elegies”
The article focuses on the notions of death, resistance and liberation in Peter Horn's sequence of poems “The Plumstead Elegies”. It argues that the process of radical personal and social transformation described in the poems is rendered problematical by employing a conceptual framework that is at once psychoanalytic and Marxist. The dilemma posed by the process of transformation described in the poems is seen to arise from a disjunction between …
Native from the start
Patrick Cullinan. 1994. Selected Poems 1961–1994. Edited and introduced by Stephen Watson. Illustrations by Judith Mason. Cape Town: Snailpress. 142pp. Stephen Gray. 1994. Selected Poems 1960–92. Cape Town, Johannesburg: David Philip. 75pp
Ideology and the study of South African English poetry
Ideology is intricated in South African English poetry and its critical reception in complex ways which demand ongoing examination. In this study I approach the subject along three lines of enquiry. In the first section I trace the development of a materialist critical practice up to the recent challenge it encounters in the work of Michael Chapman. In the second section I attempt to shift this debate onto new ground by reformulating the concept …
Repetition and death in Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’
In response to the criticism frequently levelled against contemporary literary theory, that it disregards and devalues the literary text, this article attempts to show how post‐structuralism can feasibly be employed, vis‐a‐vis Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’, as a strategy of reading literary texts without detracting from their enjoyment. The article first examines a few key concepts and their ramifications that together constitute the theoretical fiel…
Dry bones
The secular having prevailed over the sacred, paleoanthropology rather than scripture is now invoked to provide narratives of human origins. Nevertheless, given its “occult” method of making inferences about an invisible past, as opposed to an invisible future, the sacred continues to inhabit the secular in paleoanthropological discourse. This is not to suggest that the method is mistaken, but it does mean that it is subjected to ongoing revision…
In pursuit of the primitive
Van der Post has provoked considerable controversy in recent years around what are seen as the fictionalisations and the mystifications evident in his work. In this article I provide a reading of The Lost World of the Kalahari that seeks to understand rather than excoriate these features of his writing. For purposes of my argument, the relevant question is not so much whether Van der Post's representation of the Bushman is true, but what the cont…
A life elsewhere
Wilma Stockenström’s novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree provides a first-person account of a fifteenth-century slave woman who was abducted in childhood from her forest village, sold in a Swahili coastal city to a succession of masters, and has come to inhabit the hollow of a baobab tree in the interior of the land after a failed expedition to find a trade route to a mercantile city rumored to be located in the distant northwest of the conti…
Between man, woman and dog
The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and t…
Boer, Bushman, and Baboon
British occupation of the Cape in the late eighteenth century coincided with the rise of natural history as global knowledge of the created world. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) had provided a t
Repetition and death in Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’
In response to the criticism frequently levelled against contemporary literary theory, that it disregards and devalues the literary text, this article attempts to show how post‐structuralism can feasibly be employed, vis‐a‐vis Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’, as a strategy of reading literary texts without detracting from their enjoyment. The article first examines a few key concepts and their ramifications that together constitute the theoretical fiel…
Ideology and the study of South African English poetry
Ideology is intricated in South African English poetry and its critical reception in complex ways which demand ongoing examination. In this study I approach the subject along three lines of enquiry. In the first section I trace the development of a materialist critical practice up to the recent challenge it encounters in the work of Michael Chapman. In the second section I attempt to shift this debate onto new ground by reformulating the concept …
Native from the start
Patrick Cullinan. 1994. Selected Poems 1961–1994. Edited and introduced by Stephen Watson. Illustrations by Judith Mason. Cape Town: Snailpress. 142pp. Stephen Gray. 1994. Selected Poems 1960–92. Cape Town, Johannesburg: David Philip. 75pp
Death, resistance and liberation in Peter Horn's “The Plumstead Elegies”
The article focuses on the notions of death, resistance and liberation in Peter Horn's sequence of poems “The Plumstead Elegies”. It argues that the process of radical personal and social transformation described in the poems is rendered problematical by employing a conceptual framework that is at once psychoanalytic and Marxist. The dilemma posed by the process of transformation described in the poems is seen to arise from a disjunction between …
A libidinal zone
The presence of an absence
Making a difference
Narrative Time and the Space of the Image
The article begins by examining the relationship between truth and reconciliation as propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It contrasts a linear conception of this relationship with an iterative conception and equates these conceptions with the narrative and the image,respectively. The article then proceeds to explore the implications of the image, or the imaginary, as the “other” of the TRC narrative. It argues that the di…
Self and community in the poetry of Arthur Nortje
Many studies of Arthur Nortje's poetry have commented on the prevalence in his work of images of alienation, seeing this as a function either of political conditions in South Africa in his lifetime or of Nortje's exile from his home country. In this paper, I maintain that Nortje's depictions of alienation are more fundamental than suggested by earlier studies, inasmuch as his depictions point to primordial loss as constitutive of identity. I argu…
In pursuit of the subject
This article presents the conceptual framework and methodological approach I have adopted in my research towards a biography of the South African poet Arthur Nortje (1942–1970). It begins by identifying the principles of biographical unity advocated by James Boswell, and adopted by subsequent biographers, and proceeds to question the validity of these principles in the light of contemporary reflections on the nature of the subject, language, and …
The Body in Biography
This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which…
Travel and Transgression
Jacobson maintains that, as a child growing up in Kimberley, he had invested with fantasy the landscape of the historical route from the Cape Colony to the African interior, one that is said to have registered an unconscious anxiety that there might, in fact, ‘be nothing there’. On his return as adult to this landscape, he wonders whether or not he will discover a void in the heart of the imagined plenitude. In this paper, I explore the relations…
Critical Fictions in JM Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth
This paper explores the way in which Coetzee's Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) interrogate the conventions of self-representation in autobiographical writing. It begins by drawing attention to how Coetzee sees the question of subject, truth and writing as a concern that runs through all his works, suggesting that autobiography is not a privileged genre in presenting the truth of the subject, and then looks at contemporary theoretical studies of a…
Between nature and culture
While earlier studies of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness have drawn attention to the way in which the novel challenges the binary opposition of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, and have expounded on the novel's ecological theme, none have thus far examined the significance of prophecy in the novel, the mode of thought that informed the Xhosa cattle killing of the 1850s and the logic of which the narrative sets out to explore. Draw…
In pursuit of the primitive
Van der Post has provoked considerable controversy in recent years around what are seen as the fictionalisations and the mystifications evident in his work. In this article I provide a reading of The Lost World of the Kalahari that seeks to understand rather than excoriate these features of his writing. For purposes of my argument, the relevant question is not so much whether Van der Post's representation of the Bushman is true, but what the cont…
Boer, Bushman, and Baboon
British occupation of the Cape in the late eighteenth century coincided with the rise of natural history as global knowledge of the created world. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) had provided a t
The Place of Nostalgia in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light
Much recent South African fiction deploys the motif of returning to a place associated with the past. Medalie claims that this motif justifies characterising these fictions as a literature of nostalgia, and is critical of their idealising the past rather than engaging critically with the process of constructing the past. My article examines Wicomb's Playing in the Light as a novel of return that similarly concerns itself with nostalgia, though it…
Conditional Tense
Antjie Krog is in the first instance an Afrikaans poet, who has been publishing books of poetry since 1970. Her international reputation rests, however, on her prose writings. Country of My Skull (
Between man, woman and dog
The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and t…
Dry bones
The secular having prevailed over the sacred, paleoanthropology rather than scripture is now invoked to provide narratives of human origins. Nevertheless, given its “occult” method of making inferences about an invisible past, as opposed to an invisible future, the sacred continues to inhabit the secular in paleoanthropological discourse. This is not to suggest that the method is mistaken, but it does mean that it is subjected to ongoing revision…
The Twice-Told Tale
This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheles…
Ghosts of Books
Focusing on the figures of Makanna, the ‘Bushman’, Vytjé Vaal, Hinza Marossi, Arend Plessis, and Johannes van der Kemp in Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches, the paper traces their refiguration in Matthew Shum’s Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834 and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life. The figures make interesting company. While Makanna and the ‘Bushman’ resist colonial rule and denounce the hypocrisy …
A life elsewhere
Wilma Stockenström’s novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree provides a first-person account of a fifteenth-century slave woman who was abducted in childhood from her forest village, sold in a Swahili coastal city to a succession of masters, and has come to inhabit the hollow of a baobab tree in the interior of the land after a failed expedition to find a trade route to a mercantile city rumored to be located in the distant northwest of the conti…
Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way
No Abstract
Art (20 obras) · Literature (19 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · History (14 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · South African History and Culture (11 obras) · Aesthetics (10 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Linguistics (9 obras)