Hermann Wittenberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 1744298 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hermann Wittenberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hermann |
| FAMILY NAME | Wittenberg |
| SIGNATURE | WITTENBERG H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2961-2281 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Photography and Film in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensi…
Re-reading Dusklands
This paper has two points of departure: the publication of Dusklands in 1974, and the event of the Dusklands 50 conference held at the University of the Western Cape exactly 50 years later, on the 18th and 19th of April, 2024. We consider aspects of the publication history of the first edition, with special reference to the book’s dustcover. This leads us to a discussion of the importance of photographs in Dusklands, and to an appreciation of the…
Turn-It-Off
This essay concerns the pervasive "problem" of plagiarism in student writing, arguing against the easy adoption of technological policing "solutions" that may themselves contribute to an erosion of authentic learning and knowledge production. The paper critically examines the key tool, or weapon, in the war against plagiarism, namely the educational software Turnitin, and some of the discontent that has arisen in consequence of its widespread ado…
J. M. Coetzee and the Archive
Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collection, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee’s oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the volume sets out to investigate the historical, cultural and aesthetic c…
Obituary of Michael Wessels (1958–2018)
Many of us will remember the time when Michael joined the English Department at UWC in mid-2015.It was the first week of term, and we had organised a conference to share our writing and scholarship, and the idea was to introduce Michael to the department so that he could get to know his new colleagues and research context.You will remember him from the conference: listening intently and carefully to each of our presentations, always afterwards as…
Reflections on Literary Studies in South Africa
Zakes Mda is not only one of South Africa’s most significant post-apartheid novelists, but has worked in diverse media such as theatre, film, opera, painting and music. His prolific creativity in forms other than the novel needs to be taken into account when evaluating his writings. This article proposes an intermedial analysis of Black Diamond (2009), a novel which has largely been given unfavourable critical attention, and suggests that it need…
Between text and stage
Several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels have been adapted successfully for the stage, both as theatrical and operatic versions, but these adaptations have not received much critical attention. This article examines the ways in which Peter Glazer and Mark Wheatley have adapted Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986), resulting in two different and distinct stage productions, performed in the US and the UK respectively. In order to explore the complex relationship bet…
Sven Hedin's “Vanished country”
Coetzee in California
The scene below comes from a screenplay version of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, written in 1988 by the Hollywood scriptwriter, Walter B. Newman.EXT. OUTSIDE OF TOWN—DAYUsi
The boer and the jackal
In the context of considerable scholarly and popular attention focused on Bushman narratives over the last 30 years, much of it centred on analyses and retellings of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, there has been much less attention paid to Khoi story-telling and the comparative insights made possible by such a study. The monumental work on the ∣Xam carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has overshadowed Bleek's own earli…
Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination
In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naïve European children's folktale. Bleek's theories of …
Late style in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a bad year
J.M. Coetzee's post-millennial writing has been marked by new forms of inventiveness, formal risk-taking and narrative experimentation that have blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography and social commentary. Using the example of the novel Diary of a bad year (2007), it is argued that this latter fiction is exemplary of Edward Said's idea of “late style”, accounting not only for Coetzee's surprising venture into explicit political co…
Alan Paton's writing for the stage
Introduction: \nIt would not be an exaggeration to assert that no South African playwright in the 1950s and 1960s received as much international attention and recognition as Alan Paton, until eclipsed by Athol Fugard’s emerging career. Paton’s own plays and musicals, and the stage adaptations of his novels, had some extensive and successful runs on Broadway in New York, and also played to packed houses in South Africa. Some highly acclaimed artis…
Occult, Empire and Landscape
Occult, Empire and Landscape: The Colonial Uncanny in John Buchan’s African Writing Hermann Wittenberg Introduction The African writing of John Buchan (1875–1940) deals, in highly complex ways, with the relationship between South Africa’s colonial landscape and the emerging white political consensus on the native question in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. At the core of Buchan’s small but diverse body of African writing, is the problem of c…
Alan Paton's sublime
This article develops a postcolonial reading of the sublime by suggesting that aesthetic theories of the sublime were, in their classical philosophical formulations by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, founded on problematic assumptions of racial difference. In the colonial sphere, it is argued, the sublime could discursively manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested landscapes. This…
Imperial space and the discourse of the novel
This paper uses insights of recent theories of space as a basis for an investigation into the relationship between imperialism and the discourse of the metropolitan novel. J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe and its intertext Robinson Crusoe are examined in the light of these notions. Foe, it will be argued, is a critical engagement with spatialised structures of power such as imperialism, which seek to establish the dominance of a Western, rational, male s…
Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination
In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naïve European children's folktale. Bleek's theories of …
The boer and the jackal
In the context of considerable scholarly and popular attention focused on Bushman narratives over the last 30 years, much of it centred on analyses and retellings of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, there has been much less attention paid to Khoi story-telling and the comparative insights made possible by such a study. The monumental work on the ∣Xam carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has overshadowed Bleek's own earli…
Sven Hedin's “Vanished country”
Coetzee in California
The scene below comes from a screenplay version of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, written in 1988 by the Hollywood scriptwriter, Walter B. Newman.EXT. OUTSIDE OF TOWN—DAYUsi
Late style in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a bad year
J.M. Coetzee's post-millennial writing has been marked by new forms of inventiveness, formal risk-taking and narrative experimentation that have blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography and social commentary. Using the example of the novel Diary of a bad year (2007), it is argued that this latter fiction is exemplary of Edward Said's idea of “late style”, accounting not only for Coetzee's surprising venture into explicit political co…
Imperial space and the discourse of the novel
This paper uses insights of recent theories of space as a basis for an investigation into the relationship between imperialism and the discourse of the metropolitan novel. J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe and its intertext Robinson Crusoe are examined in the light of these notions. Foe, it will be argued, is a critical engagement with spatialised structures of power such as imperialism, which seek to establish the dominance of a Western, rational, male s…
Alan Paton's sublime
This article develops a postcolonial reading of the sublime by suggesting that aesthetic theories of the sublime were, in their classical philosophical formulations by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, founded on problematic assumptions of racial difference. In the colonial sphere, it is argued, the sublime could discursively manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested landscapes. This…
Occult, Empire and Landscape
Occult, Empire and Landscape: The Colonial Uncanny in John Buchan’s African Writing Hermann Wittenberg Introduction The African writing of John Buchan (1875–1940) deals, in highly complex ways, with the relationship between South Africa’s colonial landscape and the emerging white political consensus on the native question in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. At the core of Buchan’s small but diverse body of African writing, is the problem of c…
Alan Paton's writing for the stage
Introduction: \nIt would not be an exaggeration to assert that no South African playwright in the 1950s and 1960s received as much international attention and recognition as Alan Paton, until eclipsed by Athol Fugard’s emerging career. Paton’s own plays and musicals, and the stage adaptations of his novels, had some extensive and successful runs on Broadway in New York, and also played to packed houses in South Africa. Some highly acclaimed artis…
Late style in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a bad year
J.M. Coetzee's post-millennial writing has been marked by new forms of inventiveness, formal risk-taking and narrative experimentation that have blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography and social commentary. Using the example of the novel Diary of a bad year (2007), it is argued that this latter fiction is exemplary of Edward Said's idea of “late style”, accounting not only for Coetzee's surprising venture into explicit political co…
Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination
In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naïve European children's folktale. Bleek's theories of …
The boer and the jackal
In the context of considerable scholarly and popular attention focused on Bushman narratives over the last 30 years, much of it centred on analyses and retellings of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, there has been much less attention paid to Khoi story-telling and the comparative insights made possible by such a study. The monumental work on the ∣Xam carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has overshadowed Bleek's own earli…
Sven Hedin's “Vanished country”
Coetzee in California
The scene below comes from a screenplay version of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, written in 1988 by the Hollywood scriptwriter, Walter B. Newman.EXT. OUTSIDE OF TOWN—DAYUsi
Between text and stage
Several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels have been adapted successfully for the stage, both as theatrical and operatic versions, but these adaptations have not received much critical attention. This article examines the ways in which Peter Glazer and Mark Wheatley have adapted Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986), resulting in two different and distinct stage productions, performed in the US and the UK respectively. In order to explore the complex relationship bet…
Obituary of Michael Wessels (1958–2018)
Many of us will remember the time when Michael joined the English Department at UWC in mid-2015.It was the first week of term, and we had organised a conference to share our writing and scholarship, and the idea was to introduce Michael to the department so that he could get to know his new colleagues and research context.You will remember him from the conference: listening intently and carefully to each of our presentations, always afterwards as…
Reflections on Literary Studies in South Africa
Zakes Mda is not only one of South Africa’s most significant post-apartheid novelists, but has worked in diverse media such as theatre, film, opera, painting and music. His prolific creativity in forms other than the novel needs to be taken into account when evaluating his writings. This article proposes an intermedial analysis of Black Diamond (2009), a novel which has largely been given unfavourable critical attention, and suggests that it need…
J. M. Coetzee and the Archive
Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collection, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee’s oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the volume sets out to investigate the historical, cultural and aesthetic c…
Turn-It-Off
This essay concerns the pervasive "problem" of plagiarism in student writing, arguing against the easy adoption of technological policing "solutions" that may themselves contribute to an erosion of authentic learning and knowledge production. The paper critically examines the key tool, or weapon, in the war against plagiarism, namely the educational software Turnitin, and some of the discontent that has arisen in consequence of its widespread ado…
Re-reading Dusklands
This paper has two points of departure: the publication of Dusklands in 1974, and the event of the Dusklands 50 conference held at the University of the Western Cape exactly 50 years later, on the 18th and 19th of April, 2024. We consider aspects of the publication history of the first edition, with special reference to the book’s dustcover. This leads us to a discussion of the importance of photographs in Dusklands, and to an appreciation of the…
Photography and Film in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensi…
Art (10 works) · South African History and Culture (10 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · African history and culture studies (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works)