J U Jacobs
Biographic Data
| ID | 5226930 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J U Jacobs |
| GIVEN NAMES | J U |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobs |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBS J U |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
An Absent Presence
Taking as point of departure Frenkel’s notion of contemporary, post-transitional South African writing as palimpsestic, and Genette’s theory of inter-/hypertextuality in terms of palimpsest, the article examines Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Michael K as an inter- textual appropriation of Coetzee’s Life & Time of Michael K. Employing theories of intertextuality from Kristeva to Genette, Riffaterre, Frow and Hutcheon, it shows how Coetzee’s novel, whic…
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Les essais critiques réunis dans ce volume prennent leur ancrage dans l’océan Indien et explorent les multiples façons dont la dynamique des échanges a formé cette région multilingue, de l’Inde aux Mascareignes et au sud de l’Afrique. Frontières, bords et tiers espaces sont revisités à travers la notion d’écotone, une zone de transition entre deux écosystèmes. Si le terme a été surtout utilisé par les biologistes et les écologistes, l’angle métap…
Performing in the Margins
Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, narrative strategies and thematic concerns are closely inscribed over those of Henry James's The Ambassadors. Approaching Heyns's novel from various theoretical perspectives on intertextuality and memory (Kristeva's intertextuality, Genette's hypertextuali…
A Bridging Fiction
The article examines, with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), how the migrant is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life, which is being transformed into memory, and a future life, which has to be imagined before being realised. Drawing on Coetzee’s own metaphor in Elizabeth Costello of writing fiction as constructing a bridge over a chasm between the real world and an imaginary one,…
Home and (un)belonging in October by Zoë Wicomb
Zoë Wicomb’s third novel, October (2014), provides the most searching revision of the notion of home in contemporary South African fiction. Taking as its point of departure the epigraphs from Tony Morrison’s novel, Home (2012), and Marilynne Robinson’s similarly named novel, Home (2009), this article examines the intertextuality of these fictional works with Wicomb’s novel in the light of the themes of home and belonging. The traditional, or “thi…
(Mis)appropriating Caravaggio in Michiel Heyns's A Sportful Malice
Caravaggio's painting, David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1609) is the central iconic intertext in Michiel Heyns's novel, A Sportful Malice: A Comedy of Revenge, which was awarded the 2015 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. The article demonstrates how Caravaggio's depiction of the young David looking at the severed head of Goliath at the end of his outstretched arm is transposed in A Sportful Malice into a secular subject, and the symbolic import of …
Performing the Precolonial
The article traces the continuity between Zakes Mda's storytelling in his works for the theatre and his fictional works. This is especially evident in the performative character of his novels: his fictional protagonists are performers and artists of various kinds, and some kind of indigenous cultural, religious or artistic performance is usually foregrounded in his novels. His novel, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013), is the latest stage in his …
Nadine Gordimer
As I Lay Dying’
The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993 Schoeman, Karel. 1993. Hierdie Lewe, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. [Google Scholar]), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), André Brink's Imaginings of Sand…
Mapping a self, mapping absence in Sally‐Ann Murray's small moving parts
The essay analyses the figurative mapping in Sally‐Ann Murray's first novel, Small Moving Parts (2009), which is a coming‐of‐age novel about the young Halley Murphy who grows up in the suburb of Umbilo in Durban in the 1960s. The essay begins by analysing the narrative topography of Durban in the 1960s in terms of J. Hillis Miller's notion of “topotropography”, with special reference to what Miller calls “atopical” or unplaceable/unmappable place…
Picturing the African Diaspora in recent fiction
Coetzee's engagement with the theme of diasporic migration in Disgrace signals an important direction in contemporary South African fiction. Coetzee himself has foregrounded immigrant cultural identities in Slow Man (2005), whereas the historical African diaspora and its continuation into the present‐day dispersal of Africans into diasporic communities around the world, including South Africa, have been taken up in a number of other recent South …
Playing in the dark/ playing in the light
Zoë Wicomb's three fictional works – You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb's writing in terms of the…
A.k.a. Breyten Breytenbach
The essays in this volume hold up for scrutiny, in diverse ways, many facets of the artistic output of Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet who first became a public figure in apartheid South Africa – his poetry, his fictional and non-fictional prose, his plays, and his painting and drawing. The approaches adopted by the authors of the essays range from the largely theoretical to the more popular forms of the interview and the review. Collecti…
Mapping a heartland Breyten Breytenbach's ‘Zone of Bastardisation’ in Dog Heart
The article takes as its point of departure the trope of revisionist cartography as it features in postcolonialist theories of the geographical and conceptual de/reterritorialisation of postcolonial cultures. It analyses the way in which Breyten Breytenbach returns to the formative topography of his childhood and maps his Western Cape “Heartland” in Dog Heart (1998). The article shows how his conception of identity in terms of topography and writ…
Translating the ‘heart of darkness’ cross‐cultural discourse in the contemporary Congo book
The tension between the insistent binarism of Marlow's discourse on darkness and the cautionary self‐reflexivity of the frame narrator in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) has remained a feature of writing about Congo up to the present day: King Leopold's Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild; The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Passage to Africa (2001) by George Alagiah. The patriarchal discourse of the American missionary, Nathan…
Reconciling languages in Antjie Krog's country of my skull
Introduction
Michael Ondaatje's the English patient (1992) and postcolonial impatience
This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects…
Cruising across cultures in the novels of Antony Sher
Narrating the Island
The anatomy of symbiosis marino marini and d.h. lawrence
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Les essais critiques réunis dans ce volume prennent leur ancrage dans l’océan Indien et explorent les multiples façons dont la dynamique des échanges a formé cette région multilingue, de l’Inde aux Mascareignes et au sud de l’Afrique. Frontières, bords et tiers espaces sont revisités à travers la notion d’écotone, une zone de transition entre deux écosystèmes. Si le terme a été surtout utilisé par les biologistes et les écologistes, l’angle métap…
Home and (un)belonging in October by Zoë Wicomb
Zoë Wicomb’s third novel, October (2014), provides the most searching revision of the notion of home in contemporary South African fiction. Taking as its point of departure the epigraphs from Tony Morrison’s novel, Home (2012), and Marilynne Robinson’s similarly named novel, Home (2009), this article examines the intertextuality of these fictional works with Wicomb’s novel in the light of the themes of home and belonging. The traditional, or “thi…
The anatomy of symbiosis marino marini and d.h. lawrence
The anatomy of symbiosis marino marini and d.h. lawrence
Narrating the Island
Michael Ondaatje's the English patient (1992) and postcolonial impatience
This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects…
Cruising across cultures in the novels of Antony Sher
Introduction
Reconciling languages in Antjie Krog's country of my skull
Translating the ‘heart of darkness’ cross‐cultural discourse in the contemporary Congo book
The tension between the insistent binarism of Marlow's discourse on darkness and the cautionary self‐reflexivity of the frame narrator in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) has remained a feature of writing about Congo up to the present day: King Leopold's Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild; The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver, and A Passage to Africa (2001) by George Alagiah. The patriarchal discourse of the American missionary, Nathan…
Mapping a heartland Breyten Breytenbach's ‘Zone of Bastardisation’ in Dog Heart
The article takes as its point of departure the trope of revisionist cartography as it features in postcolonialist theories of the geographical and conceptual de/reterritorialisation of postcolonial cultures. It analyses the way in which Breyten Breytenbach returns to the formative topography of his childhood and maps his Western Cape “Heartland” in Dog Heart (1998). The article shows how his conception of identity in terms of topography and writ…
A.k.a. Breyten Breytenbach
The essays in this volume hold up for scrutiny, in diverse ways, many facets of the artistic output of Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet who first became a public figure in apartheid South Africa – his poetry, his fictional and non-fictional prose, his plays, and his painting and drawing. The approaches adopted by the authors of the essays range from the largely theoretical to the more popular forms of the interview and the review. Collecti…
Playing in the dark/ playing in the light
Zoë Wicomb's three fictional works – You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb's writing in terms of the…
Picturing the African Diaspora in recent fiction
Coetzee's engagement with the theme of diasporic migration in Disgrace signals an important direction in contemporary South African fiction. Coetzee himself has foregrounded immigrant cultural identities in Slow Man (2005), whereas the historical African diaspora and its continuation into the present‐day dispersal of Africans into diasporic communities around the world, including South Africa, have been taken up in a number of other recent South …
Mapping a self, mapping absence in Sally‐Ann Murray's small moving parts
The essay analyses the figurative mapping in Sally‐Ann Murray's first novel, Small Moving Parts (2009), which is a coming‐of‐age novel about the young Halley Murphy who grows up in the suburb of Umbilo in Durban in the 1960s. The essay begins by analysing the narrative topography of Durban in the 1960s in terms of J. Hillis Miller's notion of “topotropography”, with special reference to what Miller calls “atopical” or unplaceable/unmappable place…
As I Lay Dying’
The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993 Schoeman, Karel. 1993. Hierdie Lewe, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. [Google Scholar]), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), André Brink's Imaginings of Sand…
Nadine Gordimer
(Mis)appropriating Caravaggio in Michiel Heyns's A Sportful Malice
Caravaggio's painting, David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1609) is the central iconic intertext in Michiel Heyns's novel, A Sportful Malice: A Comedy of Revenge, which was awarded the 2015 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. The article demonstrates how Caravaggio's depiction of the young David looking at the severed head of Goliath at the end of his outstretched arm is transposed in A Sportful Malice into a secular subject, and the symbolic import of …
Performing the Precolonial
The article traces the continuity between Zakes Mda's storytelling in his works for the theatre and his fictional works. This is especially evident in the performative character of his novels: his fictional protagonists are performers and artists of various kinds, and some kind of indigenous cultural, religious or artistic performance is usually foregrounded in his novels. His novel, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013), is the latest stage in his …
Home and (un)belonging in October by Zoë Wicomb
Zoë Wicomb’s third novel, October (2014), provides the most searching revision of the notion of home in contemporary South African fiction. Taking as its point of departure the epigraphs from Tony Morrison’s novel, Home (2012), and Marilynne Robinson’s similarly named novel, Home (2009), this article examines the intertextuality of these fictional works with Wicomb’s novel in the light of the themes of home and belonging. The traditional, or “thi…
A Bridging Fiction
The article examines, with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), how the migrant is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life, which is being transformed into memory, and a future life, which has to be imagined before being realised. Drawing on Coetzee’s own metaphor in Elizabeth Costello of writing fiction as constructing a bridge over a chasm between the real world and an imaginary one,…
Performing in the Margins
Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, narrative strategies and thematic concerns are closely inscribed over those of Henry James's The Ambassadors. Approaching Heyns's novel from various theoretical perspectives on intertextuality and memory (Kristeva's intertextuality, Genette's hypertextuali…
An Absent Presence
Taking as point of departure Frenkel’s notion of contemporary, post-transitional South African writing as palimpsestic, and Genette’s theory of inter-/hypertextuality in terms of palimpsest, the article examines Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Michael K as an inter- textual appropriation of Coetzee’s Life & Time of Michael K. Employing theories of intertextuality from Kristeva to Genette, Riffaterre, Frow and Hutcheon, it shows how Coetzee’s novel, whic…
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Les essais critiques réunis dans ce volume prennent leur ancrage dans l’océan Indien et explorent les multiples façons dont la dynamique des échanges a formé cette région multilingue, de l’Inde aux Mascareignes et au sud de l’Afrique. Frontières, bords et tiers espaces sont revisités à travers la notion d’écotone, une zone de transition entre deux écosystèmes. Si le terme a été surtout utilisé par les biologistes et les écologistes, l’angle métap…
Art (16 works) · Literature (14 works) · History (12 works) · South African History and Culture (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Anthropology (5 works)