Andrew Van Der Vlies
Biographic Data
| ID | 640360 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Van Der Vlies |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Der Vlies |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DER VLIES A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8431-6701 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work. The volume covers a wealth of topics, inc…
Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts
This collection considers the significance of South African-born writer, activist and thinker Olive Schreiner in international and multidisciplinary contexts in her time – and the ongoing relevance of her work to our own. A leading writer of New Woman Fiction at the fin de siècle , Schreiner influenced generations of readers and writers. Taken together, these essays make the argument for a ‘new’ Schreiner Studies drawing on recent developments in…
“Doing very well in South Africa”: Fiona Melrose, Karel Schoeman, and the Intertextual Afterlives of Woolf ’s
This essay examines two South African responses to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925): Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), and Karel Schoeman’s Die noorderlig (published in Afrikaans in 1975). Melrose’s novel patterns character and plot directly on Woolf’s with allusions to her biography and to other reworkings of the text. Schoeman’s performs a less obvious homage to Mrs Dalloway in its exploration of the tensions between politics and poetics…
Constellated in a flash: On the dialectics of seeing (beyond stasis) in Zoë Wicomb’s work
This essay considers the photograph as representation and metaphor in select work by Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948). It asks how the photograph functions in her prose fiction and criticism in service of a recuperation of late- and postapartheid stasis in potentially affirmative vein. Many of Wicomb’s most illuminating essays and many of her fictions – from her debut, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the most recent, Still Life (2020) – engage wit…
World Literature, the opaque archive, and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others
A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputabl…
South African Writing in Transition
Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid? Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime and science fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and te…
Everyone is present: Essays on photography, memory and family
Terry Kurgan is one of South Africa’s most accomplished and sophisticated theorists of her own photographic practice. Her projects, both studio-based and publicly engaged, have frequently explored
Queer Worlds/Global Queer
Twenty-six years ago, introducing his space-clearing edited essay collection entitled Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner took stock of the failure of social theory then current in the academy t
Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013
Print, Text and Books in South Africa
Reading for hope: A Conversation About Texts and Method
In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durb…
Bad Feelings in the Provinces of History
Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994) and Agaat (2004) set new standards for Afrikaans fiction. This chapter canvasses the author’s abiding concerns with the forced adoption of the temporality of another—another political order, another cultural identity—that was at the heart of apartheid ideology, and with the multiple disappointments (missed appointments, frustrated desires) that resulted. Focusing on Agaat , it considers the role of the n…
Stasis Anxiety
Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) …
On Being Stuck
This chapter considers J.M. Coetzee’s complex (and partly fictionalized) autobiographical project, Scenes from Provincial Life , comprised of Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009), in which Coetzee dramatizes an- other self’s desire for the posture of the anti-political by staging a form of disaffection that refuses metropolitan expectation at the same time that it models itself on metropolitan explorations of the desire for artisti…
South Africa, Time or Place?
Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) …
Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing
Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the ‘new’ nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa’s literature, it understands ‘disappointment’ both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-aparthei…
In appreciation: Rita Barnard
A Tribute to Andrew Offenburger, Founding Editor of Safundi
Response: The People, the Multitude and the Costs of Privacy in South Africa's Postcolony
In this engagement with the idea of the common in contemporary South Africa, the author uses three episodes from his own experience in and of South Africa – a performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2009; a bus journey from Cape Town in 2010; news of the Marikana mine massacre in August 2012 – as well as recent work by theorists Lauren Berlant, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, as prompts to explore how issues of public and pr…
I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or: Zoë Wicomb, textuality, propriety, and the proprietary
This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorship of — South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Variously described as a short-story cycle or novel-in-stories, this deftly metafictional work offers a meditation on the gender and rac…
Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
Vir iemand wat altyd die gewig van 'n boek takseer terwyl jy begin blaai en nie die verleiding kan weerstaan om aan die binnekant te ruik nie, is Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa 'n heerlike boek. Nie dat dit spesifiek lekkerder as ander moderne boeke ruik nie - wel kraakhelder en fris - maar omdat die materialiteit, die boek as ding, so sterk op die voorgrond staan in die 21 artikels waaruit dit bestaan. Die plesier begin al danksy …
Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others
This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. …
Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms
Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicomb's oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a …
Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (David's Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics.…
An Interview with Mark Behr
Mark Behr was born in October 1963 in Arusha, in Tanzania, and grew up in (KwaZulu-)Natal, South Africa. He attended the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School for two years in the early 1970s and finished
Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others
This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. …
I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or: Zoë Wicomb, textuality, propriety, and the proprietary
This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorship of — South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Variously described as a short-story cycle or novel-in-stories, this deftly metafictional work offers a meditation on the gender and rac…
The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb'sPlaying in the Light
This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicomb's novel points to possibilities for n…
Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the Textual Atlantic
In a wide-ranging and suggestive assessment of the implications of Oprah Winfrey's selection of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) as the second book—after Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
Queer Worlds/Global Queer
Twenty-six years ago, introducing his space-clearing edited essay collection entitled Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner took stock of the failure of social theory then current in the academy t
Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms
Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicomb's oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a …
Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (David's Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics.…
Disaggregating imperial(ist) discourses
Local’ Writing, ‘Global’ Reading, and the Demands of the ‘Canon’: The Case of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country
Extracted from text ... I thank Francis Galloway and Lize Kriel for inviting me to contribute an earlier version of this article to a 'Book History' panel at the South African Historical Society Conference at the University of Cape Town in June 2005, and Kriel and Isabel Hofmeyr for inviting this submission to the SAHJ. I wish to acknowledge the support and insights, at various points, of Patrick D. Flanery, Rita Barnard, Laura Chrisman, and espe…
Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the Textual Atlantic
In a wide-ranging and suggestive assessment of the implications of Oprah Winfrey's selection of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) as the second book—after Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
Reading Banned Books: Apartheid Censors and Anti-Apartheid Aesthetics
By the late 1960s, state oppression in South Africa, including the proscription of activists associated with the liberation movements and censorship of writing critical of the government by a highl
Through a different lens: Bongani Ndodana-Breen interviewed and introduced by Andrew van der Vlies with extracts from Greyson/Ndodana-Breen's Orange Clouds
Bongani Ndodana-Breen, born in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape in 1975, was educated at St Andrew's College in Grahamstown, Rhodes University (where he studied Music as an undergraduate), and the University of Stellenbosch (where he studied composition). He started composing in his late teens, and by 1998, aged only twenty-one, had won a Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award for Music. Acclaimed early work included the chamber opera Themba …
On the Ambiguities of Narrative and of History: Writing (about) the Past in Recent South African Literary Criticism
As South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was in the midst of conducting Human Rights Violation hearings across the country in 1997, leading intellectual and writer Njabulo Ndebel
The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb'sPlaying in the Light
This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicomb's novel points to possibilities for n…
Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms
Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicomb's oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a …
Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (David's Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics.…
An Interview with Mark Behr
Mark Behr was born in October 1963 in Arusha, in Tanzania, and grew up in (KwaZulu-)Natal, South Africa. He attended the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School for two years in the early 1970s and finished
The Art and Politics of Alex La Guma
Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
Vir iemand wat altyd die gewig van 'n boek takseer terwyl jy begin blaai en nie die verleiding kan weerstaan om aan die binnekant te ruik nie, is Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa 'n heerlike boek. Nie dat dit spesifiek lekkerder as ander moderne boeke ruik nie - wel kraakhelder en fris - maar omdat die materialiteit, die boek as ding, so sterk op die voorgrond staan in die 21 artikels waaruit dit bestaan. Die plesier begin al danksy …
Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others
This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. …
Response: The People, the Multitude and the Costs of Privacy in South Africa's Postcolony
In this engagement with the idea of the common in contemporary South Africa, the author uses three episodes from his own experience in and of South Africa – a performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2009; a bus journey from Cape Town in 2010; news of the Marikana mine massacre in August 2012 – as well as recent work by theorists Lauren Berlant, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, as prompts to explore how issues of public and pr…
I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or: Zoë Wicomb, textuality, propriety, and the proprietary
This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorship of — South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Variously described as a short-story cycle or novel-in-stories, this deftly metafictional work offers a meditation on the gender and rac…
A Tribute to Andrew Offenburger, Founding Editor of Safundi
In appreciation: Rita Barnard
Bad Feelings in the Provinces of History
Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994) and Agaat (2004) set new standards for Afrikaans fiction. This chapter canvasses the author’s abiding concerns with the forced adoption of the temporality of another—another political order, another cultural identity—that was at the heart of apartheid ideology, and with the multiple disappointments (missed appointments, frustrated desires) that resulted. Focusing on Agaat , it considers the role of the n…
Stasis Anxiety
Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) …
On Being Stuck
This chapter considers J.M. Coetzee’s complex (and partly fictionalized) autobiographical project, Scenes from Provincial Life , comprised of Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009), in which Coetzee dramatizes an- other self’s desire for the posture of the anti-political by staging a form of disaffection that refuses metropolitan expectation at the same time that it models itself on metropolitan explorations of the desire for artisti…
South Africa, Time or Place?
Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) …
Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing
Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the ‘new’ nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa’s literature, it understands ‘disappointment’ both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-aparthei…
Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013
Print, Text and Books in South Africa
Reading for hope: A Conversation About Texts and Method
In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durb…
Art (25 works) · History (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · Literature (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · History (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Politics (11 works)