Michael Titlestad
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 637517 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Michael Titlestad |
| PRENOMES | Michael |
| SOBRENOME | Titlestad |
| ASSINATURA | TITLESTAD M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3167-7028 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 55 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Biographical contentions
Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson , published in 1999, was the author's response to his publisher's suggestion that he write a biography of Horatio Nelson to commemorate the bicentenary of Trafalgar. The novel is narrated by the sociopathic Charles Cleasby who, endeavouring to produce a hagiography, experiences writer's block when he reaches the events at Naples in 1799. By placing the novel in counterpoint to the three most significant commemorativ…
On Editing South African Fiction
The Life and Death, and Life of William Mackay
This essay traces my dedication, over two decades, to reconstructing the life of Captain William Mackay of the (English) East India Company. Mackay was second officer on an unseaworthy country ship, the Juno, which was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal in 1795. The ship did not sink entirely—the teak cargo in her hold was sufficiently buoyant to keep sections of the upper deck just above the waterline. The seventy-two crew members and passengers, afte…
Maps and Lives
This article considers H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910), a revision of When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), as a heuristic work in which the author places in counterpoint different ways of representing future societies. The different epistemologies involved—the perspective of the voyeur-god and the “pedestrian”—are derived from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). The author argues that Wells’s suggestion in the preface of t…
Shipwreck and Psychosis
Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways (1972) is neglected in South African literary historiography because its experimental modernism was at odds with the emphasis in the 1970s on politically committed literature. Further, its dialogism and preoccupation with the spiritual inflection of whiteness make it, at times, recondite. Fugard resets the events of the wreck of the Indiaman Grosvenor in 1782 as the hallucinated interiority of Christiaan Jordan, an e…
How Many Cooks in This Kitchen?”
In this article we combine an autoethnographic narrative by the first author and analytical reflections by the second, exploring the complexities of autoethnographic reflection on fields of cultural practice. The autoethnographer describes Indian Delights, a cookbook that is iconic among South African Indian Muslim women, as a shifting cultural collage and social repository, which also has a particular status in her life. The second author’s refl…
Reflections on editing a South African literary studies journal
This article reflects on the history of English Studies in Africa, the journal published biannually since 1958 that is affiliated to the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. My reflections, based on my 14-year editorship, are anecdotal. They are motivated by three considerations. First, journal editorship is a largely invisible practice in both institutions and across the literary studies academy, and it warrants …
Ohm Krüger
Ohm Krüger premièred in Berlin in 1941 and was widely praised by audiences, critics and the Nazi high command. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, instituted a special award to honour the film, Film der Nation (Film of the Nation), and it was pronounced reichswichtig (important to the state). Ohm Krüger places in parallel the Boer War (1899–1902)11 I have elected to use ‘Boer War’ instead of the more current and correct ‘South Af…
South African end times
The future of South Africa has most commonly been conceived as a prospective apocalyptic upheaval in which the nation fractures along race lines. This expectation preceded, but informed the rise of apartheid, and has accompanied its demise. This article argues that catastrophic prediction — the trope of a looming racial Armageddon — is like a worn coin: familiar currency so often spent. Nonetheless, we need to conceive how this particular politic…
Dealing with Evils
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Contesting Teleology as Literary Interpretation
While the intellectual genealogy of "secularization" can be approached from any number of directions, this article rehearses the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. While it makes no effort to reconcile their positions, it argues that both were troubled by the persistence of theological structures and tropes in ostensibly secular paradigms. Various contemporary scholars have sought to elaborate a negative hermeneutics that identifies …
I have been in an earthquake”
Published in 1929, Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics across the spectrum of the British and American literary scenes (among them Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Vita Sackville-West, Cyril Connelly, John Masefield, Hugh Walpole, and Arnold Bennett). At the same time, its readers were generally shocked by its portrait of child psychology (“the mind of the child”). While several critics applauded its realism,…
No Time Like the Present
Nadine Gordimer was widely criticised for her failure to take a stand against the injustices manifest in the post-apartheid regime (during the presidencies of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma). No Time Like the Present (2012) apparently set out to rectify this neglect: it presents a catalogue of contemporary failures, injustices and abominations, touching on almost every index of state failure. At the same time, the novel sanctifies both the struggle a…
Conspiracy, apocalypticism, and contingency in Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek
This essay presents a narrative analysis of Smith Henderson’s debut novel, Fourth of July Creek (2014). Woven into an account of its plot and concerns is a description of contending epistemologies: the first (which is heuristic and contingent) is manifest in the life of Pete Snow, a social worker in Montana, the second (adamant in its teleological convictions) is the doctrine of a right-wing conspiracist, Jeremiah Pearl. A more general account of…
The South African Life and Afterlife of Jim Reeves
This article considers the overwhelming and lasting popularity of the country singer, Jim Reeves, in South Africa. Interpreting the press and radio coverage of his two tours to the country (1962 and 1963) and two recent biographies, it considers the ways in which this representative of the Nashville Sound was constructed to appeal to particular sectors of the South African community. Reeves’s habitus was constructed – despite all evidence and beh…
Learning Hospitality
Shipwreck narratives were a publisher's staple during the eighteenth century. They appeared as pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsheets, and occasionally as more expensive book editions. George Buchan's Narrative of the Loss of the Winterton East Indiaman (1820) is a complex text that weaves together a historical account of a tragedy and its aftermath, an ethnography and natural history of Madagascar, and the unequivocal pronouncement of the author's ev…
Searching for the Sugar-coated Man
Proclamations of the excellence of the film Searching for Sugarman, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, ignore its contrived narrative. The film violently yokes the singer's South African popularity to the struggle against apartheid. This article argues that the film capitalizes on white South African nostalgia and that the tours subsequent to the film's release have offered occasions for the performance or endorsement of this problematic phenomenon. …
The Logic of the Apocalypse
Apocalyptic and millennial rhetoric is recycled in countless contemporary literary and cinematic works and is central in versions of progressive political critique. The first part of this essay describes Cormac McCarthy's The Road as a dystopian allegory mired in Judeo-Christian temporality and which, as a consequence, promotes a sentimental version of human salvation. The second considers the ways in which analogous renditions of catastrophism p…
The muddy middle-ground
This article presents a narrative analysis of the wreck of the Wager, a small sixth rate converted Indiaman of 28 guns that functioned as a supply ship on the Anson expedition (1740–4). In 1741, despite the efforts of the crew to bring her about, she wedged between two rocky islets off the inhospitable Patagonian coast of Chile. Despite the carnivalesque insubordination of a section of the crew, about 140 men made shore and those who remained on …
Approaching Johannesburg
Note on ContributorMichael Titlestad is an associate professor, Head of the Department of English, and Deputy Head of the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand. He publishes widely in the fields of South African literary and cultural studies, and on maritime literature. In addition, Michael is an editor of both literary and scholarly publications. He makes a lot of mistakes, but not often grammatical ones…
Turning to Crime
This article compares the representation of detection in two novels by Mike Nicol, The Ibis Tapestry (1998) and Payback (2008). Each concerns the fortunes of arms dealers. The first is a complex intertextual weave of the biography of (the fictitious) Christo Mercer, the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his tragedy Tamburlaine and reflections on the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second is a crime-thriller that…
Carel van der Merwe's No Man's Land
Capital Games
I do have quite strong views on book awards. My view is that as a writer you should regard them entirely as “posh bingo” and as utter luck and nothing more. And if you are a member of the judging p
Introduction
Dead to the World, and Almost to Ourselves’
This article considers William Mackay's 1789 narrative of the wreck of the East India Company ship, Juno, in the light of recent studies of the genre of shipwreck narrative by Blackmore, Lamb and Thompson. It reads the narrative as reflecting the dynamics of symbolic abdication experienced by survivors during such catastrophes, but proceeds to identify Mackay's efforts to discover, in the language of sentiment that was so central to the eighteent…
Turning to Crime
This article compares the representation of detection in two novels by Mike Nicol, The Ibis Tapestry (1998) and Payback (2008). Each concerns the fortunes of arms dealers. The first is a complex intertextual weave of the biography of (the fictitious) Christo Mercer, the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his tragedy Tamburlaine and reflections on the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second is a crime-thriller that…
"Jazz discourse and black South African modernity, with special reference to "Matshikese
In this article, I use a jazz structure (made up of a chorus, solo, and coda) to explore both the versions of black modernity advanced in South African jazz discourse and the particular ways in which these are manifest in the journalism of Todd Matshikiza. I set various global flows of the imaginary alongside their local appropriation and manipulation to show how South African writers made use of the jazz episteme to construct tactical (if evanes…
The Logic of the Apocalypse
Apocalyptic and millennial rhetoric is recycled in countless contemporary literary and cinematic works and is central in versions of progressive political critique. The first part of this essay describes Cormac McCarthy's The Road as a dystopian allegory mired in Judeo-Christian temporality and which, as a consequence, promotes a sentimental version of human salvation. The second considers the ways in which analogous renditions of catastrophism p…
Introduction
Searching for the Sugar-coated Man
Proclamations of the excellence of the film Searching for Sugarman, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, ignore its contrived narrative. The film violently yokes the singer's South African popularity to the struggle against apartheid. This article argues that the film capitalizes on white South African nostalgia and that the tours subsequent to the film's release have offered occasions for the performance or endorsement of this problematic phenomenon. …
Approaching Johannesburg
Note on ContributorMichael Titlestad is an associate professor, Head of the Department of English, and Deputy Head of the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand. He publishes widely in the fields of South African literary and cultural studies, and on maritime literature. In addition, Michael is an editor of both literary and scholarly publications. He makes a lot of mistakes, but not often grammatical ones…
Dead to the World, and Almost to Ourselves’
This article considers William Mackay's 1789 narrative of the wreck of the East India Company ship, Juno, in the light of recent studies of the genre of shipwreck narrative by Blackmore, Lamb and Thompson. It reads the narrative as reflecting the dynamics of symbolic abdication experienced by survivors during such catastrophes, but proceeds to identify Mackay's efforts to discover, in the language of sentiment that was so central to the eighteent…
Reflections on editing a South African literary studies journal
This article reflects on the history of English Studies in Africa, the journal published biannually since 1958 that is affiliated to the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. My reflections, based on my 14-year editorship, are anecdotal. They are motivated by three considerations. First, journal editorship is a largely invisible practice in both institutions and across the literary studies academy, and it warrants …
South African end times
The future of South Africa has most commonly been conceived as a prospective apocalyptic upheaval in which the nation fractures along race lines. This expectation preceded, but informed the rise of apartheid, and has accompanied its demise. This article argues that catastrophic prediction — the trope of a looming racial Armageddon — is like a worn coin: familiar currency so often spent. Nonetheless, we need to conceive how this particular politic…
Contesting Teleology as Literary Interpretation
While the intellectual genealogy of "secularization" can be approached from any number of directions, this article rehearses the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. While it makes no effort to reconcile their positions, it argues that both were troubled by the persistence of theological structures and tropes in ostensibly secular paradigms. Various contemporary scholars have sought to elaborate a negative hermeneutics that identifies …
Capital Games
I do have quite strong views on book awards. My view is that as a writer you should regard them entirely as “posh bingo” and as utter luck and nothing more. And if you are a member of the judging p
Introduction
Allegories of white masculinity in Damon Galgut'sThe Good Doctor
This essay argues that Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003 Galgut, D. 2003. The good doctor, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar]) contests the version of national allegory on which its interpreters have relied. It suggests that, in juxtaposing Frank Eloff’s pragmatism and Laurence Waters’ idealism, the novel opposes two ways of making meaning: the one a complex, polysemic mediation of the private and the public, and the other an idealistic version…
Traveling Jazz
The persistent castaway in South African writing
There is a small bundle of letters in the archives of the National Library in Cape Town that was assembled and dispatched, with a detailed explanation, by the black Presbyterian priest, John Knox B
Listening to Bloke Modisane
This paper defends the relevance of materials pertaining to auditory perception in the analysis of colonial and postcolonial texts. It considers the orientation of the subject in an acoustic domain and, through the work of Jacques Attali in particular, theorises the relation between dissonance and political dissidence as this distinction circulates in the social imaginary. Having suggested what is to be gained in analytical terms by analysing the…
I was not yet myself
Seeing things differently
Poetic signatures (Don Maclennan, Adam Schwartzman and Gail Dendy)
Embodied histories
Aesthetes and democrats
While the debate offered nothing new in theoretical terms, it suggested the possibility of an emergent aesthetic which is the stuff of our historical and political context
Riffs at the edge of forgetting
Seeking an ethics of reciprocity
Jazz bodies
Fictional narratives commonly stage the ineffability of music while simultaneously constructing located identities and trajectories of meaning in the course of its configuration. This argument concerns a range of these constructions: attempts to configure jazz in discourse through translations across the border between the music and corporeality. The literary embodiment of jazz has historically been embedded in primitivist discourses which reify …
Improvisation
Where is Tuesday
Sounding out discourse pilgrims and vagrants
Taking translation in its broadest sense, the argument considers whether the idiom of musical improvisation might allow us to theorise the emergence of the subject in the course of moving from one code of meaning to another. More precisely, it asks whether different modes of improvisation might be used to sound out the implications of the translator's journey. Two musical modes, 'classic' and 'total' jazz improvisation, are placed alongside two '…
Mongane Serote's To Every Birth its Blood
South African jazz carries a burden of optimism. It is consistently identified with an ebullient élan vital that resists the monomania of apartheid ideology. Mongane Serote's novel To Every Birth its Blood (1981) sounds a cautionary note in its exploration of the limits of modernist improvisation in the face of violent oppression. In exploring its representation of these limitations, this article addresses the critical debate regarding the disjun…
“The foot does not sniff”
The South African literary institution is engaged in an examination of both its role in the history of apartheid and its potential futures. Originating in Edward Said's search for an alternative to a “politics of blame”, this article considers recent attempts to explore the possibility of “secular interpretation” in (and of) the South African context. Leon de Kock's trope of “the seam” and Mark Sanders's notion of “complicity” are considered. We …
Humility in a Godless World
Water from an Ancient Well
I was not yet myself
The mangled flesh of our griots’
This article considers the use of black Atlantic music in Seitlhamo Motsapi's volume of verse, earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow. In his poetry, Motsapi constructs a critique of the popular music industry while heralding the therapeutic potential of various dissonant musical modes, central among which is free improvisational jazz. We are concerned to appraise whether this musical genre, which by its own insistent definition resists represent…
Introduction
Listening to Bloke Modisane
This paper defends the relevance of materials pertaining to auditory perception in the analysis of colonial and postcolonial texts. It considers the orientation of the subject in an acoustic domain and, through the work of Jacques Attali in particular, theorises the relation between dissonance and political dissidence as this distinction circulates in the social imaginary. Having suggested what is to be gained in analytical terms by analysing the…
A wrecked life
André Brink's An instant in the wind (1976) is most commonly interpreted as presenting a Utopian alternative to apartheid's politics of race. This alternative is constructed as an Edenic allegory in which Elizabeth Larsson, who is abandoned in the interior of South Africa, and Adam Mantoor, an escaped slave, discover a genuinely liberated libidinal mutuality unconstrained by colonial ideology. We are concerned to investigate Brink's presentation …
The dynamics of discontent
In this article we explore the experiences of David Lurie and his daughter Lucy, the main protagonists in J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace, in terms of the tensions in modern society analysed so trenchantly by Sigmund Freud in his short investigation, Civilisation and its Discontents. We demonstrate how David's self‐understanding and internal conflicts are a reflection of the fundamental conflict between impulse and social constraint, the basis upo…
"Jazz discourse and black South African modernity, with special reference to "Matshikese
In this article, I use a jazz structure (made up of a chorus, solo, and coda) to explore both the versions of black modernity advanced in South African jazz discourse and the particular ways in which these are manifest in the journalism of Todd Matshikiza. I set various global flows of the imaginary alongside their local appropriation and manipulation to show how South African writers made use of the jazz episteme to construct tactical (if evanes…
Reconsidering black South African writing
Extracted from text ... ~ 132 . . . . REVIEWS Reconsidering black South African writing David Attwell. 2005. Rewriting modern- ity: studies in black South African literary history. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. MICHAEL TITLESTAD University of the Witwatersrand [email protected] We might begin with the stories of two snakes. In 1908, Thomas Mofolo wrote Chaka ([1925]1981), one of the great South African historical epics. It is an i…
Introduction
Secular improvisations
Each of the four protagonists in The exploded view (2004) attempts to negotiate the field of post-apartheid signs, material objects and ideological possibilities and limits. In this article we analyse the limited capacity of each protagonist to make sense of the transforming world he inhabits. We characterize this limited capacity to make meaning by relating the four narratives comprising the novel to certain theoretical moves in the work of Mich…
The Secularization of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry
In this article we read Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry (1998) as an intertextual novel that brings a postmodern inflection to its interrogation of the principles and practices of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Using the distant mirror of the life, work, and death of Christopher Marlowe, the novel unravels aspects of the ethical ideology and epistemological framing of the Commission in a way that, we argue, amounts to its s…
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