The Struggle Over the Sign
Writing and History in Zoë Wicomb's Art
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4995308 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dorothy Driver (0000-0002-6478-4313, The University of Adelaide, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 523-542 |
| Publication date | 2010-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03057070.2010.507536 |
| OpenAlex | W2097896350 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 20 |
Although Zoë Wicomb's four works of fiction deploy realist techniques, they show a deep and increasingly self-conscious interest in using the strategies of textualism, in which the real is seen to be grounded in discourse, materiality is inscribed in allegorising ciphers or signs, and the presented world has the status of textuality rather than being representational. Her short stories and novels address, adjust and re-imagine history – not simply by interrogating the intersecting discourses by means of which certain historical concepts are conventionally managed and understood but also by undoing the apparent opposition between history and text. These strategies constitute what is, in effect, a struggle over the sign. In the process, Wicomb's fiction moves in what may be called a double aesthetic and political direction. Her fiction yearns for a writing released from ‘history’ and ‘meaning’ and yet directed to truth-telling about varieties of subordination; it also yearns for a world in which human subjects – and language – can shake somewhat free of history and be born renewed, so that history in another sense can come fully alive
Aesthetics · Art · Historiography · Literature · Politics · Sociology · Textuality · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
The Real McCloy
Multiple belongings’ in Zoë Wicomb’s ‘My Name Is HannaH’ (2005)
Promised lands and paradisiacal gardens in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story
Building new selves
The trick lies in repetitions”
Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan
The echolalic in-between in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light
Properties of Whiteness
Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History
Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts
Reading Zoë Wicomb's Cosmopolitan, Domestic and Recursive Settings
Scaling the Gifberge
Shadow Stories and Shadow Selves
Cape Impudence
Zoë Wicomb and the Cape Cosmopolitan
Metafictions of development
South Africa
I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or
Guilt, shame and the politics of moral change in Antjie Krog’s and Zoë Wicomb’s literary responses to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
"Moving in "a forest of hieroglyphs
| Citations per year | 1.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2025 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |