Antoinette Pretorius

• D.Litt (University of Pretoria)
• Professor (Associate) at University of South Africa

This chapter argues that in Age of Iron, J.M. Coetzee subverts the notion of dependency associated with the concepts of childhood, femininity and older age and thus releases his elderly female protagonist from the enervation conventionally associated with senescence. This is achieved by inscribing the aged female body with images of childhood that...

In this article we provide a close reading of selected poems written during creative writing workshops at a drug rehabilitation centre. We argue that these poems expose some of the uncertainties and complexities that characterise the representation of identity in experiences of addiction and recovery. We show that the speakers in these poems attemp...

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (translated into English by Michiel Heyns) details the subjectivity of its bed-ridden and paralysed protagonist, Milla Redelinghuys, as well as the complex relationship she shares with her caregiver, Agaat. Through reading Milla’s body in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, this article aims to explor...

The preparation and the consumption of food constitute integral parts of the idealized representations of domesticity and home. What we eat and how we eat it defines our sense of individuality, as well as our collective sense of cultural belonging. However, in this era of transcultural migration, the notion of "authentic" food is fraught with ambig...

Antjie Krog's Body Bereft (2006) details both the bodily changes brought about by older age and the ways in which these changes fracture a person's previously-stable sense of self. This article reads Krog's depiction of the ageing body in a small selection of poems from this collection in relation to the unavoidable reality of bodily decay and what...

The elderly are commonly perceived as one of the frailest and most vulnerable groups in society.This view could be attributed to a decline in their physical and mental strength, as well as the disengagement from society and the diminishing sense of futurity associated with older age. While the first democratic South African elections in 1994 herald...

Margie Orford introduced South Africans to Clare Hart over half a century after the publication of June Drummond's The black unicorn, which Mike Nicol refers to as South Africa's first crime novel. Drawing on Sarah Nuttall's notion of “entanglement”, this article attempts to trace the ways in which these two authors are connected, despite the histo...

Critical commentary on Jak de Wet in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat centres on his being a patriarchal stereotype of Afrikaner nationalism. However, while his negative behaviour in the novel is undeniable, the construction of his masculine identity is mediated by the emasculated space in which he enacts it. This article reads his masculinity in relati...