Bridget Grogan

• PhD
• Research Associate at University of Pretoria

Niq Mhlongo’s use of scatology in Dog Eat Dog foregrounds his exploration of the temporal affects of disillusionment and disappointment. Drawing together critical and theoretical writing on affect, scatology, the postcolony, and abjection, this article contends that corporeality is symbolically and politically significant in the postapartheid imagi...

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems-Warsan Shire's "Home" and W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues"-in a week of teaching in each year...

In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Mare...

In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White’s fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short...

This article discusses the sensational trial of the serial poisoner Daisy de Melker in terms of the reaction of 1930s South Africa to the transgression of white, English-speaking communal ties and values. The discussion focuses on representations of the events by three writers – Harry Morris, Herman Charles Bosman and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Each at...

Through an examination of Daphne Rooke's ‘coloured’ narrator Selina in Mittee (195127. Rooke, Daphne. 1991 [1951]. Mittee. London: Penguin.View all references), this article explores, on the one hand, the extent to which the narrator's critical perspective on whiteness and racial essentialism could be achieved in the novel and, on the other, how ad...

This essay presents a postcolonial, ecocritical reading of Australian author David Malouf's celebrated novel, An imaginary life (1978). By now an important name in contemporary postcolonial literature, Malouf has yet to be discussed as an author who attempts to explode both colonial and human-centred myths and tropes in a manner that promotes a lin...

With reference to Roland Barthes’s and Julia Kristeva’s observations on the bodily origins of language, this article argues that physicality is an important aspect, both thematically and stylistically, of the fiction of Australian Nobel prizewinner, Patrick White. Kristeva’s theory of the “symbolic” and “semiotic” aspects of signification, develope...

This article argues that the seemingly disparate affective and corporeal sensations of abjection and compassion significantly inform the fiction of Australian modernist, Patrick White. Focusing in particular on White's early novel The Living and the Dead ([1941]1977), a work often sidelined in critical discussions of his writing, it maintains that...

This article uses a psychoanalytic framework to examine the troping of the body in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection is used to describe the attraction/ repulsion dialectic which characterizes not only Mary Turner's relationship with her ‘houseboy’, Moses, but which also accounts for the position both charac...