Dirk Klopper

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Rhodes University

The secular having prevailed over the sacred, paleoanthropology rather than scripture is now invoked to provide narratives of human origins. Nevertheless, given its “occult” method of making inferences about an invisible past, as opposed to an invisible future, the sacred continues to inhabit the secular in paleoanthropological discourse. This is n...

The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face...

We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the o...

Poetics and politics of the lyric poem Distinguished by the expression of personal observations and feelings, the lyric poem is an introspective and self-reflexive form that seeks to give direct voice to individual consciousness, articulating its singular patterns of cognitions, desires and doubts. This self-expressive impulse is closely associated...

Much recent South African fiction deploys the motif of returning to a place associated with the past. Medalie claims that this motif justifies characterising these fictions as a literature of nostalgia, and is critical of their idealising the past rather than engaging critically with the process of constructing the past. My article examines Wicomb'...

The postscript follows the signature of the letter or the text of the book. As an addition to a communication that has already taken place, it gestures to the inconclusiveness of the writing, its failure of closure. It is an afterthought that paradoxically draws attention to itself, simultaneously marking and transgressing the limits of language. W...

The Griqua people of South Africa are recognised by the UNO as having ‘first-nation’ status.This article argues that, in the context of Griqua identity, the notion of'first nation’ serves not to determine a prior and singular identity, but rather to problematise the question of origins. Drawing on the concept of an uncanny splitting and doubling of...

While earlier studies of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness have drawn attention to the way in which the novel challenges the binary opposition of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, and have expounded on the novel's ecological theme, none have thus far examined the significance of prophecy in the novel, the mode of thought that informed...

Van der Post has provoked considerable controversy in recent years around what are seen as the fictionalisations and the mystifications evident in his work. In this article I provide a reading of The Lost World of the Kalahari that seeks to understand rather than excoriate these features of his writing. For purposes of my argument, the relevant que...

This paper explores the way in which Coetzee's Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) interrogate the conventions of self-representation in autobiographical writing. It begins by drawing attention to how Coetzee sees the question of subject, truth and writing as a concern that runs through all his works, suggesting that autobiography is not a privileged g...

Jacobson maintains that, as a child growing up in Kimberley, he had invested with fantasy the landscape of the historical route from the Cape Colony to the African interior, one that is said to have registered an unconscious anxiety that there might, in fact, 'be nothing there'. On his return as adult to this landscape, he wonders whether or not he...

This article presents the conceptual framework and methodological approach I have adopted in my research towards a biography of the South African poet Arthur Nortje (1942–1970). It begins by identifying the principles of biographical unity advocated by James Boswell, and adopted by subsequent biographers, and proceeds to question the validity of th...

Many studies of Arthur Nortje's poetry have commented on the prevalence in his work of images of alienation, seeing this as a function either of political conditions in South Africa in his lifetime or of Nortje's exile from his home country. In this paper, I maintain that Nortje's depictions of alienation are more fundamental than suggested by earl...

This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of...

The article begins by examining the relationship between truth and reconciliation as propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It contrasts a linear conception of this relationship with an iterative conception and equates these conceptions with the narrative and the image, respectively. The article then proceeds to explore the im...

The article focuses on the notions of death, resistance and liberation in Peter Horn's sequence of poems “The Plumstead Elegies”. It argues that the process of radical personal and social transformation described in the poems is rendered problematical by employing a conceptual framework that is at once psychoanalytic and Marxist. The dilemma posed...

Patrick Cullinan. 1994. Selected Poems 1961–1994. Edited and introduced by Stephen Watson. Illustrations by Judith Mason. Cape Town: Snailpress. 142pp. Stephen Gray. 1994. Selected Poems 1960–92. Cape Town, Johannesburg: David Philip. 75pp.

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them a...

Ideology is intricated in South African English poetry and its critical reception in complex ways which demand ongoing examination. In this study I approach the subject along three lines of enquiry. In the first section I trace the development of a materialist critical practice up to the recent challenge it encounters in the work of Michael Chapman...

In response to the criticism frequently levelled against contemporary literary theory, that it disregards and devalues the literary text, this article attempts to show how post‐structuralism can feasibly be employed, vis‐a‐vis Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’, as a strategy of reading literary texts without detracting from their enjoyment.The article firs...