Louise Viljoen

Stellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Afrikaans and Dutch

A comparative reading of the representation of anger in poetry written by Ronelda Kamfer, Jolyn Phillips, Simone Atangana Bekono and Radna Fabias This article investigates the representation of affect and emotion, in four volumes of poetry by black women: the South African authors Ronelda Kamfer's Chinatown (2019) and Jolyn Phillips's bientang (202...

In this article, I read the Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer’s volume of poetry Mens dier ding (Man animal thing) against the background of transnationalism. I employ transnationalism as critical or hermeneutic perspective and focus on the identity of the author, the themes worked out in the volume and the use of anachronism and metapoetical references a...

This article explores the notion of a South African ecocriticism by firstly placing it against the background of the ongoing debates about the relationship between postcolonialism and ecocriticism and secondly by situating it within the context of African ecocriticism. It points out the most important characteristics of South African ecocriticism,...

This article discusses two volumes of ekphrastic poems by the South African author Marlene van Niekerk. The volumes are based on paintings by two relatively minor Dutch painters. The first, Gesant van die mispels [‘Emissary of the medlars’], centres on paintings by Adriaen Coorte who presumably lived from 1659 to 1708, whereas the second In die sti...

This article explores the issues raised by the publication of Flame in the Snow, the private correspondence of the South African writers André Brink and Ingrid Jonker. Events around the entry of the letters into the public domain are discussed with reference to the ethical questions they raises as well as the narrative constituted by bringing toget...

This article deals with the position of Afrikaans literature as a small literature in the world, with specific reference to some of Pascale Casanova’s most provocative statements on the position of small literatures in her book La République Mondiale des Lettres (1999), translated into English as The World Republic of Letters (2004). The article fi...

Breyten Breytenbach is the most important prison writer in the Afrikaans literary tradition. This article briefly places his prison writing against the background of national and international prison writing before going on to investigate the way in which the reader is represented in his Afrikaans prison poetry. Research about prison writing points...

This article proceeds from the vantage point that the “transnational” and the “translational” are important concepts when discussing the processes of cultural literary signification taking place under the various conditions of displacement and migration the world has witnessed throughout the course of history. The article explores the notion of “tr...

Opsomming In hierdie artikel word daar ondersoek ingestel na die vraag of daar in die geval van Afrikaanse digters en ’n lokaal-geplaaste minderheidstaal soos Afrikaans gepraat kan word van ’n transnasionale poëtika. Die begrip word aan die orde gestel aan die hand van Jahan Ramazani se boek A transnational poetics en die kommentaar en kritiek wat...

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Die jaar 1998 kan in 'n groot mate gesien word as 'n waterskeiding in Krog se loopbaan as skrywer. In daardie stadium was sy reeds 'n gekanoniseerde digter wat besondere aansien in die Afrikaanse literêre sisteem geniet het en verskillende literêre pryse gewen het. Vanaf die middel tagtigerjare het sy ook steeds groter bekendheid verwerf buite die...

This article reads Antjie Krog’s volume of poetry Mede-wete and its English version Synapse (both published in 2014) against the background of Rebecca Walkowitz’s proposal that the future of comparative literature will entail what she calls ‘foreign reading’. In her contribution to the American Association of Comparative Literature’s 2015 report on...

Opsomming Verskeie lesers het kommentaar gelewer op die wyse waarop die gebruik van Afrikaans in Marlene van Niekerk se verhaalbundel Die sneeuslaper deur ander tale, veral Nederlands, " geperforeer " of " geïnfiltreer " is. In hierdie artikel word daar aandag gegee aan die intertalige en kruiskulturele verkeer tussen Afrikaans en Nederlands in hie...

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Reading Olga Kirsch’s Afrikaans poetry, one is struck by the important role that the experience of loss occupies in her oeuvre. It is evident in the first two volumes of poetry she published while still living in South Africa, as well as in the five volumes she published after emigrating to Israel in 1948. Because her poetry, especially the volumes...

This article explores the role that the Netherlands play in the transnational movement of Afrikaans authors. Because of the historical ties between the Netherlands and South Africa and the similarities between the languages Dutch and Afrikaans, Afrikaans authors and their texts often gain an audience in the Netherlands. This article posits the idea...

Literature and history The aim of this chapter is to give a selective overview of Afrikaans literature after 1976. It is customary in South African literary historiography to accept that literary histories are shaped by contextual as well as aesthetic factors and to use historical transitions as reference points for the periodisation of literature....

The article offers a critical survey of Afrikaans poetry of the years 2000 to 2009. It is written against the climate of concern that Afrikaans, no longer one of two official languages but one of eleven, will be increasingly marginalised, particularly as English is the effective lingua franca of contemporary South Africa. The considerable output of...

Abstract There exists in Afrikaans poetry an extensive collection of poems in which Afrikaans poets respond to Breyten Breytenbach as a public figure and to his poetry. This article focuses on those poems in which Afrikaans poets respond to Breytenbach's poetic persona, his poetics and his poetry. The article gives an overview of those poets who re...

Breyten Breytenbach is the most important prison writer in the Afrikaans literary tradition. This article briefly places his prison writing against the background of national and international prison writing before going on to investigate the way in which the reader is represented in his Afrikaans prison poetry. Research about prison writing points...

Breyten Breytenbach is the most important prison writer in the Afrikaans literary tradition. This article briefly places his prison writing against the background of national and international prison writing before going on to investigate the way in which the reader is represented in his Afrikaans prison poetry. Research about prison writing points...

This article makes the point that autobiography, a genre often considered marginal to the literary canon, can be regarded as a site for examining the impact of nationalism on the construction of gendered and sexual identity. It investigates questions of nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical texts of Petronella van Heerden and El...

This article looks at the way in which the Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog positions herself with regard to her female precursors or literary mothers in Afrikaans literature. A short survey is done of the different descriptions of the way in which literary tradition functions: the male-centred descriptions of T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom are mentioned a...

This article looks at the way in which the Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog positions herself with regard to her female precursors or literary mothers in Afrikaans literature. A short survey is done of the different descriptions of the way in which literary tradition functions: the mole-centred descriptions of T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom are mentioned a...

Antjie Krog's autobiographical text, A Change of Tongue (2003), consists of six separate but also related narratives which give different aspects of the author's experience of transformation after South Africa's change to democratic rule in 1994. This article deals with the first narrative titled “A Town”, in which the processes of post‐apartheid c...

This article discusses Antjie Krog's translation of verse written in the indigenous South African languages in the anthology Met woorde soos met kerse [“With words as with candles”] into Afrikaans. It looks at Krog's work as a translator as well as her ideas about translation as a means of empowering the speakers and writers of languages smaller an...

This article focuses on the representation of physical displacements in literary texts by black Afrikaans writers. These representations can be seen against the background of a complex history of colonisation and decolonisation in South Africa. On the one hand the relatively young Afrikaans literature tells of the way in which a sense of place was...

André Brink in conversation with Louise Viljoen [Afrikaans] André P. Brink in gesprek met Louise Viljoen [First paragraph]: Hierdie gesprek met André P. Brink is in November 2004 gevoer in antisipasie van sy sewentigste verjaardag in 2005 en is iets van 'n terugkyk oor verskillende aspekte van sy formidabele loopbaan as skrywer en literator. Omdat...

This article discusses the way in which Karel Schoeman's autobiography, Die laaste Afrikaanse boek (2002), constitutes a combination of the different genres he has used in his writing career and argues that his text is a demonstration of the statement that autobiography is a hybrid genre that preys on other genres. This reading of the autobiography...

This article explores the way in which the construction of Africa interacts with the construction of identity in the poetry written by Breyten Breytenbach. On the one hand, Breytenbach’s use of the name Jan Afrika, his attempts to emphasise the African-ness of the language Afrikaans as well as the construct Afrikaner indicate a desire to locate his...

This article discusses the possibilities of applying postcolonial theory to Afrikaans literature. It is argued that the heterogeneous nature of the Afrikaans language as well as Afrikaans literature necessitates the construction of several small narratives which take into account the local historical contexts in order to avoid obscuring generalisat...

A rhetorical analysis of the five funerary poems in T.T. Cloete’s Alloiroop This article works from the premise that these poems form part o f a tradition that can he traced back to the funerary poetry of the Dutch Renaissance and from there to the funeral orations of Classical times. After referring to the current revival of interest in rhetoric,...

This article analyses the two different approaches to history and its representation demonstrated in Brink’s novels An Act of Terror (1991) and On the Contrary (1993) in terms of a response to the controversial influence of postmodernism on the historical novel in South Africa today. Although the first of these two novels, An Act of Terror, hints a...

This article argues that Mikhael Bakhtin's dialogism provides an appropriate theoretical background against which Lettie Viljoen's Belemmering (1990), a novel in which the polyphony of voices is immediately apparent, can be read. Bakthin's dialogism presupposes the heteroglossia of reality according to which the world is seen as a teeming mass of d...