Rick de Villiers

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at University of the Free State

This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern...

What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our responses to improper literary behaviour? Addressing these questions against the backdrop of South African author Willem Anker’s substantial ‘borrowings’ from Samuel Beckett, this article proposes three alternative avatars – the catfish, hacker, and emperor –...

‘Poverty porn’ supposedly names a kind of representation that trades in oversaturated images, blunt realism, and a crude mix of morbidity and pathos. It caters to low tastes and base desires on the one hand, and to disingenuously altruistic sentiments on the other. Yet such definition neglects how poverty can be differently fetishised. It ignores a...

If Samuel Beckett's 'Company'—with all its evasions and cancelled invitations—is a work of unprecedented unguardedness within the Beckett canon, then a special case may be made for its sincerity: that it resides in the novella’s very gambits, decoys and “true feints.” To arrive at such sincerity, Beckett may be read as the modernist novelist of voi...

Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often courted—both in the fictional worlds themselves where suffering is at a constant, and also in the sometimes overly-familiar narratives of surrounding scholarship. Given this conflict, how does humiliation—and responses to it—define Beckett’s individual “c...

https://theconversation.com/waiting-for-godot-has-been-translated-into-afrikaans-what-took-so-long-257345

The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic status as assessment tool in the humanities, this relativity is sometimes overlooked. Such modal inflexibility is still more puzzling given that syllabus changes have recently been driven by inclusivity and varieties of learning experience. Opening onto thi...

Introduction to 'A Century of Modernism in South African Literature and Literary Culture' (English Studies in Africa special issue).

This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their...

Explores the relation between humility and humiliation in the works of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett Offers the first book-length comparative study of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett Develops a literary theory of humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology Explores the relation betwe...

Chapter 5 tests Eliot’s claim that ‘humility is endless’ against the parodic and ironic procedures of East Coker . It explores the ways in which the poetry can be said to question its own assumptions and undermine its own importance. Humility is thus closely allied with the poet’s self-ironizing confrontation with his own work. In particular, Eliot...

Chapter 2 explores the relation between embarrassment and pride in Beckett’s early works. Juxtaposing personal letters and selected stories from the 1934 collection, More Pricks than Kicks , embarrassment emerges as a marker of the superiority Beckett himself regarded as a symptom of his anxiety neurosis. After discussing certain pre-emptive strate...

Chapter 1 posits 1917 as a watershed year in Eliot’s writing. It argues that with his only short story, Eeldrop and Appleplex , Eliot edges away from social embarrassment towards theological shame - that is, a sense of sin. Undoubtedly the least ‘canonical’ of Eliot’s creative works, the story embodies diffusive feelings out of which humility emerg...

Chapter 6 asks how a ‘syntax of penury’ is operational in How It Is . Broadly, this question pertains to Beckett’s engagement with his own writing and delineates a scepticism in How It Is about old foundations and new turnings. The chapter considers three aspects of the novel: its impoverished style, its self-critical appropriation of earlier works...

Chapter 4 worries the ethics of approaching others’ humiliation. Here, humiliation manifests as an individuating property in Beckett’s writing: the thing that ‘mobilises’ his creatures and also confers identity. In the first instance, this invites meta-critical reflection on the dangers of overly familiar narratives and concepts in Beckett studies....

The conclusion reflects on the differences between Eliot’s and Beckett’s respective handling of humility and humiliation. This leads to a broader discussion about the interpretive difficulties of deciphering performances of humility.

Chapter 3 focuses on specific theological reiterations that define Eliot’s understanding of Christian humility between 1927 and 1935. It grapples with humility as a component of Christian sacrifice and reflects on the relation between belief and action. The sermon of Murder in the Cathedral serves as a structuring device to discuss these statements...

Despite the coy designation of ‘Interlude’, the sermon in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral presents a nexus of tension. On the one hand, it constitutes a crucial dramatic component of a play that balances on the knife-edge between pride and humility. On the other hand, it retraces certain theological assimilations found elsewhere in Eliot’s wri...

Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often courted—both in the fictional worlds themselves where suffering is at a constant, and also in the sometimes overly-familiar narratives of surrounding scholarship. Given this conflict, how does humiliation—and responses to it—define Beckett's individual “c...

The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do with a special kind of mimesis and asks whether formal aspects of the ‘documentary’ mode are directive for fictional modes. Another question pertains to motives. This article addresses the latter, but with an eye on criticism itself. It argues against i...

Drawing on the latest developments in scholarship and criticism, The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot opens up fresh avenues of appreciation and inquiry to a global twenty-first century readership. Emphasizing major works and critical issues, this collection of newly commissioned essays from leading international scholars provides seven full...

For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied a comparatively peripheral space within the enterprise of Eliot studies. Despite the frequency with which some of them have been anthologized, these poems have elicited far fewer critical responses than most of Eliot's other work. The primary reason for...

The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though these authors are not commonly thought of as bedfellows, it is argued that there are two overlapping concerns in the plays under discussion, namely, the idea of original sin and the significance of indeterminate endings. Unlike Eliot's, Beckett's idea o...

T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though entertaining, they have been accused of being pseudo-scholarly and superficial, and have on these bases suffered comparable neglect.‘The Hippopotamus’ is no exception. Though binary and more simplistic than the other quatrain poems, the poem marks the genesis...

The article offers a deconstructive reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and attempts both to explain and to reveal the abusive writing employed by each of the “authors” (Susan Barton, Foe, Daniel Defoe, J.M. Coetzee) in the novel. It operates within a Derridean framework, tracing the concepts of supplementation and origin in the text to indicate how the...