Papers by Reingard Nethersole
Mark Twain in the Holy Land
BRILL eBooks, Dec 31, 1987
Burn but his books': The power of the library in 16th Century England and France with reference to South Africa today
Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 1995
World literature and the library
Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015
Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
Arcadia, Jan 19, 2004
Abstract Set against a horizon of post-modern rejection of the modern illusion of necessity, perm... more Abstract Set against a horizon of post-modern rejection of the modern illusion of necessity, permanence, and universal knowledge, the essay deconstructs the notion of “framing contingency”. Understanding contingency as chance or randomness that ruptures temporal order within the circumference of any given ‘frame’ of intelligibility, the paper argues that the current popular term ‘framing’, in place of Hegel's domestication of time as necessary true historical unfolding, together with Kant's analytic aesthetic judgement, signals profound paradigm shifts in criticism that are attendant on divestiture in Hegelian inspired literary history, while positing anew the question of how to connect literary expressions past and present.
Past emergent: the post-postcolonial in José Eduardo Agualusa's "O vendedor de passados" (The book of Chameleons)
J. M. Coetzee : reluctant public intellectual
African Yearbook of Rhetoric, 2011
Why should concern about public intellectuals be topical everywhere, not least in South Africa as... more Why should concern about public intellectuals be topical everywhere, not least in South Africa as evident from recent publications by Jonathan Jansen and Themba Mbadlanyana? And why focus on notoriously publicity shy, writer-teacher J. M. Coetzee who Mail & Guardian critic Shaun de Waal once called "the Greta Garbo of South African literature"? What can be gleaned from a disjuncture between "sceptical rationality" and "sincere outrage" that is the subject of Coetzee's deliberations on censorship, but more importantly what insight can be had from the hauntingly dense narrative "He and His Man", read in lieu of the customary address expected of a laureate at the occasion of the prestigious award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm in December 2003? These questions, I suggest, open a window into our current state of the commerce of thinking, into the space of Literature, and of our imagining a place for ourselves in a world ruled by economic rationality and fashioned by celebrity culture; a global world that places insoluble tension between the "intellectual" and the "public".
Re in gar d Nethersole (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) 'FUr den, der keine Erfahr... more Re in gar d Nethersole (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) 'FUr den, der keine Erfahrung mehr machen kann, gibt es keinen Trost" Walter Benjamin, Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire Benjamin's famous figure of "The Storyteller" 1 , uncoupled from its exemplary historical representatives like Nicolai Leskov, Johann Peter Hebel and, among others, Herodotus, Poe and Kipling, has become almost stock in trade in contemporary reflections on narrative 2. Literary criticism in particular has engaged with the storyteller 3 and, to a lesser extent, with his artisan-like craft and the form of the tale as opposed to the novel. Yet, the importance of experience as being both an enabling condition and an effect of narration which Benjamin's essay foregrounds is often concealed. Nevertheless, it is the experience of modernity, as I shall argue, which animates this text in as much as its companion piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", and numerous others of the later writings, not least "On some Motifs in Baudelaire". Experience furthermore, as "The Storyteller" makes abundantly clear, situates us and governs the way we conduct, what amounts to, the narrative of our lives, or to put in Biblical terms: the way in which "We spend our years as a tale that is told" 4. Conversely, as Benjamin says in relation to Baudelaire's character: "For someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation. But it is nothing other than this inability which denotes the actual essence of anger. The angry man 'does not want to listen'; his arch-image (Urbild) Timon rages against people indiscriminately; he is no longer in a position to 1
1 The Beginnings of the Concept (Goethe, Marx, Said) – Readings from a Postcolonial Perspective
De Gruyter eBooks, Sep 7, 2020
Twilight of the Humanities: Rethinking (Post)Humanism with J.M. Coetzee
Symplokē, 2015
Twilight, I contend, is the trope that defi nes the history of the present with discussion on cri... more Twilight, I contend, is the trope that defi nes the history of the present with discussion on crisis in education in general and in the Humanities and in Literary Studies in particular. Thus Michael Hardt, for example, argues for curricular change so as to provide the emerging “biopolitical economy” with “mass intelligence—even and especially linguistic, conceptual, and social capacities” to enable necessary “economic innovation.” In a different vain, William V. Spanos, based on his reading of the deconstructionists Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida together with infl uential pedagogue Paulo Freire, takes to task the disciplinary meta-physical paradigm that undergirds the power structures of “disinterested” humanistic discourse surreptitiously at work in liberal arts curricula. Concern for education reform might be a symptom of crisis but this crisis is also the very vector spawning the radical shift in our understanding of the “(hu)man” and its mutation in theoretical Posthumanism as suggested, for instance, in the work of Cary Wolfe and exemplifi ed by Nathan Snaza (in this Issue) on the one hand. On the other, novelist J.M. Coetzee in a conceptionally adjacent fi ctional text, “The Humanities in Africa,”1 exposes and deconstructs the Menschenwissenschaft, the “human sciences,” including the human’s hypothetical quality “humane” before the horizon of an emergent technology that, supported by neo-liberalist economic rationality, he considers irreversible. Twilight, an instant occurring at both dawn and dusk, blurring the sharp contrast between day and night, names a zone of indistinction (Agamben) and différance (Derrida), where limits become fl uid, boundaries are crossed, and catachresis takes hold. Twilight can mark the end of an epoch like that of Nietzsche’s “last man,” the supremely contented yet shallow nihilist
Words on Trial—Verbal Experiments and the Current Trends in Modern German Literature
English Studies in Africa, Mar 1, 1974
Can There Be a Literary Theory Without People? An Argument for Relativism in Literary Theory
Philosophical papers, Oct 1, 1979
Reading the Gaps—Relocating English Studies in Africa
English Studies in Africa, 2008
'Literature', the late Edward Said remarked in his The World, The Text and the Critic (19... more 'Literature', the late Edward Said remarked in his The World, The Text and the Critic (1983), is 'in the world', meaning that verbal articulations always bear the traces of the pulls and pressures exerted by the locality, the society and the time of the writer. Critics and ...
Neohelicon, Jun 1, 2007
The essay rehearses the often obscured entanglement of Literature and value by taking at its prem... more The essay rehearses the often obscured entanglement of Literature and value by taking at its premise the historical emergence of the concept of literary value as tied to the realm of economics in the 18 th century. A brief genealogical investigation of their confluence shows the privileged ontological status of Literature as a function of discourse implicated in classical economics' labour theory of value that accompanies also the birth of aesthetic judgement. Once at the apex of the Humanities, where the knowledge of literary texts signified cultural achievement, 'the worth of the value' of Bildung (education), of capitalised Literature and of reading has diminished greatly in today's world. Under threat by entrepreneurialism made possible by new advancing and exponentially expanding digital mnemotechnical devices that are overtaking print culture, the study of Literature, and with it the Humanities, are losing ground. Interest in questions of 'literary value', together with renewed reflection on the "singularity" of Literature, it is argued, are symptomatic of profound changes in cultural technology that require literary studies to rethink language as precisely a writer's and a reader's "capital", and to revisit the oikonomia of language as the place of world-modelling and world-making.
Shards of Hegel
Wits University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2020
Models of Globalization
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 2001
All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, phy... more All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of its become fully and truly “global”: some are fixed in their “locality” —a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the “globals” set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game. —Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (2) To say that globalization is ubiquitous is stating the obvious. for globalization has become a household word in boardrooms, local and international institutions, the academy, and the media. It also shapes the everyday life of all but the most disadvantaged communities. Besides having the world at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day, courtesy of CNN and other news channels, I am connected by a mere click of the mouse, even in South Africa, to colleagues across vast geographic distances locally and abroad. The supermarket down the road in my Johannesburg suburb offers me the choice of Oprah's Book Club, the “taste of Provence,” and African, Indian, Chinese, English, and a host of other flavors, not to mention Coca-Cola, because I live in a society made up of different cultures and ethnicities. Without having to move even a mile, I feel like M. de Vogüé, of whom Harper's Magazine said in 1892, “[He] loves travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be ‘global’” (“Global”).
World Literature and the Library
Routledge eBooks, Aug 5, 2022
Places of the Past as Sites of Cultural Self-Constitution and Preservation: The Case of Es’kia Mphahlele’s Father Come Home (1984) and André Brink’s The First Life of Adamastor (1993)
BRILL eBooks, 2000
History: The European myth and the time and space of the other
The European Legacy, Jul 1, 1996
... See Levinas, "The Trace of the Other"; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Theory in ... more ... See Levinas, "The Trace of the Other"; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Theory in the Margin" in Con-sequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987-88); Edward W. Said ...
<b>Monica Fröhlich</b>, Literarische Strategien der Entsubjektivierung. Das Verschwinden des Subjekts als Provokation des Lesers in Christoph Ransmayrs Erzählwerk. 2001
Arbitrium, Oct 10, 2003
Mit Hilfe weit ausgreifender kritisch gebündelter Sekundärliteratur, hauptsächlich neostrukturali... more Mit Hilfe weit ausgreifender kritisch gebündelter Sekundärliteratur, hauptsächlich neostrukturalistischer Provenienz, gelingt es der Autorin, in der Konvergenz von Literaturtheorie, Philosophie und Rezeptionsästhetik die poetologische Vorgehensweise Ransmayrs programmatisch zu erklären. Diese erste Gesamtdarstellung des Ransmayrschen Werks, an der sich zukünftige Interpretationen zu messen haben, basiert auf der Frage: „Warum lassen Autoren ihre Helden verschwinden?“ (S. 9). Der Held als Subjekt der Äußerung, mit dem sich ein Leser-Ich identifiziert, ist spätestens seit Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften brüchig und verschwindet zugunsten des Subjekts der Aussage (des Erzählers) in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur aufgrund eines veränderten Subjektbegriffs. Vor dem Hintergrund philosophisch-postmoderner Subjektkritik, die bekanntlich das Ich als kulturhistorische Inszenierung und die Welt als unabhängige Realität begreift, konstatiert Fröhlich die nun schon seit geraumer Zeit aktuelle „Krise des Subjekts“ (S. 75), die speziell in Ransmayrs poetologischer Vorgehensweise aus dem ‚fremden Blick‘ des geschulten Ethnologen resultiert.
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Papers by Reingard Nethersole