Tydskrif vir letterkunde最新文献

{"title":"Alienation in Ntshavheni Alfred Milubi’s poetry","authors":"Moffat Sebola","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i2.13893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i2.13893","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I analyse the thematization of alienation in the poetry of the Muvenḓa poet, playwright, and scholar Ntshavheni Alfred Milubi. Milubi ascribes people’s abandonment of moral values to their perpetual frustrations, herein described as alienation. Reference is made to the crumbling African traditional institutions, which, in the past, seemingly functioned as havens for the rehabilitation of alienated individuals in African communities. These institutions are shown to be triggering alienation in the modernising and globalising space, seemingly with no room for recuperation unless one heeds the poet’s clarion calls. I restrict my analysis of Milubi’s poetry only to social and cosmic alienation, guided by a fixed set of themes, namely, from society, a romantic lover, and God, respectively. The article represents the idea that African-language literatures provide insights into how the indigenes have grappled with the interface between tradition and modernity. The three forms of alienation as treated by Milubi serve as a representative sample of how Tshivenḓa poetry in particular and African-language literatures in general often register subaltern voices and the ways in which they inscribe their experiences to explain their relationship with God or god(s), society, and intimate partners, among others. This trifocal relationship is essential to the Vhavenḓa and other African communities because it reveals their concept of cosmology, community, and intimacy.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44026215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religious metaphors and the crisis of faith in Wole Soyinka’s poetry","authors":"K. Afolayan","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i2.13033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i2.13033","url":null,"abstract":"Most commentaries on Wole Soyinka’s works across genres engage with his constant invocation of cultural tropes, most of which revolve around Ogun, his self-proclaimed muse. In this article, I highlight the centrality of religious myths and metaphors in a selection of Soyinka’s poems, namely, “Idanre” in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibman (1976), “Joseph”, one of the “Four Archetypes” poems in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), “Mandela’s Earth” in Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989), and selected poems under the sections “The Sign of the Zealot” and “Elegies” in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). While identifying the limitations of the poet’s Ogun trope, I dissect the centrality of faith issues in Soyinka’s poetry into two slants. The first, which is seen as encompassing his widely explored Ogun trope, is his use of religious metaphors to intervene on the dystopias in his postcolonial space. The second is his concern with the crisis of faith, a menace that has continued to threaten global peace. After drawing copious examples of religious tropes from Soyinka’s selected poems, I focus on the attention given by the poet to crisis in faith relationships. The copious examples of Soyinka’s use of religious metaphors lead to the conclusion, at the end of the paper, that access to Soyinka’s poetry is best achieved by paying attention to his religious metaphors. I also identify Soyinka’s antidote for the crisis of faith which lies in his prescription of tolerance and respect for humanist ideals.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46659726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The post-heroism of Stuur Groete aan Mannetjies Roux and Verraaiers","authors":"Chris Broodryk, Daniel A. Britz","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i1.15059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i1.15059","url":null,"abstract":"There is much scholarship on the linkages between Afrikaner nationalism and South African (Afrikaans-language) filmmaking. Within the context of a sustained post-apartheid renegotiation of Afrikaans or Afrikaner nationalism in the popular imagination, in this article we argue that two feature film historical dramas from the production company Bosbok Ses Films, Stuur groete aan Mannetjies Roux (2013) and Verraaiers (2013), resonate thematically and aesthetically with Thomas Elsaesser’s notion of post-heroic cinema. While a number of pre-1994 Afrikaans-language films celebrated Afrikaner nationalism as personified in the figure of the hero, this article positions and uses Elsaesser’s post-heroism as a critical lens through which to demonstrate the ways in which these two films call attention to a post-hero whose actions and behaviour (often inadvertently) renders a productive renegotiating of the hero figure within a post-apartheid cinematic context. To supplement Elsaesser, we also draw on Johan Degenaar’s writing on political pluralism. In this article, we find that an Elsaesserian post-heroic approach to the two films allows the following constitutive components of post-heroic cinema to surface: atemporality as opposed to linear narrative time, parapraxis (productive failure) as opposed to traditional iterations of heroic acts and valour, and conceiving of the film screen as a surface in flux as opposed to the screen as a mirror. The article’s contribution to existing scholarship on contemporary Afrikaans-language cinema is three-fold: it is the first to utilise an Elsaesserian approach to Afrikaans film and as such to foreground and investigate the figure of the post-hero, it provides a critical account of two independently-made feature films that remain under-researched in current South African film scholarship, and it contributes to discourse around the ways in which popular media inform and respond to the renegotiation of Afrikaans (or Afrikaans) identity.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46107216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slow beauty: Refocusing Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid through a slow cinema lens","authors":"Emma Wanyonyi","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i1.15109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i1.15109","url":null,"abstract":"Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid is often read as a representation of South African queer realities and political progressiveness both during and since the dissolution of apartheid. Consequently, Hermanus’s contribution to the aesthetic of slowness in Skoonheid has gone largely unnoticed in the broader context of slow cinema. In this article, I examine how Hermanus, through the slow cinema conventions, urges the viewer to contemplate issues of crucial importance to human behaviour, thereby putting Skoonheid’s meditative qualities on display. Drawing on Ira Jaffe’s concept of expressive minimalism, Emre Çağlayan’s poetics of slow cinema, and Thomas Elsaesser’s observations on the virtues and demands of slow cinema, I analyse the narrative and aesthetic strategies deployed in Skoonheid within the purview of slow cinema and beyond a representation of queer sexuality. This analysis reveals that Skoonheid represents a mode of narrative-formal expressiveness distinct from, yet in dialogue with, slow cinema in its emphasis on contemplation. Principally, Hermanus finds a way to testify to some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary society through the film’s contemplative approach, which draws the viewer’s attention to the mystery and ambiguity of human experience. Skoonheid’s contemplative approach is informed by the film’s processes and experiences of alienation, incommunicability, and existentialism.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48282288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Afrikaans-language cinemas / Nuwe Afrikaanstalige rolprentrigtings","authors":"Chris Broodryk","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i1.15918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i1.15918","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction This issue of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde offers four investigations of contemporary Afrikaans-language cinemas. The emphasis in this issue is on ‘the new’: new ways to interrogate Afrikaans-language films, or Afrikaans-language films that in a new way deal with themes or content that had not been explicitly addressed in Afrikaans-language cinema. Such is the variation of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Afrikaans-language filmmaking that it is best to refer to Afrikaans-language cinemas in the plural. This plurality confirms the degrees of range and differences––in themes, aesthetics, intended audiences––that constitute contemporary Afrikaans-language filmmaking. Keyan Tomaselli is particularly astute about the use of the plural ‘cinemas’ instead of the singular ‘cinema’, where cinemas “implies the study of form, political economy and the regional, national and local historical contexts a within which industries and their associated productions practices and aesthetic regimes are located” (“Africa, Film Theory and Globalization: Reflections on the First Ten Years of the ‘Journal of African Cinemas’” 18). Such an understanding of cinemas foregrounds the multiplicity of Africa and Africans “exuding thousands of identities, languages, ethnicities and societies exhibiting myriad values” (“Africa, Film Theory and Globalization” 18). The variation and difference that Tomaselli refers to above also apply to the context of the smaller, yet dynamic, Afrikaans-language film industry, which has increasingly shed a historically dominant conservatism (of politics, gender and sex) in favour of more progressive approaches to and representations of being and living in South Africa. Some contemporary Afrikaans-language films are increasingly focused on the socio-political forces that shape life in South Africa, and that inform the identities of various Afrikaans-speaking individuals. Consider this limited sample of Afrikaans-language films from 2016 to 2020: the crime drama Noem my Skollie (2016); the historical drama Krotoa (2017), with its critical lens on South Africans history and race; the social realism of Tess (2017); the queer dynamics of Kanarie (2018), Die stropers (2019) and Moffie (2019); the celebration of individual liberation and actualisation in Wonderlus (2018); the politically incisive science-fiction Wesens (2020) with its emphasis on emergent technology in place and mythmaking. These films often provide a reckoning with the past; give voice to marginalized communities (see also the socio-politically grounded thriller Nommer 37); promise aesthetic innovation; and display a considerable concern with gender, specifically masculinity. Taking the above titles into account, one might propose an Afrikaans-language queer cinema, for instance, as well as an Afrikaans cinema of critical historical retrospection.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42824304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queer, Christian and Afrikaans: The libidinal, sexuality and religion in Kanarie and Skeef","authors":"G. Ncube","doi":"10.17159/tl.v60i1.14054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i1.14054","url":null,"abstract":"Religion is often viewed as incompatible with queer sexualities and genders. In the Afrikaans-speaking communities of South Africa, Calvinist doctrine and dogma have been used to marginalise and ostracise those sexual and gender identities that stray from the heteronormative scripts sanctioned by cultural and religious practices. In this article, I examine how the libidinal is central to the way in which queer and faith communities interact in Afrikaans-speaking communities in two films: Kanarie and Skeef. The two films represent different filmic genres with Kanarie a fictional feature film and Skeef being a documentary. The two films, despite their different genres, broach the difficulty of being queer and religious. At the same time, the films show that it is possible to rethink religions/faith communities. Such rethinking creates accommodative spaces within faith communities in a way in which queerness is not viewed as a deviance or an abomination. I read these Afrikaans-language films against the conceptualisation of the libidinal offered by Keguro Macharia together with the ideas of queer agency proposed by Adriaan van Klinken. This queer agency marks not just a transgression of heteronormative Christian norms but also engenders expansive ways of understanding human sexuality and gender identities.","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45995228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944-2020)","authors":"I Mwangi","doi":"10.17159/tl.v58i1.10492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i1.10492","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136257907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ilifa (Athambile Masola)","authors":"Sizwe Mqalo","doi":"10.17159/tl.v59i2.14249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v59i2.14249","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43837277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ons het ver […] versit: Gedigte, toesprake, onderhoude, met ’n essay deur Hein Willemse (Patrick J. Petersen)","authors":"L. Viljoen","doi":"10.17159/tl.v59i2.14227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v59i2.14227","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48331760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unam Wena (Mthunzikazi A. Mbungwana)","authors":"Mantoa Motinyane","doi":"10.17159/tl.v59i2.14233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v59i2.14233","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41787,"journal":{"name":"Tydskrif vir letterkunde","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42258039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}