NonWestern oral literatures are still sometimes roundly dismissed on the grounds that they are mo... more NonWestern oral literatures are still sometimes roundly dismissed on the grounds that they are more 'primitive' and ritualistic than their Western, written counterparts.1 According to this argument, oral art is really the province of sociology, anthropology and folklore studies; from the perspective of the literature department it is a product of the 'illiterate imagination' and therefore quite beyond the pale. Such a reactionary stance is buttressed by literary criticism's traditional insistence on having a fixed text to study, something that is concrete, objective, stable and enduring; exactly, in other words, what an oral performance does not produce. However, reception theorists have recently begun, with increasing volubility, to challenge the definition of literary criticism as the study of concrete texts and have demanded instead that we attend to the dynamics of aesthetic production. With this upsurge of interest in the collaborative dynamics of literary c...
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant ... more Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? The article argues that the contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative modes of being to neoliberalism, modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities. This ascendant understanding of plant communication and forest dynamics offers a counternarrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.”
... a broad pertinence to the prospects for a postcolo-nial environmentalism that strives ... Afr... more ... a broad pertinence to the prospects for a postcolo-nial environmentalism that strives ... Africa on a stage crowded with anxieties about race, white manhood, domesticity, class ... backward in a progress discourse indebted to a tendentiously selective imperial enlightenment; instead ...
@ Position "AN EVERYBODY CLAIM DEM DEMOCRATIC": NOTES ON THE &a... more @ Position "AN EVERYBODY CLAIM DEM DEMOCRATIC": NOTES ON THE "NEW" SOUTH AFRICA Rob Nixon ... This crank British casino owner, zoo keeper, devotee of the fiction of H. Rider Hag-gard, and self-designated "white Zulu," bellowed that he had come to repay ...
... Rob Nixon ... Behind the tender elegy to the manageable decline of Wiltshire stand the unment... more ... Rob Nixon ... Behind the tender elegy to the manageable decline of Wiltshire stand the unmentioned circum-stances of Brixton, Notting Hill, Totten-ham, Southall, Bristol ... sity that has Naipaul and the Southern poet, James Applewhite, bonding in an al-most sacramental moment. ...
... ii. l ···: ' Page 3. Brett Murray (South African, 1961-), Truth. 1994. ... Bill Buford h... more ... ii. l ···: ' Page 3. Brett Murray (South African, 1961-), Truth. 1994. ... Bill Buford has noted the long line of American writers who have reflected covetously on the lit-erary stature that political adversity seems to generate. ...
... Asked what films he watched, he spoke movingly of Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as if their... more ... Asked what films he watched, he spoke movingly of Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as if their movies had premiered last Saturday at ... which brought together a spectrum of leading South Africans ranging from the far right Conservative party's Koos van der Merwe and the ...
... Pâicaros, madmen, naèifs, and clowns: The unreliable first-person narrator. Post a Comment. C... more ... Pâicaros, madmen, naèifs, and clowns: The unreliable first-person narrator. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Riggan, William (b. 1946, d. ----. PUBLISHER: University of Oklahoma Press (Norman). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1981. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0806117141 ). ...
This essay explores the differences between the non-fiction booms that have occurred in the Unite... more This essay explores the differences between the non-fiction booms that have occurred in the United States and South Africa during the 1990s and the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Nixon asks what factors have contributed to the enhanced status of non-fiction in these two distinctive societies. In the process he looks at the politics of non-fiction’s aesthetics and reception against the backdrop of neo-liberalism, gender and racial dynamics, the changing aura of the “real” in a digital age, and the politics of selfhood.
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2012
In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by t... more In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.1 According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with h...
NonWestern oral literatures are still sometimes roundly dismissed on the grounds that they are mo... more NonWestern oral literatures are still sometimes roundly dismissed on the grounds that they are more 'primitive' and ritualistic than their Western, written counterparts.1 According to this argument, oral art is really the province of sociology, anthropology and folklore studies; from the perspective of the literature department it is a product of the 'illiterate imagination' and therefore quite beyond the pale. Such a reactionary stance is buttressed by literary criticism's traditional insistence on having a fixed text to study, something that is concrete, objective, stable and enduring; exactly, in other words, what an oral performance does not produce. However, reception theorists have recently begun, with increasing volubility, to challenge the definition of literary criticism as the study of concrete texts and have demanded instead that we attend to the dynamics of aesthetic production. With this upsurge of interest in the collaborative dynamics of literary c...
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant ... more Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? The article argues that the contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative modes of being to neoliberalism, modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities. This ascendant understanding of plant communication and forest dynamics offers a counternarrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.”
... a broad pertinence to the prospects for a postcolo-nial environmentalism that strives ... Afr... more ... a broad pertinence to the prospects for a postcolo-nial environmentalism that strives ... Africa on a stage crowded with anxieties about race, white manhood, domesticity, class ... backward in a progress discourse indebted to a tendentiously selective imperial enlightenment; instead ...
@ Position "AN EVERYBODY CLAIM DEM DEMOCRATIC": NOTES ON THE &a... more @ Position "AN EVERYBODY CLAIM DEM DEMOCRATIC": NOTES ON THE "NEW" SOUTH AFRICA Rob Nixon ... This crank British casino owner, zoo keeper, devotee of the fiction of H. Rider Hag-gard, and self-designated "white Zulu," bellowed that he had come to repay ...
... Rob Nixon ... Behind the tender elegy to the manageable decline of Wiltshire stand the unment... more ... Rob Nixon ... Behind the tender elegy to the manageable decline of Wiltshire stand the unmentioned circum-stances of Brixton, Notting Hill, Totten-ham, Southall, Bristol ... sity that has Naipaul and the Southern poet, James Applewhite, bonding in an al-most sacramental moment. ...
... ii. l ···: ' Page 3. Brett Murray (South African, 1961-), Truth. 1994. ... Bill Buford h... more ... ii. l ···: ' Page 3. Brett Murray (South African, 1961-), Truth. 1994. ... Bill Buford has noted the long line of American writers who have reflected covetously on the lit-erary stature that political adversity seems to generate. ...
... Asked what films he watched, he spoke movingly of Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as if their... more ... Asked what films he watched, he spoke movingly of Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as if their movies had premiered last Saturday at ... which brought together a spectrum of leading South Africans ranging from the far right Conservative party's Koos van der Merwe and the ...
... Pâicaros, madmen, naèifs, and clowns: The unreliable first-person narrator. Post a Comment. C... more ... Pâicaros, madmen, naèifs, and clowns: The unreliable first-person narrator. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Riggan, William (b. 1946, d. ----. PUBLISHER: University of Oklahoma Press (Norman). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1981. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0806117141 ). ...
This essay explores the differences between the non-fiction booms that have occurred in the Unite... more This essay explores the differences between the non-fiction booms that have occurred in the United States and South Africa during the 1990s and the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Nixon asks what factors have contributed to the enhanced status of non-fiction in these two distinctive societies. In the process he looks at the politics of non-fiction’s aesthetics and reception against the backdrop of neo-liberalism, gender and racial dynamics, the changing aura of the “real” in a digital age, and the politics of selfhood.
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2012
In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by t... more In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.1 According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with h...
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