Research 2010

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Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of English

Selected Highlights from Research Findings

Prof. David Medalie published an article entitled ‘The Uses of Nostalgia’ in English Studies in Africa (Volume 53, no.1, May 2010). This edition of English Studies in Africa is devoted to what the guest editors term ‘post-transitional’ literature and culture. It grows out of a special colloquium on this theme, which was held at the University of Johannesburg in October 2009. The collection is likely to be important in terms of the ‘mapping’ of literary trends in the post-apartheid period, and Prof. Medalie’s essay, which was commended at the colloquium for its originality and its incisiveness, promises to play a significant part in these attempts to understand and trace the various literary and cultural trajectories. Prof. Medalie argues in ‘The uses of Nostalgia’ that, despite a pervasive rhetoric of new beginnings, a great deal of post-apartheid writing remains fixated upon the past. Characterizing this recurring, even obsessive preoccupation with the past as a literature of nostalgia, his paper seeks to distinguish between different forms of nostalgia and to consider their implications. It is suggested that this provides an important way of understanding the complexity of the relationship between the past and the present in post-apartheid literature. Prof. Medalie’s findings are that, on the one hand, an unreflecting or pathological nostalgia may be discerned, where the nostalgia laments an irreparable, psychologically crippling loss. Such works depict an eternal exile and a mourning which never ends. Jo-Anne Richards’s best-selling novel The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996) is offered as a prominent example of this strain. On the other hand, there are works which present an evolved nostalgia, in which nostalgia is a way of engaging critically with the past, and a form of imaginative transformation or reinvention. This type of nostalgia, it is argued, is evident in Anne Landsman’s recent novel The Rowing Lesson (2007).
Contact person: Prof D Medalie.

Ms E. Donaldson, a doctoral student in the Department of English, contributed a chapter to a prestigious book, Practising Science Fiction: Critical Essays on Writing, Reading and Teaching the Genre (Hellekson, K., Jacobsen, C. and Yazsek, L. (eds.)) which was published in 2010 by McFarland Publishers in the USA. Her paper, ‘Hail the Conquering the Campbellian S/Hero: Joanna Russ’s Alyx’, is a radical reappraisal of the hero. Traditional theoretical approaches to the hero have maintained that only men may take up this archetypal mantle but Ms Donaldson effectively demonstrates that female heroes appearing in contemporary feminist science fiction are refuting this masculinist position. Using Joseph Campbell’s seminal study of the heroic monomyth, she finds that Joanna Russ’s female assassin, Alyx, not only displays the characteristics of the male hero but successfully completes the archetypal journey of the male hero. The provocative position Ms Donaldson takes is that women are fully capable of undertaking the heroic action of the male hero and that this should be expected of them; an archetypal hero should embody certain qualities, whether male or female. She also finds that the female hero thus has the potential to subvert patronising patriarchal assumptions that dictate women be ‘feminine’ and therefore helpless.
Contact person: Ms E Donaldson.

As a number of international tests have shown, South Africa is facing a reading crisis. In the context of increasing concern about this issue, Molly Brown of the Department of English at U.P. reviewed both current teaching practices and research into reading conducted at local schools. Her findings were that a high percentage of learners never manage the transition from reasonably accurate to fluent reading and that therefore the crucial area requiring targeted intervention may, in fact, be the primary rather than, as is often assumed, the foundation phase. In a paper delivered at the first Unisa conference on reading promotion and storytelling in Africa and a more extensive article, 'Harry Potter and the reluctant reader' published in Mousaion 27(2), Ms Brown also suggests possible strategies for addressing this problem area. These strategies include making more time in the new curriculum for reading aloud to children in their intermediate phase: addressing the shortage of novels suitable for older children in most of South Africa's indigenous languages: developing appropriate reading role models for learners to emulate; and countering adult prejudice against popular fiction such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series since these works can be very helpful in the development of reading fluency.
Contact person: Ms MA Brown.

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