Papers by Simon van Schalkwyk
European Journal of American Studies, 2017
This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which... more This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which it is widely celebrated. It argues that Lowell’s appeal to techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows the poet to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. In this way, Lowell’s Life Studies imitations betray an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.
C. A. Davids’ sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts
of heterotopia and heterotopo... more C. A. Davids’ sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts
of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013)
allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than
narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that
heterotopic locations such as the garden, the library, the prison,
and the graveyard allow Davids to explore unlikely intersections
and overlaps between places as far afield as South Africa, America, and
Mali. It argues, furthermore, that the ghostly superimpositionality
that characterizes Davids’ employment of heterotopia collapses
distinctions between home and world, history and memory, and
text and intertext. In this way, heterotopological spaces offer Davids
a peculiarly productive means by which to “float” – to suggest, but
also to suspend – forms of memory, literary imaginaries, and ethical
potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global
divides.
Published in 1929, Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics ac... more Published in 1929, Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica was praised by reviewers and critics across the spectrum of the British and American literary scenes (among them Rebecca West,). At the same time, its readers were generally shocked by its portrait of child psychology (" the mind of the child "). While several critics applauded its realism, the record of its reception suggests that it induced — what one critic referred to as — " a sort of mental panic ". This article considers aspects of Hughes' " new psychology " , which derived largely from the writings of Freud and the Freudians. Reading the novel and Freud in counterpoint, the argument concludes that — while Hughes constructs A High Wind in Jamaica as a rejoinder to the ideological logic of the imperial romance — in inscribing Freudian " primitivism " it reiterates colonial assumptions about " civilization " .
This paper appeared in English Studies in Africa, 57.2 (2014).
Robert Lowell's earliest volumes,... more This paper appeared in English Studies in Africa, 57.2 (2014).
Robert Lowell's earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), anticipate William Appleman Williams' (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorise policies of transatlantic expansion in the postwar and Cold War years. In Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's conscious alignment with a form of Southernist politics, curiously inflected by Max Weber's remarks on the kinship between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, reinforces his scathing critique of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North. Lord Weary's Castle, by contrast, is less explicitly censorious of America's expansionist impulses. Lowell's liberal translation of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, however, serve to display the complex interests and potential consequences of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a transAtlantic frontier.
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Papers by Simon van Schalkwyk
of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013)
allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than
narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that
heterotopic locations such as the garden, the library, the prison,
and the graveyard allow Davids to explore unlikely intersections
and overlaps between places as far afield as South Africa, America, and
Mali. It argues, furthermore, that the ghostly superimpositionality
that characterizes Davids’ employment of heterotopia collapses
distinctions between home and world, history and memory, and
text and intertext. In this way, heterotopological spaces offer Davids
a peculiarly productive means by which to “float” – to suggest, but
also to suspend – forms of memory, literary imaginaries, and ethical
potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global
divides.
Robert Lowell's earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), anticipate William Appleman Williams' (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorise policies of transatlantic expansion in the postwar and Cold War years. In Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's conscious alignment with a form of Southernist politics, curiously inflected by Max Weber's remarks on the kinship between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, reinforces his scathing critique of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North. Lord Weary's Castle, by contrast, is less explicitly censorious of America's expansionist impulses. Lowell's liberal translation of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, however, serve to display the complex interests and potential consequences of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a transAtlantic frontier.
of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013)
allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than
narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that
heterotopic locations such as the garden, the library, the prison,
and the graveyard allow Davids to explore unlikely intersections
and overlaps between places as far afield as South Africa, America, and
Mali. It argues, furthermore, that the ghostly superimpositionality
that characterizes Davids’ employment of heterotopia collapses
distinctions between home and world, history and memory, and
text and intertext. In this way, heterotopological spaces offer Davids
a peculiarly productive means by which to “float” – to suggest, but
also to suspend – forms of memory, literary imaginaries, and ethical
potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global
divides.
Robert Lowell's earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), anticipate William Appleman Williams' (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorise policies of transatlantic expansion in the postwar and Cold War years. In Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's conscious alignment with a form of Southernist politics, curiously inflected by Max Weber's remarks on the kinship between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, reinforces his scathing critique of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North. Lord Weary's Castle, by contrast, is less explicitly censorious of America's expansionist impulses. Lowell's liberal translation of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, however, serve to display the complex interests and potential consequences of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a transAtlantic frontier.