Hasil untuk "African languages and literature"

Marius Crous

Review Editor

Book Reviews 21.1

Doseline Kiguru

This article explores the place of the future African city as presented in contemporary African speculative fiction. It focuses on the short stories in the collection Imagine Africa 500 to look at how the urban space is conceptualized in these narrations of an imagined future Africa, 500 years from now. While the discussion looks at the urban space and imagined technological development, it also takes note of ecological narratives and the contrast drawn between the city and the rural, the local and the foreign, as imagined for the future. The article aims to provoke a debate on the imaginations of what a future African city may look like as presented through literary works and the significance of these imaginings today within developmental and environmental lenses. The aim is to look not only at the creative text but the literary production mechanisms that produce these texts, taking note of the significance of the city space as a physical setting for literary organizations that produce such texts as well as a central theme in the narratives told through these platforms. It reads the future city through use of language, space, form and style to look at how the modern short story is theorizing on African futures.

Marius Crous

Dianne Shober

Throughout the centuries, lion images have figured prominently in literature, art, heraldry and statuary. In Chinese art, for instance, lions appear more predominantly than dragons as guardians of buildings and temples, whereas across Europe, warriors surged across continents conquering under the image of the roaring lion emblazoned on their monarchs’ flags. Furthermore, numerous cultures and religious traditions symbolically embody their rulers, both divine and temporal, using leonine imagery. Through an investigation of this imagic representation, this article will explore the selection of the lion, Aslan, as the spiritual depiction of the Christ-figure in C.S. Lewis’ series The Chronicles of Narnia.

Hein Willemse

I never had the opportunity of meeting Peter Abrahams. I only knew him through his writings. I recall the mustiness of the copies of Wild Conquest (1950) and Tell Freedom (1954) I found hidden away behind books on a shelf at a relative’s house. Although the dust jackets of both were tattered the pages of Tell Freedom bore traces of heavy use. Not only did the latter title intrigue me but so did the palimpsests of readers past. That day I read it with increasing fervency. In hindsight, it must have been one of the first times that I recognised some familiarity, perhaps even immediacy, in a piece of writing.

Joan Hambidge

Chikwenye Okonjo

Antjie Krog

Thomas Mofolo never defended himself against accusations that his novel Chaka distorts historical facts to express anti-Nguni sentiments under the guise of Christianity. But in a way he foreshadowed the possibility of it, by including as part of his novel a sentence which has become one of his most analysed: “But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his [Chaka’s] life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose”. Mofolo does not elaborate on what he means by “our present purpose”, but simply continues with the story. By focusing on the original Sesotho text, indigenous Zulu customs, African philosophy and the diversions from historical facts, this article explores other possibilities for what could have been Mofolo’s “present purpose”. My reading is that he tries to plumb what comprises ethical behaviour within a traditionally-valued, pre-Christian ethos, making Chaka arguably one of the earliest philosophical, ethical investigations via the form of the novel on the African continent.

Tony Ullyatt

No abstract available.

David W. Cuthbertson, Nikhila Raol, J. Hicks et al.

Robin Poynor, Susan Cooksey, Carlee Forbes

Special Issue Introduction

J. Kirkpatrick, A. L. Weeks, G. Piel

Denise C Cooper, Lianne M. Tomfohr, Milos S. Milic et al.

R. Venter

A. Heidenheimer, Michael Johnston

Huddlestone, Kate, Fairhurst, Melanie

Pragmatic markers are “a class of short, recurrent linguistic items that generally have little lexical import but serve significant pragmatic functions in conversation” (Andersen 2001:39). While pragmatic markers are receiving growing consideration in the literature, pragmatic markers in South African English have been given little attention compared to other varieties of English. This paper provides a description of the distribution and functions of the pragmatic markers okay, anyway and shame as they occur in the spoken component of the South African version of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Using the commercially available Concordance program, WordSmith Tools, all instances of okay, anyway and shame were identified in the corpus and all non-pragmatic marker instances were then excluded. The remaining instances of okay, anyway and shame were then hand-coded to determine the primary functions that these elements exhibit. The classification of the functions of the pragmatic markers was carried out according to Fraser’s (1996, 1999, 2006) framework for identification of pragmatic markers. The findings of the corpus investigation included identifying the functions of okay as both a conversation-management marker and a basic marker, as well as its role in turn-taking. Anyway was found to function as an interjection, a mitigation marker, a conversation-management marker and a discourse marker. Shame, as a uniquely South African pragmatic marker, was found to function both as an interjection and as a solidarity marker, as an expression of sympathy or sentiment.

O. Dadzie, A. Petit

Chinua Achebe

Colin Yallop