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Research Articles (English, Media and Performance Studies)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10413/6499

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Browsing Research Articles (English, Media and Performance Studies) by Author "Murray, Sally-Ann."

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    Ivan Vladislavic and what-what : among writers, readers and ‘other odds, sods and marginals’.
    (Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, 2009) Murray, Sally-Ann.
    This essay is an experimental quodlibet on some recent Johannesburg imaginative writing. It works outwards from a creative ‘overview’ of Ivan Vladislavić's position in South African literature to a perspective on versions of citiness represented by newer, black authors such as Niq Mhlongo and Phaswane Mpe. Unable to deny the neighbourly appeal of Vladislavić's signature ‘white writing’, however, I turn to a discussion of Portrait with Keys: Johannesburg and what‐what (2006), focusing especially on his use of fellow writers as generative literary‐cultural antecedents who enable him to bookmark the material streets of Johannesburg through an inspirational, written spirit of place.
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    Lyric↔L/language: essaying the poetics of contemporary women’s poetry.
    (UNISA Press; Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2011) Murray, Sally-Ann.
    Using the deliberately provocative strategies of “essaying” and “error”, which have become central to the poetry and poetics of women experimental writers such as Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this essay charts the writer’s slow understanding that lyric voice and linguistic-formal experimentalism in writing by women poets form a problematic, yet productive, interrelation. Lyric, suggests Kinnahan, is at once an apparently unmarked, naturalized poetic mode and, for women poets, a curiously over-marked, gendered category. At the same time, female experimental poets have not found a comfortable space within the avant-garde poetics loosely derived from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The essay moves to explore the challenges of the lyric-language conjunction in relation to the writer’s second collection, open season (2006), and suggests, through a method of trial and error, that a re-turn to lyric through the lens of international scholarship on contemporary experimental poetry by women writers can invigorate our take on the persistence of lyrical voice in poetry by South African women writers.