Browsing by Author "Shum, Matthew Colin Noel."
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Item Improvisations of empire : Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789-1834.(2008) Shum, Matthew Colin Noel.This dissertation offers an extended examination of the writing of the 1820 Scottish settler Thomas Pringle. Though the primary focus of analysis is Pringle's poetry, the dissertation also engages extensively with Pringle's prose writing, particularly the Narrative ofa Residence in South Africa (1834), as well as the archival records of his personal and official correspondence. As the title suggests, the dissertation works through three distinct periods of Pringle's life, in each of which it locates different but related colonial postures or dispositions. In this schema, Pringle's Scottish writing is understood as obeisant to British cultural and linguistic norms, which it reproduces in a fashion that may be considered colonial in its deference to metropolitan standards. The Scottish context also provides Pringle with examples of people considered marginal to the developing modernity of the Scottish state (such as gypsies), who provide, I argue, baseline models for how Pringle will come to represent colonised indigenous peoples. In addition, the general principles of Scottish Enlightenment thought, in particular the four stages theory of historical development, supplied Pringle with a model within which to conceptualise the colonial state and its future evolution. Chapters two and three focus on Pringle's colonial career in the Cape Colony. Here I argue that Pringle's poetry of this period provides evidence of two distinct phases. In the first and most difficult period of settlement Pringle wrote poetry of troubled lyric interiority which reflected an incommensurable gap between colonial experience and the expressive expectations and conventions which he brought to it. Following his fallout with Governor Somerset and a de facto alliance with the mission humanitarians, Pringle's poetry moves away from a Romantic preoccupation with the self and begins to engage larger public issues, such as the treatment of indigenous people. In this mode, Pringle very often assumes an indigenous persona and I examine the extent to which such a gesture might be considered both appropriative and incipiently transcultural. As indicated earlier, I also examine the generic and representational models which might have informed Pringle's treatment of this subject. The chapters also consider Pringle's colonial politics, and emphasise that his reputation as a 'radical' is a misleading one; there are, furthermore, no easy conjunctures to be established between Pringle's allegedly radical politics and a radicalism of representation in his poetry (a commonplace critical assumption). In the final chapter I examine the complexities of Pringle's London years, which require that we bring into focus both his Scottish and his South African experience and their mediation by this new context. Here the broad focus of my argument is that we must take account not only of Pringle's standing as an abolitionist-humanitarian and Secretary to the high profile Anti-Slavery Society, but also his position as a respectable man of letters, particularly his role as editor of the influential but genteel 'annual', Friendship's Offering, from 1829-1835. These dual public roles reciprocated one another, I argue, in that Pringle's reputation as a poet of 'elegance' and 'taste' also lent credence to his reputation an ethically exemplary humanitarian. This reciprocation of roles is strongly evident in Pringle's best known poems of this period, «The Bechuana Boy" and «The Emigrant's Cabin", which rewrite colonial experience in a way that conforms to the expectations of his metropolitan readers. During his residence in London, Pringle also produced a number of poems in the subgenre of what could be described as evangelical redemptivism. These hortatory and proselytising pieces were mainly published in missionary magazines, and though South African in subject matter they could equally be set in any area of empire where mission work was being done. This subgenre I analyse as an offshoot of the extreme evangelical and abolitionist enthusiasms of the 1830s, with their belief in their divinely mandated mission to fully Christianise the British empire and emancipate all its subjects. In conclusion, this study argues for an understanding of Pringle's work as being intersected by differences in imperial location and status, as well as by a significant degree of instability and contradiction in its representation of the colonial project. Far from being cohered around a teleological liberal vision of an emancipated future, Pringle's work, both prose and poetry, repeatedly reveals a contradiction and contrariety that suggests fundamental irresolution rather than firm conviction.Item The work of G.H. Durrant : English studies and the community.(2009) Meihuizen, Elizabeth M. M.; Shum, Matthew Colin Noel.This study concerns the writing of Geoffrey Hugh Durrant. Durrant’s writing is to a large extent academic in nature, but he also comments on the broader South African society during the course of the 1940s and 1950s. The study has two interrelated objectives, the first archival in nature and the second more theoretical. The archival objective entails bringing to attention Durrant’s writing produced during the period he spent in South Africa. At present this archive remains largely unexplored. The second objective is to relate this body of writing to current thinking regarding the mission of university English Studies in South Africa. The study of languages and literatures in South Africa today finds itself in a complex situation of ongoing changes within the university as an institution, the broader system of education, and a society which in many respects can still be described as becoming a “New South Africa”. This is also true for university English Studies. It will be argued that in this process of transition Durrant’s writing, informed by the challenge to university English Studies to define itself as an independent academic discipline with an essential educational and social function, offers a valuable perspective. In defining the task of English Studies at the university Durrant aligns himself with the critical tradition which at a conceptual level originated in the writing of Matthew Arnold by the middle of the nineteenth century, but came to full fruition only after 1917 in the Cambridge English School. Durrant has to be credited for a measure of original thought and for making a personal contribution to this critical framework in for instance his definition of the concept “practical criticism”. He also has to be credited for including politics into the cultural analysis implicit in this critical framework, something which was never done by the Cambridge critics. This, for Durrant, means that his duty as citizen is not to be separated from his duty as university teacher. Durrant believes that indifference and failure to judge unacceptable political developments will ultimately endanger the values of society and make a self-respecting existence impossible. For university teachers an attitude of indifference will eventually leave the universities with no authority, unable to fulfil their essential task. Durrant sees the university as guardian of a specific type of intellectual activity and therefore as indispensable to society. The essential duty of the university is to cultivate an ability of critical discernment, and it is in this realm that the task of the university and that of English Studies coincide. For Durrant the social mission of English Studies depends on the fostering of a critical ability through engagement with the particular form of language use unique to the literary text. The standards of thought and understanding set by the literary text function as touchstones for life in all its various aspects, and mastery of this type of text affords the level of critical discernment necessary as foundation for a civil self capable of critical judgement.