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What is the relation between plagiarism and embarrassment? What unspoken rules dictate our responses to improper literary behaviour? Addressing these questions against the backdrop of South African author Willem Anker’s substantial ‘borrowings’ from Samuel Beckett, this article proposes three alternative avatars – the catfish, hacker, and emperor – to displace Martial’s archetypal plagiarius or enslaver. The catfish is an impostor, an appropriator and aggregator of identities who aims to seduce. The hacker is a digital bandit whose daring encroachments are as much admired as feared. And the emperor is that cipher either clothed by common consent or stripped at the cost of our own exposure. Whatever their vices, these figures have the virtue of nudging discussion of plagiarism away from rights and ownership towards identity, trust and exposure. Where the enslaver tends to ringfence the wronged and the wrong-doer, the alternative avatars open towards the reader. They ask us to consider our role in constituting, condoning or condemning acts of literary deceit, to mark the connections between our moral judgements and our affective responses, and, ultimately, to reflect on our position as hypocrites lecteurs when confronted with plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay is one mode of expression, a discursive genre among many. But given its monolithic status as assessment tool in the humanities, this relativity is sometimes overlooked. Such modal inflexibility is still more puzzling given that syllabus changes have recently been driven by inclusivity and varieties of learning experience. Opening onto this variety, the present article asks whether students’ critical thinking could be strengthened by their imaginative capacity, and how modal shifts in assessment practice can expand academic meaning-making. Specifically, it weighs the benefits, risks and responsibilities of translating or “regenring” the academic essay into alternative forms. Underpinned by recent theories of assessment practice, the article also situates “regenring” in relation to the disruptive, digressive, even errant formal energies of modernist literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works' difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee's reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of 'Coetzeean' difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The fact of the matter", Millin lamented, 'is that I Voorslag i , for all its South African flavour, is a branch of a well-defined overseas group' (44). On 16 June, 1926, the Johannesburg newspaper I Rand Daily Mail i carried a gloved dismantling of a new literary magazine called I Voorslag i . This special issue promises, then, to keep doubts about South African and African modernism in a state of generative tension. 6 Galgut remarks in an interview with Mark Gevisser: 'the roots of the book lie in modernism .... [M]ost of the people celebrated as the great modernist writers were the writers that spoke most loudly and clearly to me when my writing consciousness was being shaped'. [Extracted from the article]

The article critiques the novel "How It Is" by Samuel Beckett. Topics include the author's thoughts on Beckett's preoccupation with eternally larval in the novel, possible titles for the novel being considered by Beckett, a description of the intimation of Bom's worm-like existence in the work, and a discussion of the characters of Bom and Pim. Also cited is Max Nordau's book "Degeneration" where Beckett will have encountered Nordau's conjunction between asexual reproduction and the worm-man.

For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected inPoems(1920), have occupied a comparatively peripheral space within the enterprise of Eliot studies. Despite the frequency with which some of them have been anthologized, these poems have elicited far fewer critical responses than most of Eliot's other work. The primary reason for this neglect is that the quatrain poems are largely regarded as satirical or comical meanderings that do not conform to the more ‘serious’ agenda of Eliot's oeuvre. ‘Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service’ is a case in point, since it has the appearance of a learned and almost unintelligible joke. However, it is the aim of this article to demonstrate that Eliot's growing indignation with perverted spiritual practices is couched within the satire of the poem. It is further argued that the poem shows Eliot's hunger for seriousness to have grown since ‘The Hippopotamus’, a poem written two years prior which also deals the corruption of established religion. In this poem, Eliot's vituperation is sustained and is ultimately indicative the poet's distaste for spiritual apathy, a theme which will reach its zenith some three years later inThe Waste Land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Though these authors are not commonly thought of as bedfellows, it is argued that there are two overlapping concerns in the plays under discussion, namely, the idea of original sin and the significance of indeterminate endings. Unlike Eliot's, Beckett's idea of original sin is not (exclusively) the product of a Judaeo-Christian perspective, and does not necessarily imply transgression against some absolute law or being. His understanding of the consequences of original sin, however, is remarkably close to Eliot's, particularly in terms of his conception of time. In both plays there is a tendency towards stasis, which is best reflected in the unresolved endings. Eliot's and Beckett's respective inbuilt frustrations disrupt our habitual experiences and expectations in art, and their philosophy of original sin and use of indeterminate conclusions come together to loosen the grip convention has on audience and reader. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems of 1920 are notorious for their glib, satirical vein. Though entertaining, they have been accused of being pseudo-scholarly and superficial, and have on these bases suffered comparable neglect.‘The Hippopotamus’ is no exception. Though binary and more simplistic than the other quatrain poems, the poem marks the genesis of Eliot's endeavour to ‘set his lands in order’. On the surface its handling of established religion and theology appears facetious and, at times, almost blasphemous. And yet, the poem's power of scepticism most forcefully manifests in Eliot's obstinate determination to present a final answer through a swirling network of intertextuality. The aim of this paper is to show that ‘The Hippopotamus’ is not anarchic but that it represents an early version of the impulse to ‘not cease from exploration’, though it fails to sustain its seriousness throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]