Project
Ctrl Z: Undoing Narratives
The proposed project seeks to explore how retraction and recantation take shape in experimental writing of the 20th and 21st Century.
Project
J.M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography
The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is currently South Africa’s most resourceful and influential writer.
Publication
Writing Body as Land & Land as Body in Mine Mine Mine
Phalafala, Uhuru Portia. 2024. ‘Writing Body as Land & Land as Body in Mine Mine Mine.’ In S. A. Murray & M. Betty (Eds.), The Creat...
Publication
Forms of Modernist Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy
Attridge, Derek. 2023. Forms of Modernist Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy. Edinburgh University Press. https://e...
Publication
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature
Attridge, Derek. 2021. Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature. In F. G. Robinson & B. Lewis (Eds.), The Work of World L...
Project
A History of South African Literature - Afrikaans Literature since 1930
The third volume concluding my comprehensive, novel history of South-African/Afrikaans literature explores the period from the 1930s onwards.
Project
In Search of Utopia (working title)
We live in times of the apocalypse.
Project
Texts/Forms and Transformations: A Poetics of the African Imagination
African narratives in both their traditional and contemporary phases apparently extend or re-stage tendencies previously encoded in folklore.
Project
Critical Illegibility, Blackness and Scoring Dangerous Freedoms
My project examines the possibility of reconfiguring conventional literary analytic practice by crafting critical approaches which are less invested in rendering texts ‘transparent’ than in approximating, embracing and extending the transgressive energies and insights of creative texts.
Project
The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction and Film
One can identify an ‘aesthetics’ of violence in any representation of a violent act where form and textuality are essential elements to the experience to the representation.
Project
Reinstating the "Literary" in South African Literary Studie
South African literary studies has, in a sense, lost its intellectual project.
Project
Questions of Literature
This project will involve the further exploration of a number of issues treated briefly in the 2004 study ‘The Singularity of Literature’, a short book that examined the distinctive character of literary uses of language, emphasizing the interrelated trinity of inventiveness, singularity and alterity.