Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’ and W.H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ to First-Year Students
- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Contrapuntal pedagogy , Edward Said , Mikhail Bakhtin
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/459670 , uj:40875 , Citation: Grogan, B. 2020. Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’ and W.H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ to First-Year Students.
- Description: Abstract: This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.
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- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Contrapuntal pedagogy , Edward Said , Mikhail Bakhtin
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/459670 , uj:40875 , Citation: Grogan, B. 2020. Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’ and W.H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ to First-Year Students.
- Description: Abstract: This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.
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Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger
- Wayne, Christopher, Grogan, Bridget
- Authors: Wayne, Christopher , Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Abjection , African literature , Corporeality
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/277138 , uj:29682 , Citation: Wayne, C. & Grogan, B. 2018. Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 55(2):104-119. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i2.1884
- Description: Abstract: In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.
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- Authors: Wayne, Christopher , Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Abjection , African literature , Corporeality
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/277138 , uj:29682 , Citation: Wayne, C. & Grogan, B. 2018. Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 55(2):104-119. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i2.1884
- Description: Abstract: In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.
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Perceptions of Daisy de Melker : representations of a sensational trial
- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/216774 , uj:21551 , Citation: Grogan, B. 2016. Perceptions of Daisy de Melker : representations of a sensational trial.
- Description: Abstract: This article discusses the sensational trial of the serial poisoner Daisy de Melker in terms of the reaction of 1930s South Africa to the transgression of white, English-speaking communal ties and values. The discussion focuses on representations of the events by three writers—Harry Morris, Herman Charles Bosman and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Each attended the trial, directly observing the court proceedings, yet each presents a different perspective. Morris, de Melker’s lawyer, provides details of his client’s crimes and personality while exhibiting a subtle ambivalence towards her; Bosman and Millin’s accounts are less direct and factual, harnessing de Melker for their contrasting identifications of social ills. For Bosman, alienated from the white social body by his own former murder trial and conviction, de Melker’s trial emphasised the punitive nature of South African society, providing a platform to discuss the barbarism of the death penalty. For Millin, however, de Melker embodied the abjection relating to the criminal disgrace of a white English-speaking woman. Indeed, de Melker’s trial resulted in conflicting responses that emphasised the ambivalence, fragility and internal contradictions within white South Africa at the time. These responses reveal race and gender as essential components of sensational trials within the colonial South African body politic.
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- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/216774 , uj:21551 , Citation: Grogan, B. 2016. Perceptions of Daisy de Melker : representations of a sensational trial.
- Description: Abstract: This article discusses the sensational trial of the serial poisoner Daisy de Melker in terms of the reaction of 1930s South Africa to the transgression of white, English-speaking communal ties and values. The discussion focuses on representations of the events by three writers—Harry Morris, Herman Charles Bosman and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Each attended the trial, directly observing the court proceedings, yet each presents a different perspective. Morris, de Melker’s lawyer, provides details of his client’s crimes and personality while exhibiting a subtle ambivalence towards her; Bosman and Millin’s accounts are less direct and factual, harnessing de Melker for their contrasting identifications of social ills. For Bosman, alienated from the white social body by his own former murder trial and conviction, de Melker’s trial emphasised the punitive nature of South African society, providing a platform to discuss the barbarism of the death penalty. For Millin, however, de Melker embodied the abjection relating to the criminal disgrace of a white English-speaking woman. Indeed, de Melker’s trial resulted in conflicting responses that emphasised the ambivalence, fragility and internal contradictions within white South Africa at the time. These responses reveal race and gender as essential components of sensational trials within the colonial South African body politic.
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Whiteness visible : the representation of race in Daphne Rooke's Mittee
- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2015-08-14
- Subjects: Rooke, Daphne, 1914- . Mittee , Race in literature
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5615 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14428
- Description: Through an examination of Daphne Rooke’s ‘coloured’ narrator Selina in Mittee (1951), this article explores, on the one hand, the extent to which the narrator’s critical perspective on whiteness and racial essentialism could be achieved in the novel and, on the other, how adequately a white apartheid-era author could depict a black narrator. Exploring Mittee’s ambivalence in relation to the topic of race via a discussion of the novel’s depictions of the performativity of whiteness, racial mimicry, sexual relations and embodiment, it argues that the novel is most politically potent in its critique of white society, but also incapable of transcending the bounds of whiteness to represent Selina in any way other than in relation to it. While whiteness is made subversively visible in the novel, counter to its invisible normalisation in racially unequal societies like the novel’s Boer War setting and South Africa in the 1950s, when Rooke published Mittee, it is, within a current reading, ultimately too visible and is presented at the expense of the narrator’s specificity.
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- Authors: Grogan, Bridget
- Date: 2015-08-14
- Subjects: Rooke, Daphne, 1914- . Mittee , Race in literature
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:5615 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/14428
- Description: Through an examination of Daphne Rooke’s ‘coloured’ narrator Selina in Mittee (1951), this article explores, on the one hand, the extent to which the narrator’s critical perspective on whiteness and racial essentialism could be achieved in the novel and, on the other, how adequately a white apartheid-era author could depict a black narrator. Exploring Mittee’s ambivalence in relation to the topic of race via a discussion of the novel’s depictions of the performativity of whiteness, racial mimicry, sexual relations and embodiment, it argues that the novel is most politically potent in its critique of white society, but also incapable of transcending the bounds of whiteness to represent Selina in any way other than in relation to it. While whiteness is made subversively visible in the novel, counter to its invisible normalisation in racially unequal societies like the novel’s Boer War setting and South Africa in the 1950s, when Rooke published Mittee, it is, within a current reading, ultimately too visible and is presented at the expense of the narrator’s specificity.
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