Research Articles (English)

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Chaucer’s Pardoner : food, drink, and the discourse of desecration
(Routledge, 2024) Goedhals, John Antony; antony.goedhals@up.ac.za
The centrality of food and drink in the ‘Introduction to the Pardoner’s Tale’, the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue’, and the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ itself has been shown by a number of scholars, in particular Martin Stevens & Kathleen Falvey (1982), Clarence Miller & Roberta Bux Bosse (1972), Joseph Millichap (1974), Robert Nichols (1967), and Frederick Tupper (1914). This essay builds on their insights by showing that Chaucer deliberately constructs a semantic field of words relating to food, some of which are neologisms. The scholars mentioned above show how the bread and wine of the texts have deeper metaphorical resonances with the Mass. But their insights can be taken further, by demonstrating that Chaucer subverts this layer of meaning with yet another discourse set: words and deep metaphors relating to brokenness, violence, and death, as opposed to the whole, the healthy – the holiness of Christ’s body and blood, and its representation in the Christian Mass. In carrying this out, the Pardoner is one of Chaucer’s most evil characters, but also becomes one of his most ethical constructions, as he demonstrates what a Christless world would be like.
Ways of being : water spirits in Mia Couto’s sleepwalking land (1992)
(Routledge, 2024) Joseph, Confidence
Mia Couto is a Mozambican writer known for an aesthetics of the fantastic in his numerous works. In most of his writings, he blurs the distinctions between the human and the non-human, land and water, the natural and the supernatural. This is particularly evident in his 2006 novel Sleepwalking Land, set in the context of the Mozambican civil war. This paper argues that the elusive figure of the water spirit is an ideal lens by which to read Sleepwalking Land to capture the complexity of the horrendous civil war. Drawing on magical realism, I consider Couto’s use of water-based indigenous beliefs to underscore ideas of flexibility and mobility in a land ravaged by war, while revising the myth of powerful water spirits in line with the raging civil war. The chaos of war is amplified in the novel through actions of spirits that encroach on the human world, influencing events and problematizing the laws of logic, time and space. Their intractability enables Couto to foreground ambiguity and hybridity with characters who assume different forms at different stages of the fragmented plot, mirroring the raging war.
The desiring girl in South African young adult fiction
(Routledge, 2025) Kneen, Bonnie; bonnie.kneen@up.ac.za
Girls in South African young adult (YA) fiction typically represent a heteropatriarchal, sexually passive model of femininity that allows for neither sexual autonomy nor sexual desire. This article examines six prominent South African YA novels that are unusual in that the sexual desires of their teenage heroines play an important role in shaping plot or character: S. A. Partridge’s Dark Poppy’s Demise (2011); Adeline Radloff’s Sidekick (2010); Sonwabiso Ngcowa’s In Search of Happiness (2014); and Lily Herne’s Mall Rats series of three books. The study finds that even in these rare examples of South African texts that treat girls’ desires as significant, desire mostly remains ambivalent or is treated evasively, while violence, by contrast, is embedded in each novel’s social context and routinely described at length, in explicit detail. South African girls live in a violent world, but the article argues that reducing their lives to a single violent dimension only perpetuates that violence. And in correlating girls’ desire indissociably with violence, these texts normalize the violent punishment of girls whose femininity is not sexually passive.
‘These super people’ : the superimposition of Ted Hughes’ ‘Brasilia’ on Sylvia Plath’s ‘Brasilia’
(Routledge, 2025) Nöffke, Tobias Georg; georg.noffke@up.ac.za
When Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters was published in 1998, only months before the poet’s death, the volume came as such a surprise that it made headlines in both England and America. To readers hungry for biographical revelation, it seemed as though Hughes was finally offering a confessional account of his lifelong association with Sylvia Plath. But a careful examination of these poems indicates that Hughes’ intentions are not uncomplicatedly or ingenuously autobiographical. Hughes assesses, appropriates, and recalibrates Plath’s mythically charged poetic oeuvre to mould his own myth, and does so in a manner that echoes the way Plath appropriates his work when she writes the Ariel poems. In fact, Birthday Letters is simultaneously Hughes’ last volume of poetry and the last instance of the poetic dialogue between the two poets. Though Birthday Letters is saturated with references to Plath’s poetry, many poems go beyond incidental allusion to address specific ones by Plath, some of them even sharing titles. This article examines Plath’s ‘Brasilia’ and Hughes’ ‘Brasilia’ as poems that, together, represent an exemplary instance of the Hughes-Plath textual exchange. Neither of these poems has been analyzed closely in existing scholarship. Plath’s poem envisions the emergence of a race of ‘super-people,’ inhuman figures who present a threat to the speaker’s child. Hughes’ poem superimposes another vision onto Plath’s ‘Brasilia’: a resurrected Plath herself, an immortal literary icon who becomes the super-human threatening those left behind in the wake of her death.
The relationship between the spelling and pronunciation of English in the South African context
(South African Association for Language Teaching, 1999-12) Titlestad, Peter J.H.
English spelling is not phonetic. This is just as well as the variety of accents world wide would make a universal phonetic spelling system impossible. But the non-phonetic and sometimes apparently eccentric nature of English spelling creates difficulties for learners and teachers need instruction in some aspects of the pronunciation of English. The problem is acutest with the vowels as only the letters a e i o u cater for the great variety of vowel sounds, but consonants, while generally providing the framework, can also give trouble. Teacher and learner must be aware of such things as silent letters, assimilation, slurring, stress, vowel reduction and some of the common tendencies in South African pronunciation. All this has implications for the training of English teachers.
Ben Okri's eco-imagination in Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021) : an Afropolitan approach
(Routledge, 2024) Gray, Rosemary A.
There are possibly myriad approaches to an examination of Sir Ben Okri’s African folktale, Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021), that sings the praises of Mother Nature’s ability to transform human nature. Premised on the phenomenology of the eco-imagination that adopts Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Imaginatio Creatrix as the pivotal force of the genesis/ontopoiesis of human life and reality, coupled with Arne Naess’s notion of “deep ecology” that likewise emphasises the intrinsic interconnectedness of all lifeforms and geophysical features on Planet Earth, the discussion shows that Every Leaf a Hallelujah implicitly explores the developmental phenomenology of perception via Achille Mbembe’s notion of Afropolitanism. It does this through the agency of the innocent prescience of a small Nigerian girl child, the seven-year-old Mangoshi who is attuned to the choral voices of nature. Writing against the rift of the prevalent Western belief in a nature that is utilitarian or where nature serves human needs, this article is embedded in an African eco-critical imaginary that investigates the interrelationship between human nature and Mother Nature from an Afropolitan literary perspective in which there is a mythic conjunction between humans and nature, as well as art and science. Echoing Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life and the human creative condition, the argument concludes that Every Leaf a Hallelujah represents a significant contribution to contemporary discourse on conservation for sustainability.
"The only almost germ-free continent left" : pandemics and purity in cultural perceptions of Antarctica
(Duke University Press, 2023-03) Leane, Elizabeth; Lavery, Charne; Nash, Meredith
This article examines the role of pandemics and viruses in cultural perceptions of Antarctica over the past century. In the popular imagination, Antarctica has often been framed as a place of purity, refuge, and isolation. In a series of fiction and screen texts from the nineteenth century to the present, viruses feature prominently. The texts fall into two categories: narratives in which Antarctica is the sole source of safety in a pandemic-ravaged world and those in which a virus (or another form of contagion) is discovered within the continent itself and needs to be contained. Viruses in these texts are not only literal but also metaphorical, taking the form of any kind of threatening infection, and as such are linked to texts in which Antarctic purity is discursively connected to racial and gendered exclusivity. Based on this comparison, the article argues that ideas of containment and contagion can have political connotations in an Antarctic context, to the extent that they are applied to particular groups of people in order to position them as “alien” to the Antarctic environment. The authors show that the recent media construction of Antarctica during COVID-19 needs to be understood against this disturbing aspect of the Antarctic imaginary, and also that narratives of Antarctic purity are imaginatively linked to both geopolitical exclusions and the melting of Antarctic ice.
The gender performances of Margaret Atwood's Aunt Lydia in the Testaments
(Unisa Press, 2023-04) Weiss, Jordyn Jade
This article examines the different gender performances that are demonstrated by the version of the character Aunt Lydia that Margaret Atwood focuses on in her latest novel, The Testaments (2019). The research is primarily informed by Judith Butler and her various works on the subject of gender performance. In The Testaments, Lydia performs two gender roles: publicly, that of the Aunt, and, in private, that of a woman who aims to restore Gileadean women’s freedom. The gender of the Aunt is performed consciously, whereas the second gender is performed significantly more unconsciously.
Editorial : Plunging into the depths of scholarly critique
(Routledge, 2023) Gray, Rosemary A.; rosemary.gray@up.ac.za
This issue of English Academy Review provides both contributors and readers of our internationally acclaimed journal with a rare opportunity to imagine themselves as novice deep-sea divers, not in search of a Tennysonian Leviathan but rather plunging into the depths to view the wonders of one of the world’s surviving coral reefs, a metaphor for the contents of this issue. As we view Nature’s bounty beneath the ocean, we may not be able to identify all the wondrous types of fish, sponges, anemones, plankton, octopi, starfish and other sea creatures, or the seaweed, ferns, rocks, barnacles and carnivorous plant life beneath the seas. In like manner, we may not be familiar with the wide variety of texts explored and interrogated here or the scholarly readings thereof, yet we will still be able to enjoy them and to be intrigued by dipping into them.
Academic, keyword, and plain English subtitles for natural sciences students : intralingual views
(AOSIS, 2023-08-31) Kruger-Marais, Elmarie; Kruger-Roux, Helena
The study is an analysis of the reaction of students in a faculty of natural and agricultural sciences (NAS) to subtitles and also includes an investigation of their responses thereto. Reception of and responses to academic English (close to verbatim transcription), plain English, and keyword English subtitles were explored by showing participants subtitled videos related to the content of their module. Participants were then asked to complete demographic and affective questionnaires, and participated in focus group interviews to investigate their reception of the various subtitles. The results show that participants responded particularly well to plain English subtitles. The focus group interviews indicated that they found all three sets of subtitles useful for note-taking purposes, adjusting the speed at which they accessed and processed information by pausing the videos, highlighting important information in the study materials, and being able to engage aurally and visually with the materials. From a higher education perspective, this emphasises students’ readiness for subtitles as an academic mediation tool. CONTRIBUTION : This article aims to fill existing gaps in the fulfilment of higher education institutions’ language policies, which have been exposed by the thrust for multilingualism in higher education. Research into academic subtitling as an academic mediation tool can be used to bridge this gap, thereby supporting innovative research in higher education.
Toward de-exceptionalizing migration : intra-African diasporic writing in South Africa
(Indiana University Press, 2022-09) Fasselt, Rebecca; rebecca.fasselt@up.ac.za
Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing on Ekow Duker’s Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije’s The Eternal Audience of One (2019), and Sue Nyathi’s The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts interrogate South Africa’s complex relationship to “Africanness” and forge new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris). Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of “Africa” in global literary circuits from the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and non-migrant identities.
Sekhmet and the shaman : extinction, ferality and trans-species connections in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Green Lion
(Routledge, 2023) Simon, Judith
In her fourth novel, Green Lion (2015), Henrietta Rose-Innes depicts nature’s precariousness in a commercial-driven city. The novel focuses on how, in the Anthropocene epoch, destructive human activities such as property development and hunting have emptied the city of Cape Town’s peri-urban areas of wildlife, to the extent that Sekhmet is the last surviving black-maned lioness in the world. In response to this overwhelming loss, Green Lion turns its attention to what remains in nature, depicting what Fredric Jameson identifies as an ‘imaginary regression to the past and to older pre-rational forms of thought’ (64). The novel thus foregrounds the ecocritical concept of age-old interconnections between human and nonhuman life through its depiction of the transformative shamanistic relationship between the protagonist, Con Marais, animal activist Mossie and Sekhmet. In this article, I elucidate the change of state and ferality that this transformative relationship elicits in Con, and I extend the notion of ferality to encompass its ecological connotations.
Religion, security and politics in northern Nigeria : a public intellectual reading of Ahmed Yerima's Pari
(Unisa Press, 2022) Oloruntoba, Albert Olatunde
Nigeria boasts of some of the world's biggest worship centres, as the vast majority of its population attend religious services and pray regularly. However, this nation remains one of the most religiously divisive nations across the world. Critical and literary studies have shown the role of religion in the creation and aggravation of conflict in this nation. This article analyses the ways in which Ahmed Yerima's play, Pari (2016), examines this burning subject of religious violence in Nigeria, and most specifically, northern Nigeria. Classifying this contemporary playwright as an active public intellectual, this article engages in a close reading of how the play speaks to the controversial subject of religion. The latter part of the article explores Pari's handling of the subject of conflict resolution, positing that confession, remorse, and forgiveness are important requirements if lasting peace is to be restored after any crisis. These subjects are constructed around the 2014 abduction of the 275 Chibok schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria by the Islamic terror group, Boko Haram.
Using process-oriented, guided-inquiry learning in the teaching of academic literacy
(University of Stellenbosch, Education Faculty, Department of Curriculum Studies, 2022-08) De Waal, Marguerite Florence; Weder, Nandi; marguerite.dewaal@up.ac.za
This paper presents a quantitative analysis of an intervention study that used process-oriented, guided-inquiry learning (POGIL) to teach grammar as part of an academic literacy module in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) at a South African university. In the first semester of the Language and Study Skills (LST) module, four key grammatical functions (parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation, and discourse markers) are foundational to subsequent writing skills taught throughout the year. The POGIL-based intervention study for the LST module was designed to respond to the specific educational context and needs of the ECP students. A teaching intervention was conducted using POGIL-style worksheets, after which the performance of the intervention group was compared to the performance of a control group using data from items in formal assessments (two semester tests and an examination). Analysis of this data indicates that the POGIL group performed better than the control group in all four constructs, though the difference in performance was statistically significant in only three constructs. The paper concludes with a suggestion that further research should be conducted to investigate the relationship between students’ level of capability and their response to POGIL-style language instruction; some possibilities for the continuation of the study are outlined. The research therefore contributes to the small, but growing body of work on POGIL instruction by expanding it to include academic literacy and ECP instruction.
The (de)colonial praxis : confronting present-day dilemmas of transforming knowledges and societies in Kopano Matlwa’s Spilt milk
(Unisa Press, 2022-09) Ncube, Ndumiso
Contemporary South African campus fiction has always been concerned with questions of power, being, and knowledge production. Kopano Matlwa’s novel Spilt Milk, like most campus fiction, evokes and challenges the South African academy, and looks at ways of making the school and/or university a hospitable place. Unlike Matlwa’s sister novels Coconut and Period Pain, Spilt Milk has received few scholarly reviews. I examine how the novel reveals and can be read as a starting point in exploring the intellectual dimensions of colonialism. I investigate the decolonial concept of the coloniality of knowledge and Matlwa’s seeming quest for decolonial education by foregrounding the educational institution Sekolo sa Ditlhora as the prime setting of the novel. The argument around the coloniality of knowledge I advance here is akin to current debates seeking to decolonise (or Africanise) education in South African schools and universities. Theoretically, this article draws from the decolonial ideas on the coloniality of knowledge whose foundations were laid by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who suggested that, for global domination, colonisers imposed their own modes of knowing and methods of producing knowledge. The concept of the coloniality of knowledge in Matlwa’s fiction is multifaceted since it speaks to the colonisation of space, education, languages, and the ways of life of the colonised people. Following the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests at South African universities, I argue that the characterisation of Mohumagadi, and her foregrounding of Africa as an epistemic site from which she interprets the world, is an attempt at moving the centre.
Reading for water
(Routledge, 2022) Hofmeyr, Isabel; Nuttall, Sarah; Lavery, Charne
This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This is followed by a discussion of Sarah Nuttall’s essay on Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, which establishes the framework for the essays that follow. These are discussed under four sections: Hydro-infrastructures, Multi-spirited Water, Bodies of Water and Wet Ontologies, and New Genealogies, New Chronotopes.
Editorial: Through the looking glass : figuring the animal
(Routledge, 2022) Gray, Rosemary A.; rosemary.gray@up.ac.za
The articles featured in this final issue, compiled and edited by Dr Sopelekae Maithufi, the outgoing editor-in-chief, and finalised by Professor Emerita Rosemary Gray, managing editor of English Academy Review, provide a cornucopia of trans-generic human–animal studies.
Inside the creaking baobab in Sindiwe Magona’s When the Village Sleeps (2021)
(Routledge, 2022) Gray, Rosemary A.; prof.r.gray@gmail.com
Bookended by the life of Busisiwe Mhkonto, When the Village Sleeps can be read as an “unfinished symphony”. The musicological analogy is bolstered by the harmonisation of the polyphonic voice register, coupled with the “unachieved” or the “yet to be achieved” implied in Sindiwe Magona’s wake-up call towards education for life. This article is predicated on Milan Kundera’s three categories of the art of the novel—the art of radical divestment, the art of novelistic counterpoint, and the art of the specifically novelistic essay—which, in turn, determine the progression of my argument. This is no dystopian novel— Magona looks beyond the precarity that she depicts in this metatext for uplifting instances that epitomise the central tropes of ubuntu and self-sufficiency. Ultimately, this is a story about youth advocacy that culminates in a programme to teach self-help through a broad-based notion of education for living in South Africa. Magona’s proposed reparation seeks to define a new cultural nationhood through an awakened imaginary.
Neither very bi nor particularly sexual : the essence of the bisexual in young adult literature
(Springer, 2015-12) Kneen, Bonnie; bonnie.kneen@up.ac.za
This article examines four prominent young adult novels about bisexual protagonists: Julie Anne Peters’s It’s Our Prom (So Deal With It) (2012), Brent Hartinger’s Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (2007), Lili Wilkinson’s Pink (2009), and Sara Ryan’s Empress of the World (2001). Defining bisexuality in terms of gender-plural sexual desire, it argues that narratives about bisexuals may impose essentializing identities, which resignify and redefine bisexuality through the use of stereotypes and the evasion of the sexuality and plurality of bisexual desire. By doing this, Peters and Hartinger, who represent the ideological middle ground in such narratives, ironically sustain the invisibility of bisexuality that they ostensibly resist. Of the novels by Wilkinson and Ryan, Wilkinson’s Pink is the most stereotypical and evasive example, while Ryan’s Empress of the World, at the other extreme, manages to avoid essentializing bisexuality, seeing it in terms of plural desires. If narratives of bisexuality are to help bisexual teenagers interpret their plural desires and fill the bisexual spaces or gaps in their worlds, it is argued that this necessitates a shift towards approaches, like Ryan’s, that recognize the variety and individuality of these teenagers.
Crain Soudien (2019) the Cape radicals : intellectual and political thought of the new era fellowship. Johannesburg : Wits UP
(Transformation, 2021) Sandwith, Corinne; corinne.sandwith@up.ac.za
The Cape Radicals presents a fascinating history of the New Era Fellowship (NEF), an organisation that emerged in the latter part of the 1930s as one manifestation of the South African anti-Stalinist Left. As such, the book is an important intervention in the ongoing effort to retrieve hidden intellectual-political traditions in early twentieth century South Africa, traditions which have been obscured by the dominant historiographical emphasis on the African National Congress. Soudien’s claims about the political and pedagogic significance of the NEF are centred on its grand ambitions, its intellectual foresight and its decisive local influence, as well as the paradox of its failure to establish a wider base and its subsequent historical marginalisation. In this latter sense, The Cape Radicals raises questions about the politics of contemporary historical retrieval and invites reflection on the larger historical processes of institutional sanction, neglect or erasure. This history of a relatively small but influential organisation is situated within the larger context of anti-colonial thinking in South Africa and is therefore an important addition to existing histories of left progressive movements. It is centred in particular on the Cape Town intellectual scene and undertakes an important recovery of the hidden social, intellectual and political history of Cape Town itself.

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