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South African Literature
South African literature is the literature of South Africa, which has 11 national languages: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Venda, Swazi, Tsonga and Ndebele. Overview Elleke Boehmer (cf. Cullhed, 2006: 79) writes, "Nationalism, like patriarchy, favours singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all ... ndwill promote specifically unitary or 'one-eyed' forms of consciousness". The first problem any student of South African literature is confronted with, is the diversity of the literary systems. Gerrit Olivier notes, "While it is not unusual to hear academics and politicians talk about a 'South African literature', the situation at round level is characterised by diversity and even fragmentation". Robert Mossman adds that "One of the enduring and saddest legacies of the apartheid system may be that no one – White, Black, Coloured (meaning of mixed-race in South Africa), or Asian – can ever speak as a "South African." ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics during the course of the 18th century. Now spoken in South Africa, Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, estimates circa 2010 of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million. Most linguists consider Afrikaans to be a partly creole language. An estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin with adopted words from other languages including German and the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. Differences with Dutch include a more analytic-type morphology and grammar, and some pronunciations. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form. About 13.5% of the So ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DJ Opperman
Diederik (or Dirk) Johannes Opperman, commonly referred to as D.J. Opperman ( 29 September 1914 – 22 September 1985) was an Afrikaans poet. Biography He was born on 29 September 1914 in Dundee in Natal, where he grew up. He went to school in the towns of Estcourt and Vryheid, and afterwards received an M.A. degree from the University of Natal. He taught at schools in Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg, and later on became editor of ''Die Huisgenoot''. In 1949 he became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. During this period he completed one of his most important publications – ''Digters van Dertig'' (Poets of the thirties) – in 1953. He won the prestigious Hertzog prize for poetry in 1947 for his collection ''Heilige beeste'' ("Holy cattle"). From 1960 to 1975 he was a professor of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University, where he also served on the editorial board of the publication '' Standpunte'' ("Points of View"). He died in 1985 in Stellenbosch. He won four Hert ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elisabeth Eybers
Elisabeth Françoise Eybers (26 February 1915 – 1 December 2007) was a South African poet. Her poetry was mainly in Afrikaans, although she translated some of her own work (and those of others) into English. Eybers was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal. She grew up in the town of Schweizer-Reneke, where her father was the local dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa church. After completing her high school studies there at the age of 16, she enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand for a Bachelor of Arts degree, which she achieved ''cum laude''. After her graduation she became a journalist. In 1937 Eybers married the businessman Albert Wessels, with whom she had three daughters and a son. Counted among the so-called Dertigers, she became the first Afrikaans woman to win the Hertzog Prize for poetry in 1943. She won the prize again in 1971. Her work received many other awards in both South Africa and the Netherlands, including the Constantijn Huygens P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WEG Louw
William Ewart Gladstone Louw (31 May 1913 in Sutherland, Northern Cape, Sutherland, formerly Cape Province, now Northern Cape Province in South Africa – 24 April 1980 in Stellenbosch, Western Cape Province, South Africa), was an Afrikaner poet and is in the main known to the literary world merely as W.E.G. Louw. He was the younger brother of the poet N. P. van Wyk Louw. William Louw matriculated at the S. A. College School in Cape Town. He studied at the University of Cape Town from 1931 -1935 and was admitted to the degree of Master of Arts with a dissertation on the poetry of J. H. Leopold. He continued his studies in the Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam, where he was admitted to the degree of D.Lit. Louw returned to Cape Town in November 1938. Here he completed another doctorate with a dissertation on the influence of Gorter on Leopold (Die Invloed van Gorter op Leopold). In 1944 he married the composer Rosa Nepgen. In 1945, together with his brother N. P. van Wyk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anglo-Boer War
The Second Boer War ( af, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, the Anglo–Boer War, or the South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the South African Republic and the Orange Free State) over the Empire's influence in Southern Africa from 1899 to 1902. Following the discovery of gold deposits in the Boer republics, there was a large influx of "foreigners", mostly British from the Cape Colony. They were not permitted to have a vote, and were regarded as "unwelcome visitors", invaders, and they protested to the British authorities in the Cape. Negotiations failed and, in the opening stages of the war, the Boers launched successful attacks against British outposts before being pushed back by imperial reinforcements. Though the British swiftly occupied the Boer republics, numerous Boers refused to accept defeat and engaged in guerrilla warfare. Eventually, British scorched earth po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cornelis Jacobus Langenhoven
Cornelis Jacobus Langenhoven (13 August 1873 – 15 July 1932), who published under his initials C.J. Langenhoven, was a South African poet who played a major role in the development of Afrikaans literature and cultural history. His poetry was one of the then young language's foremost promoters. He is best known for writing the words for the national anthem of South Africa, "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika", which was used during the apartheid era. He was affectionately known as ''Sagmoedige Neelsie'' (Gentle Neelsie) or ''Kerneels''. His childhood friend who helped him get into poetry was called Hans Conrodius van Zyl. Biography Langenhoven was born at Hoeko, near Ladismith, in the then Cape Colony, and later moved to Oudtshoorn where he became its most famous resident. In 1897 he married the widow Lenie van Velden. They had one child, a daughter named Engela, who was born in 1901. By 1914 he became a member of parliament (first as member of The House of Assembly, and later as Sen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dadaism
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up technique, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with Radical politics, radical left-wing and far-left politics. There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the German artis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Post-modernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to epistemic certainty or stability of meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization. Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has bee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modernism
Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach. Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and modern architecture. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody. Modernism also rejected ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaningVictorino Tejera, 1966, pages 85,140, Art and Human Intelligence, Vision Press Limited, London of emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,Bruce Thompson, University of California, Santa Cruzlecture on Weimar culture/Kafka'a Prague particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music. The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Mat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's '' Les Fleurs du mal''. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Etymology The term ''symbolism'' is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
