Invite | The State of Literary Studies in South Africa | Colette Gordon | 19 Sept | 11:30 - 13:00

You are warmly invited to the next in WISER’s continuing series on The State of Literary Studies in South Africa

Colette Gordon (English, Wits University)

An Inconvenient Narrator:  Dissonant Reading in the English Department

This paper examines what can be gleaned from failure in the English literature classroom, a pattern of (mis)reading, observed both before and after #Feesmustfall, among students interpreting K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2000). In his short novel, Duiker uses a young first-person narrator to distance readers from the available normative ‘grown up’ viewpoint, and by seeing through the eyes of a child, perceive the extreme abnormality of its social certainties (notably capitalist): “I don’t remember a grown up ever saying enough. They always want more. Even if that means you have to work till you die…”  Against the conventional predictions of narratology and the bromide that reading fosters empathy, a surprising number of students applied a corrective reading, affirming the gas lighting narratives of the two characters (a thief and a pederast) who exemplify the author’s social critique, and attacking the narrator, who is blamed for maligning adult society.  In this paper, I try to think through the many factors that might contribute to this form of dissonant reading, mapping factors specific to the South African context (generational, institutional), but also considering the wider failure of English departments to place misreading at the centre, not the periphery, of their work.

Thursday, 19^th September
11:30 – 1pm

WiSER Seminar Room,
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University

All welcome.