Launch of Stephen Clingman’s 'Birthmark'

Wednesday, 13 May, 2015 - 17:30

WiSER and Jacana invite you to the launch of

Stephen Clingman’s new book

B I R T H  M A R K

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Birthmark is a profound reflection on vision and identity. From the minutely observed details of a Johannesburg childhood, through the dark comedy of military service, to the challenges of making a new life as an immigrant scholar, Clingman examines his own perspectives and their origins. How did I come to see this way? How does this way of seeing shape the person I am? Can it be changed? To answer such difficult questions, he must go beneath the shimmering surface to find deeper patterns in his mind and body, and reveal the ‘underlying grammar of things’. The result is a thoughtful, unconventional memoir that will change the reader’s perspective too.”– Ivan Vladislavić

 
Stephen Clingman is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His first book was The Novels Of Nadine Gordimer: History From The Inside (still called, on the Nobel Prize website, the ‘best study’ on the subject), and his edited collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics And Places (Knopf, Jonathan Cape), has been translated into a number of languages, including French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Japanese. His book, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, a biography of the white Afrikaner who led Nelson Mandela’s legal defense at the Rivonia Trial, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction; a new edition of the book was published in 2013, and the film rights have been optioned. Stephen has written articles for a range of journals internationally, as well as reviews for the Boston Globe and New York Times. In 2009 he published The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford University Press), a study of a spectrum of writers across the twentieth century, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. Stephen’s new memoir, Birthmark, is forthcoming in South Africa in April 2015.

Tuesday, 12th May 2015
6:00 - 7:30

WiSER Seminar Room
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building
East Campus, Wits University
 
Drinks will be served
 
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