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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | 'Minor Disorders': Ivan Vladislavic and the Devolution of South African English |
Author: | Helgesson, Stefan |
Year: | 2004 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 30 |
Issue: | 4 |
Period: | December |
Pages: | 777-787 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | writers English language novels History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Literature, Mass Media and the Press |
About person: | Ivan Vladislavic (1957-) |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4133883 |
Abstract: | This article argues that Ivan Vladislavic's aesthetically radical fictions interrogate the authority of English as a language imposed by colonialism and globalization. Diverging from the romantic legacy of English letters in South Africa, which has seen literature as an ideal expression of an inner truth, Vladislavic's writing deals with the materiality of the sign and, more specifically, the print medium. In his hilarious novel 'The Restless Supermarket' (2001), the ironical tension between the perception of English as an ideal order and the shape-shifting materiality of the sign produces what the author (following G. Deleuze) calls a minoritization of English. However, Vladislavic targets not only the high cultural authority of British English, but equally the instrumentalized English of advertising and commercial media. As he ludically reshuffles and defamiliarizes the conventions of both 'high' and 'low' language, Vladislavic places South African English in the larger flow of transnational history and enables language to function as a mode of becoming rather than being. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |