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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Minor Disorders': Ivan Vladislavic and the Devolution of South African English
Author:Helgesson, StefanISNI
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-)ISNI
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]
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