Tim Woods

Giving and Receiving: Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts, or, the Postcolonial Logic of Third World Aid:

Woods, T. (2003). Giving and Receiving: Nuruddin Farahs Gifts, or, the Postcolonial Logic of Third World Aid. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38 (1), 91-112.

Mending the Skin of Memory: Ethics and history in contemporary narratives

Abstract The skin covering the memory of Auschwitz is tough. Sometimes, however, it bursts, and gives back its contents. In a dream, the will is powerless. And in these dreams, there I see myself again, me, yes me, just as I know I was: scarcely able to stand… pierced with cold, filthy, gaunt, and the pain is unbearable, so exactly the pain I suffered there, that I feel it again physically, I feel it again through my whole body, which becomes a block of pain, and I feel death seizing me, I feel myself die. Fortunately, in my anguish, I cry out. The cry awakens me, and I emerge from the nightmare, exhausted. It takes days for everything to return to normal, for memory to be ‘refilled” and for the skin of memory to mend itself. I become myself again, the one you know, who can speak to you of Auschwitz without showing any sign of distress or emotion. (Delbo 1985: 13–14)

South African Literature in the time of AIDS

The political response to the crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has been notoriously slow and chequered during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A sustained literary response, alert to the impact of the disease has been even slower, although this gathered pace by the mid-2000s in South Africa. This article investigates a number of these significant literary representations in relation to the understanding of HIV/AIDS in the South African public sphere. It focuses upon the ways in which representations of HIV/AIDS raise semiotic and political complexities, the problem of granting or denying sympathy, issues of literature’s attention to silences and differences, especially regarding those who have been culturally marginalized, and the ways in which HIV/AIDS is linked to changing representations of gender in South Africa. It seeks to demonstrate that, no longer constructing HIV/AIDS sufferers as dying subjects for whom nothing can be done, these literary narratives engineer a symbolic reorganization of subjectivity in the public sphere. Literary representations form part of a body of texts that are exhorting more transparency in public debate, demonstrating ways in which people can take greater responsibility for their health, and representing ordinary citizens as subjects with social, political, and psychological power and agency to alter their “life roles”. The article examines the ways in which this symbolic reorganization of subjectivity not only reflects but also projects a change in socio-medical power relations within South African society. Building a social responsibility, imagining new forms of citizenship, and creating new spaces for social justice, such literary narratives demonstrate a narrative transition from a depressed, debilitating doom to a new defiant defence; and in so doing, contribute to a transformative intervention in the public discourse of HIV/AIDS.

Human rights, human wrongs: literatures of captivity

Following Richard Rortys lead, this article does not foreground debates on human rights to the exclusion of the literary; instead, it examines bodies of literature that articulate and express these concerns about human rights, sometimes explicitly, but more often by implication. It is within this context that we argue that a new sub-genre of writing can be discerned and shaped, one we label ‘literatures of captivity’. This article considers the ways in which these narratives manifestly open a discursive space that both allows and enables the exploration of what, exactly, constitutes human rights. This exploration of the violation of human rights, in a manner not so freely available in state-sponsored discourse (the law), is also disseminated and packaged in ways that reach and influence a considerably wider readership or audience than codified statutes. We suggest that this is especially pertinent to life writings, focusing in particular upon case studies drawn from Japanese American internment narratives and memoirs of northern Korean labour camps.

Textual memory: The making of the Titanic's literary archive

James Camerons film, Titanic , depended on both a recent spate of novels and short stories about the ship, and an earlier diverse archive. We argue that a case study of the cultural memory of the Titanic , alongside the changing modes by which the sinking is represented, can reveal more general traits of our tacit understanding of what now constitutes both history and the past. Through discussion of Camerons film, E.J. Pratts poem, Walter Lords documentary narrative, A Night to Remember , and novels about the ship by Cussler, Steele, Finney, Bainbridge and Bass, we show that contemporary popular culture imagines the past as a traumatic memory to which access can be gained through a technics of memory and representation which will reveal it as a witnessable location in time and space. We suggest that the reliance on models of memory needs to be questioned both ethically and through the study of narrative practices, because the willingness of readers and viewers to go on being there as the Titanic sails and sinks again and again can be read as an image of how it is actually history which sinks late modernitys representation of the past.

George Oppen and the Public Sphere

This article aims to demonstrate that it is less important to pigeonhole Oppens poetics within modernism or postmodernism than it is to understand his poetic practice as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. Adopting the framework of the Habermasian transformation of the public sphere allows us to understand the political impact of Oppens volumes of poetry in the 1960s much more clearly, if we construe them as part of a distinct political engagement that reaches beyond his earlier modernist allegiances. The main argument here is that Oppens middle and later poetry straddles a larger paradigmatic shift that occurs within the 1960s from a politics of subjectivity that is focussed upon the autonomy of the self to a politics of the self that stresses community and relational ethics. Within this context, it can be seen that a volume like Of Being Numerous addresses itself to the question of how to live as both a unique and yet a social being, and how to retain ones individuality whilst also participating within a community. The urgency and pressure of that question characterizes all three volumes of his poetry published in the 1960s, and is explored through a comparative analysis of the discourse of individuality and community in Oppens poems and various documents of the 1960s.