marginal spaces: on ivan vladislavić

8/6/2019 Marginal Spaces: On Ivan Vladislavi

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M A R G I N A L S PA C E SR E A D I N G I VA N V L A D I S L A V I

E D I T E D B Y G E R A L D G AY L A R D


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L I S T o f P R E V I o u S L Y P u B L I S h E D W o R k S v i i

C o N T R I B u T o R S i x

P R E f A C E x i v

I N T R o D u C T I o N Gerald Gaylard 1

ARCh IT ECT oNIC RES IST ANCE

M IS S ING P E RS O NS ( 1 9 8 9 )

2 1

An Extraordinary Volume Romps in My Head Tny Mrpet 2 2

Freeze-frame? (Re-)imagining the Past in Ivan VladislavisMissing Persons Se Marais 2 5

I Take up my Spade and I Dig: Verwoerd, Tsafendas and the Position of the Writer

in the Early Fiction of Ivan Vladislavi Cristper Trman

4 6

S u R R E A L A PA R T h E I D PAT h o L o G I E S

THE FOLLY ( 1 9 9 3 )

7 1

Postmodern Castle in the Air Ivr Pwell 7 2

Citadel and Web Ingrid de k 7 4

A House/A Story Hanging by a Thread: Ivan Vladislavis The Folly Peter hrn 8 0

Fossicking in the House of Love: Apartheid Masculinity in The Folly Gerald Gaylard 8 5

D E C o N S T R u C T I o N

P RO P a G a Nd a b Y M O NuM E NTS a Nd O THE R S TO R IE S ( 1 9 9 6 )

9 9

Pleasures of the Imagination San de Waal 1 0 0

Interview with Ivan Vladislavi Cristper Warnes 1 0 4

Or is it Just the Angle? Rivalling Realist Representation in The

Bench Elaine Yng

1 1 3

Translations: Lenins Statues, Post-Communism and Post-Apartheid in Propaganda

by Monuments Mnica Ppesc

1 2 2

Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author in

KidnappedZ Wicmb

1 4 3

C o N T E N T S


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A N A C h R o N I S M A N D N E W N E S S

THE RE S TLE S S S uP E RM a RkE T a Nd O THE R S TO R IE S ( 2 0 0 1 )

1 5 9

Review ofThe Restless Supermarket Linel Abraams 1 6 0

An interview with Ivan Vladislavi Mie Marais and Carita Bacstrm 1 6 5

Minor Disorders: Ivan Vladislavi and the Devolution of South African English

Stean helgessn

1 7 5

Lost in Translation fred de Vries 1 9 2

C o S M o P o L I T A N T o P o L o G I E S

THE E x P LO d E d V IE w ( 2 0 0 4 )

2 0 1

Words First: Ivan Vladislavi Tny Mrpet 2 0 2

Inside the Toolbox Andie Miller 2 1 1

Layers of Permanence: Towards a Spatial-Materialist Reading of Ivan Vladislavis

The Exploded View Sane Graam

2 2 1

L I V I N G A R T

THE M O d E L M E N ( 2 0 0 4 ) AND wILLE M b O S HO FF ( 2 0 0 5 )2 4 5

Writings on the Wall M Anderssn 2 4 6

On Ivan Vladislavi on Willem Bosho on Conceptual Art Sally-Ann Mrray 2 4 9

u R B A N A E S T h E T I C S

P O RTRa IT w I TH kE Y S : JO b uRG & wH a T- wHa T ( 2 0 0 6 )

2 7 5

Ivan VladislavisPortrait with Keys : Fudging a Book by its Cover? Ralp Gdman 2 7 6

Migrant Ecology in the Postcolonial City inPortrait with Keys: Joburg & What-

What Gerald Gaylard

2 8 7

Dismantling the Architecture of Apartheid: Vladislavis Private Poetics inPortrait

with Keys Jane Pyner

3 0 9

The Invisible City: Surface and Underneath inPortrait with Keys Sara Nttall 3 2 7

B E I N G L o S T TJ /d O ub LE NE G a T IVE ( 2 0 1 0 )

3 3 9

Interview with David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavi Brnwyn Law-Viljen 3 4 0

I N D E X 3 5 9


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L I S T o f P R E V I ou S LY

P u B L I S h E D W o R k S

Tony Morphets review on page xx of Missing Persons first appeared in Review of Books

supplement to the Weekly Mail6. 6 (23 Feb1 Mar 1990): 8.

Sue Marais piece was first presented as a paper at the Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Algemene

Literatuurwetenskap Conference in Vanderbijlpark in 1991, and was published as Ivan

Vladislavis Re-vision of the South African Story Cycle Current Writing4. 1 (1992): 4156. It is

reproduced here with some revisions and additions, and the omission of a section dealing with

the characteristics of the short story cycle as genre, which appeared, in expanded form, in an

essay in Nahem Yousaf. Ed. Apartheid Narratives. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

Ivor Powells review of The Folly was first published as Post-Modern Castle in the Air in the

Review of Books supplement to the Weekly Mail & Guardian 10. 4 (28 Jan.3 Feb. 1994): 37.

Ingrid de Koks review ofThe Folly was first published in New Contrast22. 1 (1994): 9194.

Peter Horns essay was first published as The House that Nieuwenhuizen Built in the Southern

African Review of Books 6. 1 (1994): 1011.

Gerald Gaylards article entitled Fossicking in the House of Love: Apartheid Masculinity in The

Folly was first published in Current Writing22. 1 (2010): 5971.

Shaun de Waals interview was first published in the Review of Books supplement to the Mail &

Guardian 12. 24 (1824 October 1996): 3.

Christopher Warness interview took place in Johannesburg on 8 January 1999, and was first

published inModern Fiction Studies 46. 1 (Spring 2000): 273281.

Elaine Youngs piece was first published as Or is it Just the Angle? Rivalling Realist

Representation in Ivan Vladislavis Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. English

Academy Review 18 (2001): 3845.

Monica Popescus piece was first published as Translations: Lenins Statues, Post-Communism

and Post-Apartheid. The Yale Journal of Criticism 16. 2 (2003): 406423.

A version of Zo Wicombs paper appears in Step Across this Line: Proceedings of the 3rd


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Conference of the Associazione Italiana di Studi sulle Letterature in Inglese. Eds. Alessandra

Contenti, Maria Paola Guarducci and Paola Splendore. Venice: Cafoscarina, 2004. Zos thanks

go to Paola Splendore who invited her to deliver the keynote address. The paper was also

subsequently published as Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial

Author.Journal of Postcolonial Writing41. 2 (Nov. 2005): 144155.

Lionel Abrahams review first appeared in Donga 6 (2002): 5760.

Mike Marais and Carita Backstrms interview was first published inEnglish in Africa 29. 2 (2002):

119128.

Stefan Helgessons essay was first published as Minor Disorders: Ivan Vladislavi and the

Devolution of South African English.Journal of Southern African Studies 30. 4 (2004): 777787.

Fred de Vries piece first appeared as Lost in Translation in scrutiny2 11. 2 (2006): 101105.

Tony Morphets article first appeared as Words First: Ivan Vladislavi inscrutiny2 11. 2 (2006):

8590.

Andie Millers piece was first published inscrutiny2 11. 2 (2006): 117124.

Shane Grahams essay is a lightly revised version of an article originally published in a special

issue ofscrutiny2 devoted to the work of Ivan Vladislavi,scrutiny2 11. 2 (2006): 4861. Another

version of this the paper also appeared as a chapter in Grahams book South African Literature

after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss . Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Muff Anderssons review first appeared as Writings on the Wall. in the Friday supplement to

the Mail & Guardian 20. 34 (2026 August 2004): 3. The exhibition took place at the Wits Art

Museum in Johannesburg in September 2004.

Sally-Ann Murrays paper was first published in Current Writing20. 1 (2008): 1637.

Ralph Goodmans piece was first published as Ivan Vladislavics Portrait with keys: A Bricoleur s

Guide to Johannesburg Safundi 10. 2 (Apr. 2009): 223230.

Sarah Nuttalls paper was first published as Haunted Places are the Only Ones People Can Livein in Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid Johannesburg: Wits

University Press (2009): 8793.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoens interview was first published in Art South Africa 9. 2 (2010) and online at

.


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C o N T R I B u T o R S

Lionel Abrahams (19282004) was a Johannesburg writer, editor and publisher.

Mentored by Herman Charles Bosman, he edited seven volumes of Bosmans

posthumously published works, and later became best known for his poetry, though

he also published numerous essays and two novels.

Muff Andersson is a writer and researcher working in the Office of the Principal at

University of South Africa where she is writing the history of the university. Her most

recent book is Intertextuality, Violence and Memory in Yizo Yizo: Youth TV Drama

(2010).

Carita Backstrm is a former producer at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, focusing

on cultural and documentary programmes. She has produced a number of features on

African literature, theatre and dance. She edited (together with Mai Palmberg) a book

in Swedish,KulTur i Afrika, on contemporary arts and artists in Africa (2010).

Ingrid de Kok has written four books of poetry, most recently Seasonal Fires: New

and Selected Poems (2006). Her work has been translated into eight languages. She

has been awarded writing fellowships in Italy and her work has been read at numerous

national and international literary festivals. A Professor in the Centre for Extra-Mural

Studies at the University of Cape Town, she also writes on cultural and literary topics.

Fred de Vries is a Dutch writer/journalist, who moved to South Africa in 2003 to

write a biography of Beat poet, Sinclair Beiles. Earlier he wrote Respect!(with Toine

Heijmans), a book about hip hop in Europe. In 2006 he published Club Risiko, a closeand personal look at the 1980s underground. Recently he published a collection of his

South African interviews: The Fred de Vries Interviews: From Abdullah to Zille. Fred

is affiliated to the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University

of the Witwatersrand.


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Shaun de Waal was the Mail & Guardians literary editor from 1991 to 2006. He is

now its chief film critic and an assistant editor. Recent publications include Pride:

Protest and Celebration (with Anthony Manion 2006); To Have and to Hold: The

Making of Same-Sex Marriage in South Africa (2008);Exposure: Queer Fiction (2009);

and 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian (2010).

Gerald Gaylard is Associate Professor and previous Head of the English Department

at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author ofAfter Colonialism: African

Postmodernism and Magical Realism (2006), and has written widely on postcolonial

literatures and aesthetics.

Ralph Goodman currently works in the Department of English at Stellenbosch

University. His areas of teaching include satire, the postmodern novel and the

eighteenth century. His research is centred on post-1994 South African literature,

moving into the area of cultural studies. His current work is on monsters and the

monstrous in relation to the issue of xenophobic violence in South Africa.

Shane Graham, an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, is the

author ofSouth African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (2009),

and the principal editor ofLangston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation:

The Correspondence (2010). He has published in Modern Fiction Studies, Theatre

Research International, Studies in the Novel, andResearch in African Literatures, and

he serves as Book Review Editor for Safundi.

Stefan Helgesson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stockholm

University. Apart from his academic focus on Southern African literature, Brazilian

literature, postcolonial theory and theories of world literature, he freelances as a

literary critic and published his first novel in 2010. He is the author ofWriting in Crisis :

Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004),Efter vsterlandet: Texter

om kulturell frndring (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature

(2009), and is the editor ofExit: Endings and Beginnings in Literature and Life (2010).

Peter Horn is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Life Fellow (University of Cape Town),

Honorary Professor and Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand,

and President of the INST (Vienna). He has published three books on Kleist, a book


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on South African literature, and has published with Anette Horn a book on Rilke, Ich

lerne sehen (2010). He is an award-winning South African poet and short-story writer,

translated into a wide range of languages.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is the Editor and Co-Director of Fourthwall Books, Editor of

Art South Africa magazine, and a Research Fellow in the University of Johannesburgs

Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. As Managing Editor at David Krut Publishing

(20052010), she edited eighteen titles including William Kentridge: Nose; Dis-

Location/Re-Location ; Art and Justice; Light on a Hill; TAXI-015 Paul Stopforth;

TAXI-014 Mmakgabo Mmapula Mmankgato Helen Sebidi; TAXI-013 Diane Victor;

and William Kentridge: Flute.

Andie Miller has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand

and was winner of the 2009 Ernst van Heerden Award. Her work has appeared in a

variety of publications including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature,scrutiny2,

English Studies in Africa and Spectator: University of Southern California Journal of

Film and Television Criticism . She is the author ofSlow Motion: Stories about Walking

(Jacana, 2010).

Sue Marais currently lectures in the English Department at Rhodes University. Her

research interests include feminisms, South African literatures and postmodern short

fiction cycles.

Mike Marais teaches in the Department of English at Rhodes University. His research

interests include contemporary South African writing and recent publications include

Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (2009).

Tony Morphet taught English Literature at the University of Natal in the 1960s and

1970s. He subsequently moved to the University of Cape Town to teach adult education

and to work as an educational project evaluator a move prompted by an admiration

for Raymond Williams. He took early retirement in 1999. He has contributed a varietyof critical articles and reviews to newspapers and journals.

Sally-Ann Murray is an Associate Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In

2010, her novel Small Moving Parts received the Herman Charles Bosman Prize and


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the M-Net Literary Award for English Fiction, in addition to being short-listed for the

Sunday TimesLiterary Award and the University of Johannesburg Prize. She is also

the recipient of the Sanlam Literary Award and the Arthur Nortje Award for poetry.

Ivor Powell is a journalist and art critic living in Cape Town, South Africa. Starting

out in his working life as an academic art historian, he moved into journalism in 1985

with the emergence of the anti-apartheid alternative press, writing mainly for the

Weekly Mail(now the Mail & Guardian), first as an art critic, then as a political and

investigative journalist. He is currently employed as Group Investigations Editor for

Independent Newspapers.

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Wits Institute for

Social and Economic Research (WISER). She is the author of Entanglement: Literary

and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid(2008), editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African

and Diasporic Aesthetics (2007) and co-editor ofJohannesburg The Elusive Metropolis

(2008) andLoad Shedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (2009).

Monica Popescu is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University where she

teaches and researches postcolonial literatures. She is the author of South African

Literature Beyond the Cold War(2010) and The Politics of Violence in Post-communist

Films (1999). Her articles on post-apartheid literature, cultural translation, nationalism,

and the Cold War in Southern Africa have appeared in Studies in the Novel, The Yale

Journal of Criticism, Current Writingand other major journals.

Jane Poyner is a lecturer in postcolonial literature and theory within the Department

of English at the University of Exeter. Her research interests lie primarily in South

African literature from the apartheid years to the present, focusing particularly on

the question of intellectual practice within the sphere of culture. Her publications

include a monograph and an edited collection on J. M. Coetzee, as well as articles on

TRC narratives and representations of anti-colonial violence in contemporary South

African fiction.

Chris Thurman is a member of the English Department at the University of the

Witwatersrand. He is the editor of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa, and

compiler ofSport versus Art: A South African Contest (2010). His other publications


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include Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life (2010) and Text Bites, a

literary anthology for high school learners (2009).

Christopher Warnes wrote an MA thesis on Ivan Vladislavis work at the University

of KwaZulu-Natal in 1998. After finishing his PhD at the University of Cambridge in

2003, he taught at Stellenbosch University. He is currently a lecturer in Postcolonial

and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge. He is the author ofMagical

Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (2009).

Zo Wicomb is a South African writer of fiction and essays on South African

writing and culture. She is Emeritus Professor of English Studies at the University of

Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her latest work is The One That Got Away (2011).

Elaine Younglectured in the English Department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

from 1999 to 2006. Her Masters dissertation, Narrative and Nationhood: Mediations

of Identity in Post-Apartheid South African Short Stories, focused on the writing of

Ivan Vladislavi, Sindiwe Magona and Achmat Dangor. She embarked on a freelance

writing and editing career in 2007, and now runs her own writing, editing and

translation company, Copy Edit Paste.


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P R E fA C E

Born in Pretoria in 1957, Ivan Vladislavi is of mixed origin and, as he tells

Christopher Warnes,

The name is Croatian. My grandparents on my fathers side were Croatian

immigrants. My father was born in South Africa. And on my mothers side my

background is Irish and English, with a dash of German. Im second-generation

South African, on both sides. (104, this volume)

He moved to Johannesburg and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in the

1970s where he was particularly influenced by the continental theory of Barthes and

Saussure as introduced to him by the Afrikaans Department. A sensitivity to signs

and semiotics, to the intricate relationships between words, has become a signature

of his work. He was also impressed by the directness of studying Afrikaans works as

they were published, and this introduced him to the world of South African fiction.

Nevertheless, in the interview with Warnes he maintains that his work is as much

influenced by events and processes in the world as by his own experiences or his reading

of Dickens, Stevenson, T. S. Eliot, Kundera, Schulz, Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut, etc.

During the 1980s, Vladislavi worked for Ravan Press as a fiction and social studies

editor, was assistant editor of a local literary magazine, Staffrider, and compiled

the commemorative Ten Years of Staffrider (1988) with Andries Oliphant. It is no

exaggeration to say that Vladislavi is South Africas pre-eminent editor, having edited

and been involved with prominent works by Antjie Krog, Tim Couzens, Achmat

Dangor, Jonny Steinberg, Charles van Onselen, Kevin Bloom and Peter Harris , amongothers. He has also edited or co-edited several titles under his own name. Publishing

his first collection of short stories, Missing Persons, in 1989, Vladislavi has gone on

to become arguably South Africas most prominent author in the post-apartheid era; a

list of his works thus far follows below.


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The aim of this volume, the first of its kind, is to collect much of the significant and

original critical material, ranging from reviews to interviews to full-length articles, so

far published on Vladislavi s individual works. Some of the material is new, and some

of the previously published pieces have been rewritten and edited for this volume. In

compiling the book, I tried to choose critical material of diverse opinion and form,

from the scholarly to the casual and creative, in order to indicate the wide-ranging

and fertile responses that his writing elicits, and few pieces are only about the text to

which they primarily allude. Moreover, in each section I have included examples of

the initial reception of each of Vladislavi s books upon their publication. The book is

thus not only a critical celebration of Vladislavis work, but also gives readers a sense

of how literary and cultural production and reading has changed since apartheid, via

a collection of the original interpretive directions that Vladislavis work has been

part of, enabled and encouraged. I hope that this critical material will be of benefit

to readers and scholars of Vladislavi, post-apartheid South African literature and

postcolonialism, especially postcolonial city writing.

There are a number of people whose contributions to this book have been invaluable;

indeed, it would not be in print if it were not for their help and encouragement. I

would like to express my gratitude to all of them. Firstly, of course, my thanks go

to Ivan Vladislavi, not only for his work, but for his generous enthusiasm for this

work. Obviously my thanks also go to the various contributors, particularly for their

patience and forbearance. Thomas Jeffrey at the National English Literary Museum

at Rhodes University provided the complete critical oeuvre without which this

book would not have been possible. Dino Galetti and Karl van Wyk did scanning,

transcribing and editing work and Kerry Esterhuizen provided taxonomy. I am grateful

to Ivan Vladislavi, Sally-Ann Murray, Cheryl Stobie, Christopher Thurman, John

Masterson, Shaun de Waal, Kerry Bystrom and Bridget Grogan for their commentary,

as I am to the anonymous readers from Wits University Press. I have had support

from Therese Steffen, Christine Giustizieri, Jan Sollberger and Ina Habermann of the

Cities in Flux project at Basel. Kirby Mania and Clea Schultz have been committed

students of Vladislavis work and have helped to keep me focused on his legacy to

future generations. My thanks also go to Veronica Klipp, Julie Miller, Tshepo Neito,Estelle Jobson and Melanie Pequeux at Wits University Press, to Mary Ralphs for her

indefatigable copy editing, Karen Lilje and Patricia Botes for their graphic design and

proofreading respectively. I am grateful to Comair and Mary Wafer for permission to

use (Murder) When our mouths are filled with the uninvited tongues of others for the

cover. Thanks are due to Monica Popescu for the picture of Lenins statue, to Joachim


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I n t r o d u c t I o n

G e ral d G ay l ard

Ivan Vladislavis oeuvre was perhaps best summed up by the author himself in an

interview with Shaun de Waal in 1996 in which he emphasised the small, peripheral

and marginal:

A realist texts success rests partly on its breadth, its vast sweep, and partly on the

depth of its authenticating detail. But the world is already so overloaded with big

stories and important information that the small and peripheral has come to me to

seem a positive value.

Thats what I mean about accustoming oneself to marginality, engaging with

something that makes no claim to completeness. To complexity maybe, but not

completeness. (Pleasures of the Imagination 3)

In accepting that this kind of [non-realist] writing is a marginal activity and finding

a way of becoming comfortable with that, Vladislavi exhibits a characteristichumility. Nevertheless, his insistence that, for him, writing is a field of autonomy

values the unconscious, small, peripheral and incomplete, at least as an antidote

to being so overloaded with big stories. This minimalism constitutes a political

resistance to monumental power, whether it be the big stories of apartheid in the


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Intr od u ct Ion

past or globalisation today. It suggests a radical notion of democracy, namely that

nothing human or otherwise is too small to be disenfranchised. Moreover, it

refuses to separate the political from the aesthetic. His insistence upon the writerly,

aesthetic and affective within a society that still tends to ignore or vilify these as

merely marginal or irresponsible demonstrates how apartheids big story brutalised

our realities, feelings and creativity. But Vladislavi does not leave us stranded in

apartheid or post-apartheid alienation. Rather, his close attention to that which we

tend to ignore gives readers a language for feelings, old and new, and a way to live

after trauma. The horror of our turbulent, violent history meets its nadir, and is

transformed in this still, focused, minimal, enduring and humorous attention to the

everyday and hitherto marginal.

Incubated in the era of late apartheid, Vladislavis concern with the marginal has

proved to be of enduring relevance. The apartheid era in South Africa could be defined

as one which attempted to socially engineer the dominance of the centre in this

case colonial whiteness and Eurocentrism via fixed delineations of margins: spatial,

geographical, racial, sexual, psychological, spiritual. Beyond and below these borders,

possibilities shrank and marginality was experienced as deprivation. Apartheids

extension of colonial frontiers via macro social engineering resulted in what Njabulo

Ndebele called the spectacular in his seminal work, Rediscovery of the Ordinary.

Vladislavis writing resists this apartheid context, particularly the spectacular that

has endured in various forms since apartheid. We might describe his fiction as that of

decentralisation, a movement paralleled in the democratisation of South Africa and

the sprawling of Johannesburg. Moreover, this decentralisation demonstrates that

South African literature has joined World literature, within which centres and margins

have become a topological truism.

Decentralisation and the assertion of margins have partly been enabled by the

satirical iconoclasm in Vladislavis writing, an enduring feature of his work. He

consistently deflates power interests and power mongering, supporting the ordinary

person and the marginalised against the big stories of the national, spectacular and

monumental.1 To this extent, his fiction is interested in speaking truth to hegemonic

power.2

Moreover, in this respect his fiction remains coloured by the apartheid past.Indeed, part of his iconoclasm is directed towards either nostalgia for, or outright

condemnation and erasure of, that past. We might regard this as the deconstruction

of both musealisation and futurism. More than these socio-historical points, however,

Vladislavi simply delights in absurdity, which abounds in situations of power. For


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Intr od u ct Ion

instance, iconoclasm is nowhere more apparent than in the titular story ofPropaganda

by Monuments, which features Russian workers dismantling statues of Lenin and

subjecting the revered icons of yesteryear to gleeful disrespect: The one with the drill

was skating around on the great mans icy dome like a seasoned performer; and even

as Grekov watched, the skaters companion, the one with the clamp, slid audaciously

down the curvature of the skull, unloosing a shower of scurfy snow from the fringe of

hair (18). Ordinary people see the ordinary humanity (involving physical grotesquery

in this case) of such great men as the great mans head becomes an ice rink and he

develops dandruff. Given the monumental seriousness of apartheid and post-apartheid

South Africa, satirical humour has the potential to overturn a whole mindset and

revolutionise the existing social dispensation. Satire is minimalisms scalpel.

This satirical resistance to the monumental spectacle that was South African

history and art has by no means been merely reactive, however, but has also delved

into otherwise obscured marginal spaces. Not only has Vladislavi exhumed realities

and intervals marginalised by society and History, but his texts tend to escape their

own margins, moving beyond the delineations of the page and its text into seemingly

unprofitable spaces, unconscious zones, intervals and gaps formerly regarded as

beneath consideration. Unpopular qualities populate this writing: gentleness, self-

effacing reticence, careful caution, close observation, scrupulously methodical

discipline, impeccable criticality, wit, silence. The inwards movement that these

qualities suggest has coincided with a focus on the literary and aesthetic, which is

perhaps prime among these marginal spaces. Vladislavis consciousness is highly

sensitive to the aesthetic and strains against constraints on the imagination, the prison

of language, generic limits, the borderlines of context and the walls of Johannesburg,

all while celebrating the ordinary. As Tony Morphet puts it , in Vladislavi s prose the

world of the city follows the frontiers of language (87), and he is attuned to the, often

discordant, word-music of contemporary life. This may be the harsh industrial music

of Johannesburgs marching suburban expansion, a dreamlike blend of familiarity

and displacement as the boundaries of Johannesburg are drifting away, sliding over

pristine ridges and valleys, lodging in tenuous places, slipping again (The Exploded

View 6). It could be the rustling, greedy advertising copy of global consumerism as inIsle of Capri where the narrator went to rifle the treasure chest full of after-dinner

mints (Propaganda by Monuments 141). It could also be the ersatz Esperanto of global

tourism, described in Lullaby , where in a Mauritian resort


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Intr od u ct Ion

a dozen people were swirling about, moored to their drinks on the tables like boats

to bollards. A spume of coconut butter and rum drifted downwind. The ice had

not just broken but melted. In a rising tide of accented English the odd phrase of

Italian or German bobbed like a cocktail olive or a lemon wedge. (115)

This aesthetic sensibility is not confined to an editor and writers concern with

words and their music, however. It also manifests as innovation in form that refuses

pigeonholing. Starting his writing career with surreal short stories (Missing Persons),

Vladislavi has moved on to reinvent the realist novel as creative non-fiction in

episodic cameo format (Portrait with Keys), to challenge character-identification (The

Restless Supermarket) and to unfreeze the boundaries between words and images (The

Exploded View, Willem Boshoff, TJ/Double Negative). Postcolonialism, for Vladislavi,

involves linguistic and aesthetic experimentation.

If the aesthetic, particularly embodied in satire, wordplay and form, is primary

among these marginal spaces, what then is Vladislavis aesthetic? In a nutshell, it

is minimalist. However, it is a minimalism that is geopolitically located, multiform,

satirically defamiliarising rather than realist, constantly changing and that suggests

lostness as a possible virtue. His is a consciousness stripped of distraction and

superfluity; his art that of brevity and understatement. In this respect his writing

partakes of the aesthetic that has been probablythe major aspect of modern culture and

has culminated, thus far, in the starkness of Modernism. Leaving behind the nature-

derived complexity and rococo curlicues of traditional and religious art, modernity has

evolved an increasingly spare and linear minimalist aesthetic that has been nowhere

more apparent than in the sparse functionalism of the contemporary city. Vladislavis

writing is minimalist in this Modernist sense: stripped of the extraneous, sensational,

arbitrary and dilatory, his writing is a kind of South African Modernism that echoes J.

M. Coetzee in its derivation from Calvinism and in its appropriateness to the vast land

and sprawling cityscapes of South Africa. The European novel has been progressively

pared of its romanticisms by Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje, Herman Charles Bosman,

Bessie Head, J. M. Coetzee, etc. Indeed, this progressively spare minimalism might

be regarded as South African literatures greatest contribution to the world of letters.Vladislavi is part of this tradition, and he can be said to go substantially further than

Coetzee in the absence of personality and drama, let alone melodrama, in his writing.

Interpersonal relationships, if present, are treated with restraint (although perhaps this

is changing, asPortrait with Keys andDouble Negative contain oblique autobiographical


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around terms, shortening the distance between word and thing.5 The individual, the

person, creature or object, is revealed in all its specificity, multiplicity and marginality

in this minimalist focus.

In this sense, Vladislavis entertainment of dimensions marginalised under

apartheid and its aftermath is place-specific, and he is at pains to situate everything

he writes of with precision. His is an acute consciousness of particular places and

events that he often feels with his entire sensorium in microscopic focus, and conveys

in definite, pointillistically detailed language. He has the satirical character Budlender

describe the process thus: Eternal vigilance. He should cultivate that, he should find

some odd corner of human life to which eternal vigilance had never been applied, and

apply it, just to see what dividends it paid (Exploded22).

If we were to describe the movement of Vladislavis writerly consciousness it

would perhaps be with the words in and through. is attention to minute particulars

is, ironically, precisely what enables a cognitive mapping of wider geospatiality, partly

because the local can be situated within a bigger region, and partly because it uncovers

the distant discourses, the general, the national, the global, history, that penetrate and

partly condition the local. A neat distinction between place and space is deconstructed.

One might say that the individuals direct, lived, sensuous experience of their immediate

surroundings is the very ground for engagement with distant others and the global.

Similarly, Jacob Dlaminis Native Nostalgia and Chris van Wyks Shirley, Goodness &

Mercy both narrate a personal history of the township that argues for just such a sensuous

engagement with the local, which is also a way of engaging with the wider world.

Writing in this specic way about Johannesburg, Vladislavi might well be regarded

as the watershed of African writing as it moves beyond the colonial heritage of the

plaasroman and the more recent anti-pastoral (J. M. Coetzees Disgrace, for instance)

into the African urban and Afropolitan. Just as nothing resisted the pernicious, lazy

generalisations of apartheids taxonomies and their aftermaths as persistently as this kind

of focus on the specic and individual, so Vladislavis satire of apartheid monumentalism

has also proved ongoingly useful in characterising the rise of African cities within the

growing tendrils of globalisation. Vladislavis portrayal of Johannesburg is thus not

merely a celebration of hybrid cosmopolitan spaces so much as an exploration of thetorsion between those and the physical detritus of the losses they involve. Indeed, no other

author better captures the ephemeral chatter of advertising copy, or conveys the copia of

consumerist folderols (his term for capitalisms triing consolations from Autopsy in

Propaganda by Monuments 50) around which we now build so much of what we value.


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ese aspects of globalisation are nowhere more apparent than in the architecture of

space, and his descriptions of the cosmopolitan anonymity of chain restaurants, cafs,

hotels, malls, stores, Tuscan villages, summon that peculiar dissociative feeling of being

everywhere and nowhere at once that characterises these spaces. Strangers are not alone

in being alone in these airbrushed way stations with their ersatz bonhomie or subdued

upmarket dignity. No promoter of cosmopolitanism like Alain de Botton (On Seeing and

Noticing), Vladislavi adds a uniquely local obliquity and scepticism to the profusion of

theories of space and the urban evident in the writing of Walter Benjamin, Michel de

Certeau, Iain Sinclair, Henri Lefebvre, Marc Aug, and others.6 Africa here is no mere

case study to theorise or basket case inviting exoticisms and compassion fatigue, but

ordinary and complexly interconnected. Vladislavis precise minimalist aesthetic resists

ideological generalisations, anthropocentric assumptions and the attening eects

and numbing aects of globalisation. It might be regarded as the margins resisting the

centripetal forces of centralisation.

Tracing the contours of contemporary alienation and rapprochement, his

Joburg is stripped of its ideals and pretensions. Frequently satirical, unlike Coetzee,

his bare prose unearths the expedience of material ambition, the ideological and

general. A delightfully Luddite scepticism towards technoscience, disposability and

fashion permeates this writing. The performative avatar identities of the urban, the

metropolitan, the sophisticate, of televisuality, of virtuality, of mobile telephony, are

exposed as projections laden with power. In the post-ideological secularism of the

present, it is all too easy to materialise our psychological complexes, particularly via

the technology of virtuality. Budlender from Villa Toscana describes contemporary

popular culture as the whole ridiculous lifestyle that surrounded him, with its

repetitions, its mass-produced effects, its formulaic individuality (Exploded31). Janie

inDouble Negative indulges in this over-represented culture thus:

Janie held her camera out of the window and took photos. My friends in the

trade insist that photos are made rather than taken, but she was a taker. She took

samples, clipping them out of the fabric of the unspooling world at arms length

and barely glancing at the screen to see what was there. (167)

It is precisely via a light, sceptical, satirical tread on the grounds of the local and

material, dense with long history, bristling with memory, bustling with daily practices,

that any counter engagement with the global takes place.


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Hence, while Vladislavis writing is characterised by brief sentences pared to

the bone, it can also include long lists of ephemera and marginalia that embody and

implicitly critique the distracted dissatisfaction of contemporary consumerist excess

and the obsession with the new. In other words, Vladislavis minimalism opposes

the maximalism and hubbub of consumerism. In this respect his writing is a minor

literature in that it allows the language of the local, the poetry of the ordinary, the

voice of the object, to emerge.7 Does this mean that Vladislavis writing is a minority

literature, in this case white? Perhaps, although it seems that Vladislavi ranges beyond

just this one minority, suggesting that all are minorities in this patchwork quilt of a

rainbow nation. His is a significantly post-nationalist, post-sectarian literature in its

specificity, even while it resists globalisation. It might also be said that his writing is

banal, the literature of the everyday, if it were not for the disconcerting unfamiliarity

with which the ordinary looks back at the reader, unknown. As Simeon Majara, an

artist character in The Exploded View, muses, with some self-satire:

The new restraint. Where should one draw the line? The world was so loud, and no

one took seriously a thing that didnt attract attention to itself. There was no room

for subtlety. Things were either visible or not, their qualities were either shouting

from the surface or silent. This silence, the lull behind the noisy surface of objects,

was difficult and dangerous. You never knew what it held, if anything. How were

you to judge whether the voice you heard was a deeper meaning, whispering its

secrets, or merely the distorted echo of your own babble? (123123)

Again, Vladislavi is self-reflexively humble about the ability of any aesthetic practice to

initiate change, even within the individual and their world of feeling, yet it is precisely

that change, in both the individual and the social, that he continues to insist upon.

While it may seem that this satirical, restrained aesthetic is coolly aloof, impersonal

even, this arguably abstracted state of feeling actually results from intimate engagement

with context. Minimalism manifests oft ignored social realities as well as the process of

perceiving. Satire is a direct response to context, both the brutalism of apartheid social

engineering and post-apartheids schizophrenic continuations of this. These strippedaesthetic forms evoke strong, albeit unfamiliar, feelings. Satire, for instance, leads to

laughter, often with a hysterical edge or quiet wryness, leading the reader to wonder

why there is so much to satirise, how to engage creatively with an easily overdetermining

context, and what form best enables freedom in the postcolonial city in flux. Such affects


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also include the anxiety of white obsolescence, the excitement of black aspiration,

achromatic contentments, unfelt feelings crowding at the corners of consciousness.

For instance, two feelings particularly endemic to, and symptomatic of, our modernity

in Vladislavis fiction are endangerment and a sense of vulnerability, both of which are

explored in Lullaby where people in an aeroplane are described thus: For a moment,

I saw an aeroplane full of little children asleep in their adult bodies, under youthful

muscle and middle-aged fat, behind beards and breasts. Babies. The long, grey nursery

droned into the dark (123). Yet here Vladislavi is not overwhelmed by these feelings

and evinces a tender concern for our infant-like vulnerability to our own constructions

via juxtaposition: just like soft jelly babies we are easily mangled within our hard steel

vehicles moving through dizzying changes at accelerating speeds. Satire here, for all of

its bite, is not vicious. Vladislavis locodescription in Potrait with Keys demonstrates

another emotion particularly helpful in Johannesburg: courage. Refusing to be cowed

and confined by fear, the narrator takes to the streets . This suggests the transformative

power of minimalism which rehabilitates the past via contemplative rigour in the

present moment. Moreover, the focus upon the marginal defamiliarises our feelings,

prompting new emotions, wider sympathies. These strange feelings include, among

others, sympathy for the obnoxious (The Restless Supermarket), the secret life of the

objects we create, the haunting sepulchral quality of the spaces and rubbish left behind

in the scramble for the new. Vladislavi suggests that an open, sensitive, light and subtle

responsibility is required to respond compassionately as well as creatively to multiple,

and frequently contradictory, local and global circumstances.

Reading this aesthetic requires a non-programmatic attention to detail, an aesthetic

sensibility that in South Africa tended to be relegated to secondary importance during

the struggle years. This hermeneutic, like that of Vladislavi, has to be prepared to go

over the edges of what is known into a state of transition and transience. Such reading

is thus marginal in the sense of occupying the margins of the text; it is annotation

in the spaces underneath and around the letters, spaces that were marginalised in

History, by History. Marginal notes provide summation and explanation, but also a

margin for error and freedom. Reading this writing requires a sensitivity to margins,

emotions and implied narratives that are written as much through absence or negativespace as through presence.

This mode of reading is concise. Vladislavis implicit minimalist philosophy of less

is more works first in the realm of consciousness where, largely stripped of distractions,

expectations and social constructions, his mind is free to notice what is right in front of


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it. Such poetic consciousness is open, has peripheral vision for the minor and ignored

(including aesthetic and formal aspects), and is fluid; it roams freely, zooming between

the textures of the specific and the broad brush-strokes of the general and historical.

In this respect, all of his writing is an exploded view, moving between the component

parts and the whole, as in the novel of that title.8 We might chart a similar trajectory in

South African literary critique, which has moved from nationalist resistance inwards

towards more holistic resistances, including the poetic and psychological, attempting

to move into ordinary living, marginal spaces and global consciousnesses, and ranging

from analyses of psychic haunting and the detritus of trauma to the motilities of

postcolonial cities. Retaining a sense of the urgency of pressing social issues from

the materialist analyses of the 1970s and 1980s, as in Louise Bethlehems rhetoric

of urgency, this criticism has increasingly moved into analyses of representation,

aesthetics, form, psychology, interiority and affect a move I would characterise as

historical formalism. As Roland Barthes had it , to parody a well-known saying, I shall

say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back

to it (112). While sociopolitical concerns are likely to be a major preoccupation of

this criticism for the foreseeable future, it need make no more apologies for its formal,

aesthetic or marginal, as well as overtly social, concerns.

That this has been a vexed movement is apparent in the critical pieces collected

here, all of which engage in the debate about the sociopolitical valency of post-apartheid

South African literature, and the import of postmodernism for postcolonial cultures.

Vladislavi has been part of an emerging controversial trend in postcolonial writing and

criticism, which has minimised the pre-eminence of the obviously political in favour

of a more nuanced sense of complexity, interconnection and resistance, a movement

that aligns it with postmodernism and magical realism. This postcolonial aesthetic,

however, is not necessarily art for arts sake or sundered from the mundane, the

material, the political. In fact, this re-aestheticisation might be seen as a re-energising

of the political via a more holistic resistance that includes the individual, psychology,

desire, style, as well as overt political organisation. Indeed, one might argue that this

is a more thoroughgoing critique of the mimetic, empiricist and utilitarian discourses

underlying imperialism. Is this a recuperation of new criticism and its close readingwithin theoretically-informed postcolonialism? If so, it is concerned with feeling

but without sentimentality; it involves the sympathetic imagination without liberal

humanism; it attempts to engage in forensic analysis without historical amnesia or

universal generalisations.


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In other words, one might say that whereas African literature was once subject to

social realities which were seen to be of greater import, this arguably condescending

interpretative framework has since been loosened such that this writing is as open to

the variety of appreciations as any literature (accompanied by a certain wry acceptance

of the limitations of literatures social effect). South African literature and literary

studies is thus no longer exceptional; it has rejoined world literature for all that it is

critical of that world. Its politically informed historical formalism is now beginning to

ask questions about the effect and affect of postcolonial literature in the global milieu

and attempting to redefine the sympathetic imagination as a consequence.

But none of this minimalist aesthetic or hermeneutic multiplicity and sophistication

should suggest a definitive interpretation of Vladislavis fiction; indeed, the elusiveness

of the marginal may well be its most constant feature. Vladislavis engagements are for

the sake of autonomy and freedom; to this extent his writing resists a realism, or any

other form or analysis, that is reductive. The results of his delvings remain at least

partially unfamiliar. As readers we are always struggling to crack his code and fully

understand the import of his words, images and narratives. Readers are granted a high

degree of freedom, and hence responsibility, by this writing. This elusive process of

meaning making is reflexively modelled in Vladislavis narratives (or lack thereof ) and

in characters who stumble along, often lost, trying to elicit meaning from apparently

random objects and events. The African flneur is no leisurely dilettante taking his

turtle for a stroll on a leash in this fiction. Indeed, Vladislavis most characteristic

character is an invisible everyman who may be like the reader or may be an anachronistic

hangover, idiosyncratic misfit, stranger or migrant, sometimes unpleasant, who

connects the formal and informal, urban and rural, city and underbelly, groomed and

chaotic, wealthy and impoverished. Never at home, always restless and moving into

informal zones, this stranger redefines our possibilities just as Vladislavi redefines his

own. Moreover, the space of undecideability between author and narrator/focaliser in

his work adds to this elusiveness. Evading our attempts to fix his writing in the clarity

of an amber understanding, we are never quite satisfied by the understanding we do

arrive at. Vladislavi encourages us to ask the question of why we want a final clarity.

Perhaps making a virtue of necessity, lostness has potential for this writer (as in theending ofDouble Negative). Perhaps it is simply that bold claims cannot be made of

minimalist fiction.


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Vladislavis literary resistance to the architectonics of monumental power began

in 1989 with Missing Persons. For Tony Morphet reviewing the short story volume

just after its first publication, this resistance lay in the unexpected and unpredictable

possibilities in his writing. For Sue Marais, this resistance was in Vladislavis critique

of monumentalism in the stupid republic (59) he parodies, a society which, in Jacques

Berthouds words, turned an irrelevance [race/skin colour] into a fundamental.

On the other hand, in Christopher Thurmans view, Vladislavis resistance is his

foregrounding of the problems of being an artist in an uncreative society. This range of

views indicates a resistance holistic and concerted enough to have continued relevance

after apartheid ended in 1994, resulting in needle-sharp satires of the commodity

fetishism and consumerism that globalisation brought.

This resistance continued with The Folly in 1993, which portrayed the

contradictions of apartheid as surreal. That this rather abstract novella, which tipped

more than a nod in the direction of semiotics and symbolism, was greeted with some

puzzlement at the time is evident in Ivor Powells review which critiqued the text for

its abstruse non-realism and unconvincing characterisation. A more socio-historical

reading was provided by Ingrid de Kok who situated the novel within the acute

transitional uncertainties of the early 1990s in South Africa. Peter Horns review, on

the other hand, was more positive, coming as it did from a deconstructive position

appreciative of Vladislavis self-reflexivity concerning the process of creativity,

particularly within a monumentalised society. My own piece attempts to explain the

abstraction of this text as a result of surreal psychosexual pathologies arising from

engineered social divisions; the house of apartheid relied on extreme machismo and

homosocial bonding under a strong leader to contain its subjects. Vladislavis book

suggested that freedom from apartheid monumentalism required an intervention into

the realm of language structures in the psyche, the house of words, as well as more

social resistances.

Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories extended this deconstruction of the

remnants of apartheid ideology into the verities and jingoisms of the new South Africa,

exposing the throes of monumental change as a previously isolated nation joined the

international community. The ability of this collection to spark connections beyondthe local and parochial is evident in the critical pieces selected here which all examine

one of its stories from distant vantage points: form and genre, Scottish writerliness

and post-communism respectively. Shaun de Waals interview did much to clarify

Vladislavis emphasis upon literatures writerly, imaginative and marginal qualities.


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Elaine Youngs piece pointed out that a key aspect of deconstruction is the challenging

of the established empiricist orthodoxies of Western realism and representation

that inevitably accompanied a country attempting to reveal the clandestine secrets

and heal the traumatic symptoms of apartheid. Zo Wicomb explored another

aspect of Vladislavis deconstruction: a self-reflexive demystifying of creativity via

foregrounding the process of writing. For Wicomb, it was Vladislavis locatedness

that was the most precious ingredient in his creativity. That this locatedness was

never entirely isolated is emphasised in Monica Popescus piece which traced the links

he made between South Africa and the Soviet bloc (something traded upon in the

Soviet-style cover art ofFlashback Hotel: Early Stories). In the eponymous title story

Propaganda by Monuments, Vladislavi suggested that every attempt to erect the

new tends to unwittingly echo the past it attempts to transcend, a deconstructive

point if ever there was one.

One of the inevitabilities of rapid flux is the difficulty of keeping up, resulting in

obsolescence and anachronism. One strand of post-apartheid South African writing

is the literature of obsolescence, primarily literature by and about white males who

feel themselves, willingly or otherwise, to be dinosaurs in the new dispensation. The

Restless Supermarketis one of these texts, alongside Coetzees Disgrace (1999) and

a number of others, embodying a highly ambivalent negotiation between nostalgia

and futurism, provoking the ambiguation of sympathy. Lionel Abrahams found that

rather more than I think Im supposed to, I sympathetically identify (perhaps even

empathise) with Aubrey Tearle (59). In his interview with Mike Marais and Carita

Backstrm, Vladislavi said that he knew he was on the right track with Aubrey Tearle

when he felt discomfort; readers are repelled by Tearles offensiveness, but identify

with his sense of quixotic isolation. That this literature of obsolescence is by no

means necessarily conservative was pointed out by Stefan Helgesson who explored

Vladislavis resistance to the language of commerce, globalisation, commodification,

consumerism and the new in this ironic novel. English, the transnational language,

is localised here, and simultaneously freed of its more imperial commercialisms.

For Fred de Vries, this explained why the novel has been unamenable to translation;

its errors, solecisms, foibles, neologisms, ephemera, evanescent colloquialisms andfantastic linguistic complexity foregrounded the difficulty and necessity of translation

in our transnational world.

If anything, The Exploded View was even more critical of the culture of global

consumerism: here the Tuscan villas arranged in serried ranks in security villages


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given that he cites Humphrey JenningssPandemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen

by Contemporary Observers at the end ofPortrait With Keys (211).

3 As Terry Eagleton has it: To penetrate to the essence of what makes a thing uniquely itself

is to discover the part it plays in the cosmic whole. This idea runs steadily through Western

civilisation, all the way from Platos Forms and Leibnizs monads to Hegels World Spirit,

Coleridges symbols and Hopkinss inscapes (13).

4 A merging of at least three distinct but related Germanic base forms, whose reflexes

remained distinct in Old English, but had fallen together by late Middle English: Old

English mearc (strong feminine) < a Germanic feminine -stem which is the base also of

Old Frisian merke mark, character, border, Middle Dutch marke limit, boundary, borderland

(compare n.; Dutch mark undivided land (chiefly in border areas) held in

common ownership), Old Saxon marka mark, boundary, Old High German marca, marcha

border, end, country (Middle High German marke, mark (see sense 3), German Mark

border country, especially in the names of certain territories: see sense 2), Old Icelandic

mrk forest (often a boundary between peoples: compare Old Saxon holtmarka boundary

forest), -mrkland (only in compounds; compare n., Swedish mark, Danish mark

field, ground, Norwegian markin the same senses), Gothic marka boundary, landmark, and

the first element in the Germanic ethnonym preserved as classical Latin Marcomann (see

n.). (Oxford English Dictionary online).

5 In conversation, he said that I do think that one can get to very precise things in language, but

you have to get past the layers of fat that lie on top of the language that we normally use; this

is why I think that so much good writing is about the craft of itWhat takes the inspirational

outpouring into the level of really good art is the ability to examine it technically and get to

something else (interview with Gerald Gaylard).

6 His fiction has been usefully read in the theorisation of Johannesburg, notably in Sarah

Nuttall and Achille Mbembes Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Lindsay Bremners

Writing the City into Being.

7 This tends to happen via the deterritorialisation of language, much in the manner of Kafka,

as suggested by Deleuze and GuattarisKafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

8 See particularly pages 15, 56, 137, 188 in The Exploded View.

References

Allende, Isabel. The Gold of Tams Vargas. The Stories of Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers

Peden. London: Penguin, 1991. 4454.

Barthes, Roland.Mythologies. 1957. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 2000.


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Bethlehem, Louise. A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South

African Literary Culture under Apartheid. Poetics Today 22. 2 (Summer 2001): 365389.

Bremner, Lindsay. Writing the City Into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 19982008. Johannesburg:

Fourthwall Books, 2010.

De Botton, Alain. On Seeing and Noticing. London: Penguin, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. 1975. Trans. Dana Polan.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

De Waal, Shaun. Pleasures of the Imagination. Review of Books suppl. Mail & Guardian 12. 24

(1824 October 1996): 3.

Dlamini, Jacob.Native Nostalgia. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009.

Eagleton, Terry.How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Morphet, Tony. Words First: Ivan Vladislavi.scrutiny2 11. 2 (2006): 8590.

Ndebele, Njabulo. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture.

Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Untimely Meditations.

1873. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 59123.

Nuttall, Sarah and Achille Mbembe. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits

University Press, 2008.

Van Wyk, Chris . Shirley, Goodness & Mercy. Johannesburg: Picador: 2004.

Vladislavi, Ivan. An interview with Ivan Vladislavi. Mike Marais and Carita Backstrm. English

in Africa 29. 2 (2002): 119128.

.Flashback Hotel: Early Stories. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2010.

. Interview with Gerald Gaylard. Philosophy Caf, Pretoria, 31 July 2009.

. Lullaby. Touch. Ed. Karina Magdalena Szczurek. Cape Town: Zebra, 2009. 113123.

.Portrait With Keys: Joburg & What-What. Cape Town, Umuzi, 2006.

.Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. Cape Town: David Philip, 1996.

. The Exploded View. Johannesburg: Random House, 2004.

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marginal spaces: on ivan vladislavić

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