Browsing by Author "Du Toit, P. A."
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- ItemDie spel van assosiasies in en om “Die verlossing van die beeld” van Breyten Breytenbach(AOSIS Publishing, 2005-07) Du Toit, P. A.The play of association in and around “The liberation of the image” by Breyten Breytenbach This analysis focuses on the conjunction of memory and imagination, which is an important impulse in, and key to, Breytenbach’s work. The play with language and with associations, the foregrounding, in the short story, “Die verlossing van die beeld” (Breytenbach, 1983) with its metafictional title and apparently divergent motifs (rain/water, watch, onion, the death and burial of a grandfather) acts, as it were, as an invitation to the reader to become a co-player. The reader ventures on a search for traces, intertextual links within the Breytenbach oeuvre and for already acknowledged influences such as Surrealism (which in turn casts some light on the strange title of the story) and the Eastern philosophies such as Zen and the even older Taoism. The analysis also takes into account the context in which “Mouroir” was written, namely Breytenbach’s term in prison (1975-1982). Seeing that the writer had to hand in his manuscripts to the jail authorities regularly, he might have decided, consciously or by intuition, to hide some thoughts and feelings behind a screen or a mask, in, for example in “Die verlossing van die beeld”, a lighter tone and irony.
- ItemTradisie en vernuwing - Hierdie lewe van Karel Schoeman(AOSIS Publishing, 1996-04) Du Toit, P. A.Since the sixties generalizations have frequently been made regarding the difference between old (older, traditional) and new (newer, "modem") Afrikaans prose. Karel Schoeman’s novel Hierdie lewe (1993), however, shows the relativity o f the dichotomy old vs. new prose. The theme o f this novel is fairly traditional: a reminiscence o f a life o f hardship and loneliness in the South African platteland. Nevertheless the formalization o f this theme is not that o f the "gemoedelike lokale realisme" (a genial local realism) which N.P. van Wyk Louw referred to. The on-going process o f "making strange/making unfamiliar ” (Victor Shklovsky) is achieved by a specific style o f writing. The novel’s merit lies in the fa c t that Schoeman, within the linguistic options available to him, within the focus o f the chosen narrative perspective, and within the time frame o f the 19th century, exhibits considerable creative mastery o f the language - despite the constraints presupposed by each o f these contexts. It is an outstanding achievement that Schoeman could fin d so many parallels and synonyms and integrate them in a diffuse but systematic way in his comprehensive novel.