No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Some commentators regard Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s major work, Die Kinder der Toten (1995), not only as a difficult novel but also as an untranslatable text. Various aspects of the novel seem to support this: not only does the text include a great many denotative and connotative ‘untranslatables’ but Jelinek’s deconstructivist understanding of language also suggests a philosophically orientated slant to its untranslatability. The latter is first and foremost illustrated by her use of ‘Sprachflächen’ that subverts a linear reading of the novel. However, the very ‘untranslatability’ of the text should not be understood as an obstacle that defeats any and all attempts at its translation. As Apter (2014) and Cassin (2016) suggest, the untranslatable is precisely that which one does not stop (not) to translate. Viewed from this perspective, it seems as if the very untranslatability of Die Kinder der Toten can be understood as an invitation to engage with the complexities of the text and the memory culture it represents. These complexities can be related to the historical particularities of the Austrian memory culture that Jelinek presents and criticises in her novel. The untranslatable nature of Die Kinder der Toten illustrates that memory culture and its discursive artefacts have no definitive meanings that can easily be translated. And because the engagement with difficult pasts is continuous, no translation of the works created in its wake can be definitive. To a large extent, the untranslatable becomes the catalyst of continuous attempts to engage with a difficult past from an outsider perspective.

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).

Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, nee Campbell, was born in 1885 and died in 1952; she wrote mostly under the name of Marjorie Bowen. She was a prolific writer and produced historical romances, supernatural horror stories, popular history, biographies and an autobiography. Writing under the pseudonym Joseph Shearing, Bowen produced what can be considered Gothic mystery novels such as The Crime of Laura Sarelle (1941). In this article, I will conduct a close reading of this novel and will argue that Bowen’s reimagining of the character Laura as simultaneously heroine and femme fatale, as well as eerily possessed by a ghostly past, makes an important contribution to the Gothic trope of the female double. Through a comparison of Bowen’s evocation of the double and that of Daphne du Maurier’s more famous evocation of the double in Rebecca (1938), I aim to demonstrate that Bowen’s use of the double is more Gothically compelling and powerful than that of du Maurier. Moreover, I will contend that Bowen’s unusual rendering of Gothic themes, along with her stylistic elegance, makes her work worthy of further scholarly study.

No abstract available.

Reading fictional narratives is a complex process that has been a preoccupation of scholars and critics in linguistics and literary criticism since Plato and Aristotle. The contention that texts are constructed (and reconstructed) through a network of prior and concurrent discourses problematises the view that a text functions as a hermetic, self-sufficient, closed system. This article examines selected Zimbabwean fictional narratives that are Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Jinga’s One Foreigner’s Ordeal focusing on how the texts speak to each other and reconfigure the African literary canon. The article draws from post-structuralist, Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality theory in order to interrogate stylistic and thematic (re)configurations in the selected novels. Close textual analysis shows that the act of reading plunges the reader into a maze of textual relations and meanings that emerge from this never-ending interaction. Intertextuality is an insightful and essential interpretive framework that draws our attention to the complexities and multiplicities of discourses in fictional narratives. The framework points to the complex matrix of textual relations that oppose the fixation of meanings but rather suggests an infinite range of interpretations. This brings into sharp focus and conversation the question of the author’s intentionality, the need for critical evaluation of textual interactions and the role of the reader in the production of meanings. Intertextuality engenders new horizons of reading and understanding literary texts by generating multiple sites of textual meanings. In other words, intertextuality theory posits that the textual interpretative trajectory is inconclusive, calling on readers to explore the textual entanglement and dialogic selves which facilitate a (re)discovering and (re)constructing of ambivalence and negotiation of meanings.

The South African Department of Basic Education (DBE) listed Mandarin as a second additional language (SAL) (Grades 4–9) in the National Curriculum Statement Grades R to 12 in 2015. We identified a gap in current research regarding the learning of Chinese characters by non-native learners of Mandarin as an SAL. The great number of characters, their complexity and the absence of grapheme–phoneme correspondences put a huge strain on learners’ memory. Rote learning and repetitive exercises lead to boredom and lack of motivation to learn Mandarin. A qualitative research design (case study) was employed in this study. Individual and focus group interviews, questionnaires, classroom observation and a Chinese characters exercise for researchers were used as data collection tools. The data were analysed manually using an inductive process and organised according to categories, themes and conclusions. The study highlights how South African Grade 5 learners learning Mandarin as a SAL learn the Chinese characters and the challenges they encounter. We consider the educational implications for learning Chinese characters and offer recommendations.

This article investigates the use of metaphorical language in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (henceforth CW). Vivekananda is one of the most important modern-day Hindu scholars because his interpretation of ancient Hindu scriptural lore has been very influential. Vivekananda’s influence was part of the motivation for choosing his CW as the empirical domain for the current study. AntConc software was used to mine Vivekananda’s CW for water-related terms, which seemed to have a predilection for metaphoricity. Which terms to search for specifically was determined after a manual reading of a sample from the CW. The data were then tagged using a convention inspired by the well-known Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije University (MIPVU). Then, a representative sample of the data was chosen, and the metaphors were mapped and analysed thematically. Five of these are referred to in this article, but special emphasis is placed on the theme of the Vedanta philosophy as the basis for neo-Hinduism, which has become synonymous with contemporary Hinduism, with Yoga as the practical wing, and Vedanta as the ideological basis for the practice; this aspect is expounded upon in more detail. The study’s main aim was therefore to investigate whether Hindu religious discourse uses metaphors to explain abstract religious concepts in a specific way, and indeed one of the main findings was the pervasiveness of water as a source domain. Hence, the key finding in this article is that neo-Hindu thought, as reconceptualised by Vivekananda, relies heavily on the water frame (as is convention in the field of Cognitive Semantics, conceptual domains are written in upper case, including hypothetical frames and conceptual metaphors), which is not as pervasive in other religio-philosophical traditions.

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).