As with other sign languages, South African Sign Language (SASL) expresses negation using both manual and non-manual features. In this case study, naturalistic data provided by two native signers of SASL are analysed to show the syntactic relationship between these two sets of features. Using a Principles and Parameters approach and Government and Binding Theory, we investigate the syntactic scope of negation in our SASL data. We observe that side-to-side headshake, as a non-manual feature, appears to be the chief clausal negator in SASL, with a clause-final manual negative particle, NOT, playing a secondary role. We describe the negative headshake as a featural affix which is base-generated in the head of NegP and triggers V-to-Neg raising. The negative particle NOT appears to be base-generated in the Specifier of NegP. Suggestions for further syntactic research on SASL are provided.

David Fram created a rich body of poetry in his mother tongue, Yiddish. This article offers detailed readings that reflect elements of empathy in his poetic responses to people he knew in Lithuania, in those referring to the strangers he encountered in South Africa, as well as to victims of the Holocaust. In making the poems available to a wider audience through my translations and transliterations, I argue for their continued relevance as vehicles for a deeper understanding of these issues.

The autobiographical process involves not just reporting on past events, reconstructing one’s life history, but replaying events in different voices and modes. It may be that the autobiographer is motivated by the desire to impose one version of her or his life and to scotch the others. Even then, however, other versions, the ones under erasure, often show through the fabric – the fabrication – and we detect their traces in the turns of the rhetoric. Thus, in autobiography, the real agenda is often underneath, either because a less official motive lurks behind the manifest ones or because what really drives the project of selfscrutiny is something only progressively revealed in the process of writing. This issue takes into consideration the structuring implications of turning points in the account of a life and the roles of the converse forces of forgetting and subjective destabilisation. There are two ways of looking at turning points: either as causative agents of order and coherence or as metaphors – as provisional, semi-fictional, forensic, cognitive instruments. In the latter case, they belong to an active, performative, conjectural, self-revising process, and they complement a version of autobiographical memory that involves a constant interplay of remembering and forgetting.

Postcoloniality, which is essentially concerned with the transition and transgression of boundaries and borders, contextualises and defines liminality as an ephemeral concept that eludes pinning down. Liminality is continually involved in a dual process of evolving and subverting: dynamic in the sense of promoting the centre, but subversive in its destabilisation of the previous status quo. In the more recent novels by Coetzee (Slow man, Diary of a bad year, Elizabeth Costello), themes that are especially acute in highlighting the subversive nature of liminality emerge repeatedly: the threshold, death, proliferation and imitation. The problem investigated is: how is the concept of liminality developed in these novels? An examination of these novels in terms of the above-mentioned themes and various conceptual and theoretical elements shows that Coetzee encourages the reader to assume a liminal status, not only as reader of the texts but also in relation to contemporary reality. It is concluded that Coetzee uses certain themes that promote liminality, often in a subversive and deconstructive manner, to inform the reader and, thus, influence him or her to effect change in the contemporary world.

No abstract available.

This article analyses two Venda ngano narratives that portray coming-of-age experiences. Viewed in juxtaposition, they express the radical shift from premodern modes of material and symbolic production to the reified consciousness of capitalist relations. This shift implicates the rootedness of local world views and global market forces within colonial and Western history, as well as contemporary political and economic conditions. The first narrative accordingly describes a classic rite of passage towards adulthood and citizenship within an ancient, precolonial world. Its protagonist is the culture hero whose society prioritises qualities and ideals like spirituality and social integration. In contrast, the second story is located in the colonial world. Its young hero migrates from his rural village to the city, and his adventure is an embryonic representation of the sociopolitical and racial dynamics of the colonial encounter. His actions evolve within a modernist world view, specifically a rational materialism driven by a teleology of progress that conceives economic organisation as the mediator of social relationships and personal fulfilment. The engagement of these diverse world views with history is explored from a perspective that aligns the ancient Venda concept of zwivhuya with Fromm’s notion of qualitative freedom, of actualisation in all realms of human experience and of transcendence in all forms. The resplendent materiality presented in the second narrative is accordingly argued to conceal a spectre of fear and incomplete selfawareness. This poses a dilemma that speaks to all humanity, namely the need to transform the actual poverty of reified materiality into the wealth of an integrated world.

Although classified as a literary novel with a fictional plot, The Prague cemetery is crammed with historical information on 19th century Europe, with the focus on the rise of anti-Semitism during this period. The overwhelming amount of data has been criticised as distracting from the plot and creating difficulty for the reader in making sense of the storyline. This article examines the role of the reader in deciphering the twisting of historic events and fiction in The Prague cemetery , that is, a literary text packed tight with historical data intertwined with a fictional story, loaded with signs, symbols and hidden meanings that have to be decoded. It is demonstrated, firstly, that a Model Reader with encyclopaedic knowledge will be able to decode the hidden meanings in the text; secondly, that the nonmodel, or empirical reader, who does not actualise all of the meaning content, will not be hindered in his understanding of the story and thirdly, that the author’s intentions will duly be accomplished.

Not available.

This article deals with Isaiah Shembe’s hymns and proposes that they should be read asliterature because, in them, Shembe employs a number of literary features. He also usesfeatures of oral literature and uses the hymns to reflect on a number of issues that concernedhim and his fellow black people. The hymns that are examined here are more akin to poetrythan hymns in that Shembe uses them to engage with the issues of his time rather than to praiseGod. However, this does not mean that all the hymns should be misconstrued as politicaltexts: They are generally songs of worship for the members to sing when praising God, yetShembe also found in the genre of hymns a powerful medium for voicing his concerns asan African. Whilst other scholars have noted Shembe’s concern with Zulu ethnicity and hiscontribution to Zulu literature, I suggest here a reading of the hymns that goes beyond Zuluethnicity, looking at them as part of African literature since Shembe himself was not justconcerned with the Zulus and their problems, but he was also concerned with the mattersthat concerned Africa as a whole.

No abstract available.