The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number of /Xam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language and culture that no longer exists, and has exerted a fascination for anthropologists and poets alike. Yet how does one begin reading texts that are at once so compromised and so unique? Bushman Letters is an important book for it examines not only the /Xam archive, but also the critical tradition that has grown up around it and the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. Wessels critiques these principles and offers alternative modes of reading. He shows the problems with the approaches employed by previous critics and, in the course of his own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives, suggests what their interpretations have left out. The book must be described as metacritical: it is criticism about the critical tradition that has grown up around the /Xam archive and in the fields of folklore and mythology more widely. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.
Innehållsförteckning
CHAPTER 1: READING NARRATIVE:
Some Theoretical Considerations
CHAPTER 2: TEXT OR PRESENCE?
On Re-reading the |Xam and the Interpretation of their Narratives
CHAPTER 3: WHOSE MYTHS ARE THE |XAM NARRATIVES?
CHAPTER 4: THE QUESTION OF THE TRICKSTER:
Interpreting |Kaggen
CHAPTER 5: READING THE HARTEBEEST:
A Critical Appraisal of Roger Hewitt’s Interpretation of the |Xam Narratives
CHAPTER 6: FORAGING, TALKING AND TRICKSTERS:
An Examination of the Contribution of Mathias Guenther’s Tricksters and Trancers to Reading the
|Xam Narratives
CHAPTER 7: HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION:
Some of the Implications of Andrew Bank’s Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore for Reading the |Xam Narratives
CHAPTER 8: HARE’S LIP AND CROWS’ NECKS:
The Question of Origins and Versions in the |Xam Stories
CHAPTER 9: THE STORY IN WHICH ‘THE CHILDREN ARE SENT
TO THROW THE SLEEPING SUN INTO THE SKY’:
Power, Identity and Difference in a |Xam Narrative
CHAPTER 10: THE STORY OF ‘THE GIRL OF THE EARLY RACE
WHO MADE STARS’:
The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts
CHAPTER 11: RELIGION IN A |XAM NARRATIVE
CHAPTER 12: ANTJIE KROG, STEPHEN WATSON AND THE
METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE
Om författaren
Michael Wessels lectures in the English Department of the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. He taught for many years in rural and township schools in the southern African region before becoming an academic. He is the current chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS).
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