A GENEALOGICAL STUDY OF THE TEACHING OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE

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CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

In this chapter a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge ( 1972) is articulated to focus upon discursive practices (in literature) in an effort to move beyond the traditional modes of literature reception and teaching and to serve as a model (Discursive Formations) for the reconstruction of the South African literature curriculum. An archaeological approach to literature teaching will be used to focus on the multiplicity of objects that constitute South African literature and on the heterogeneity of styles that characterise this literature.
The later genealogical approach as formulated in Discipline and Punish (1977b) and The History of Sexuality (1981), although contradictory to the archaeological approach where Foucault sought to find regularities, is also appropriate since the emphasis is on the limits of history, especially the margins of society, marginal groups and marginal experiences. As Foucault outlines in an interview: ‘It seems to me interesting to try to understand our society and civilization in terms of its system
of exclusion, of rejection … its limits’ (197la:l93). The study will argue for the inclusion of South African texts previously excluded by drawing on ‘forgotten’ or ‘hidden’ bibliographical, literary, historical and other •relevant information, and in the process of such a~gumentation, show why the inclusion of such texts will be educationally beneficial.

 FOUCAULT’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL WORKS

This study is underpinned by a critical analysis of a fundamental premise in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972): the prioritisation of discontinuity as against continuities.
What we have is a radical approach to literature study: an analysis of opinions rather than of knowledge, of errors rather than of truth, of types of mentality, social customs or behaviours, unrecorded information and practices. It is a discipline of interferences – what underlines the text, how do the texts relate to each other and a practice of a different history of what is recorded or said.
Foucault differentiates between discourse as document and as monument in his articulation of a definition of archaeology:
Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else. It is concerned with discourse in its own volume as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better hidden discourse. (1972:138)
Archaeology works in the opposite direction to history – it seeks rather to untie all those knots that historians have patiently tied, it discontinues the continuities of history. It increases differences and blurs the lines of communication and tries to make it more difficult to pass from one thing to another
(Foucault 1972:170). The ‘archive’ is a machine generating social – as opposed to linguistic – meaning. It is, to use Foucault’s famous words, a ‘historical a priori’. The archaeologist is an archivist whose basic task is the analysis of discourses made up of event-statements.
Merquior (1985:81) defines an archivist succinctly – as someone who does not busy himself with personalities, just with documents and their classifications. Foucault in an appropriately entitled essay ‘What is an author’ (1977a:113) makes it clear that the habit of looking for an author’s authority is futile. The research should show instead how the power of discourse constraints both author and his/her utterances. The archaeologist’s aim is therefore to elicit discursive regularities and conditions of existence from the discourse.
The first major theoretical insight in The Archaeology of Knowledge is a constitutive view of discourse. Discourse is seen as actively constituting or constructing society on various dimensions. It constitutes the objects of knowledge, social subjects and forms of ‘self’, social relationships and conceptual frameworks (Fairclough 1992:39). Allied to this is the interdependency of the• discourse practices of a society or institution. Texts always draw upon and transform other contemporary and historically prior texts a process of intertextuality.
Foucault’s archaeological perspective stands in stark contrast to an ideological critique of literary study. Attention is given to discursive situations and the framework used transcends that of the traditional critique. The very concept of the archive enables an historical investigation and forces us to radically review our interpretation, analysis and criticism of texts.
Hayden White (1978:50) views Foucault’s archaeological perspective as a significant reorientation of historical enquiry. The conventional historian is concerned to refamiliarise his readers with the past. But, Foucault strives to render the past unfamiliar. There is a move away from the customary and ideological historiography. Foucault aims to reveal fundamental differences between historical cultures instead of stressing their common traits (Merquior 1985:72). White argues further that Foucault’s archaeology generates an ‘alienating effect: it stages an intrinsically foreign and bizarre past’ (1978: 52). Alienating history therefore works as a main prop of the Foucauldian purpose: the critical grasp of modernity as a mode of existence (Merquior 1985:72).
It is important to acknowledge that it was Karl Marx and not Foucault who first attacked a history of uninterrupted continuities, a history based on the founding function of the subject, of human consciousness. Marx’s analysis of economic, social, and political relations shows that man’s activities are in the final analysis determined outside the consciousness of the individual subject (Sheridan 1980:92).

CONCEPTS THAT EXPRESS THE THEME OF CONTINUITY

Sheridan (1980:93) summarises The Archaeology of Knowledge as a study of the theoretical problems posed by the use of such concepts as discontinuity, ~ture, threshold, limit, series and transfoxmation in the history of ideas. Before embarking on the project of discontinuity, Foucault firstly examines a number of concepts that express the theme of continuity: tradition, influence, develo,PDent (period), spirit, genre, book and oeuvre. radition refers basically to the body of thought and practices belonging to a particular institution over a relatively long period – an obvious example is the canon of traditional English literature. The notion of tradition allows one to reduce the differences between items to its beginning. The new, in this case South African and ‘other’  writings, is therefore placed and compared against a background of permanence. The concept of categorisation into.genre, the rules for analysis of texts and the theories of criticism are further examples of the concept tradition.
Michael Chapman (1990:17) in his overview of the teaching of literature in South African universities revealed the tradition that was prevalent as late as the nineties. The dominant paradigm is still derived from Arnold’s touchstones of excellence and high seriousness, Saintsbury’s good manners, Leavis’s moral substance, concrete experience and formal coherence and the New Critics’ complex artefacts, which are paradoxical, ironic, subtle and a-historical. Chapman notes further that the wide-spread assumption is that English departments are concerned with ‘great Literature, which begins around Chaucer or increasingly, around Shakespeare – and tails off after the 1920s. Modern poetry is restricted to romantic-symbolist approaches of Yeats and Eliot’.
Even the didactics is strongly reminiscent of the medieval universities and does not reflect critical pedagogy which should have been the prevailing paradigm at universities during the late eighties. According to Chapman (1990:18),. standard examination questions, reflective of English middle-class hegemony, required the analysis of a poem or a passage from a novel or play, where students were invited to comment on theme, character or formal impact. The old adage that the Afrikaans speaking universities are solidly traditional in comparison to the English liberal universities was refuted when Chapman, in his 1988 survey of syllabi, acknowledged that Potchefstroom University had a free-ranging syllabus, yet Witwatersrand University (a liberal university) adhered overwhelmingly to the British ‘Great Tradition’ (1990:18).
It was traditional for the European theories to dominate the theory courses. Students are exposed to Aristotle, Leavis, Richards and Derrida, but they do not hear of Driver, Watts, Barnett, Senghor, Cesaire, Bhabha or Said. Feminism too is restricted to the Anglo-American theories with little regard for the African, Asian and South African writings which are more relevant to the context of racial oppression.
To simplify in the extreme, the tradition in South African English departments generally consists of the canon of elite, metropolitan Great Tradition of predominantly white, male, British writers with Practical Criticism as the dominant methodology ..
Students would have encountered Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and a few black poets as an alternate reading of the canon or a variation to the tradition if their lecturer/s decided it was necessary. The graphic representation of the syllabi of undergraduate and
honours courses in English at South African universities in 1986 (see Table 2, Chapter 4) reveals •/ ‘ »-‘ clearly the dominance of the metropolitan great tradition even during the last years of the interregnum. The table also reveals a very strong genre-orientated approach with a clear delineation into the categories poetry, novels and drama or a periodisation approach to the genres (16th century to 20th century) . Mhambi and Mphahlele (1996) also note that the curriculum at the University of Vista during the eighties was Eurocentric in orientation, (South)African literature constituted less than a quarter of the entire course and there was a preponderance of aesthetic-oriented concerns.
A common explanation of the notion of influence is the effect or power of one person or thing on another. It provides a support for the facts of transmission and communication. The dominant literary theories at the time of writing, the power situation that the writer writes in and the social, political, economic milieu of the writing exerts a profound influence on all the components of the production process. Two characteristic phenomena of the notion of influence are resemblance and repetition. Influence links individuals, theories and texts and groups them together under a simple organising principle.
Perhaps, the greatest influence on literature reception and teaching in South Africa was the apartheid discourse. Racially and linguistically categorised universities reflected their peculiarities and uniqueness in their curriculum. The University of Transkei’s English I syllabus in 1988 would be used to illustrate the influence of African humanism on the selection of their reading list: Abraham’s Mine Boy; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; Dikobe’s The Marabi Dance; To Kill a Man’s Pride (short stories); Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors; Laye’s The African Child; Matshikiza’s Chocolates for my Wife; Ngugi’s The River Between; Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country; and Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel.
The notion of spirit makes it possible to establish between the phenomena of a given period a common, coherent body of beliefs, thus allowing the emergence of the collective consciousness as principle of unity and explanation. Examples within the ambit of South African literature are colonial writing, protest, black consciousness, Afrikaner nationalism, Soweto Poetry and apartheid.
The irony of this continuity is reflected in the separation at the University of Vista between ‘African Literature’ and ‘The Novel of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. The novels of Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Ngugi wa Thiongo, although written in the nineteenth/twentieth century, did not qualify to be treated in the same breath as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, E.M Forster’s A Passage to India and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (Mhambi and Mphahlele 1996:6). This is a classic case of the marginalisation of (South)African literature which, although written in English, was viewed as an entity outside of English literature.

1 . CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Towards a definition of Curriculum
1.2 Genealogy
1.3 South African Literature
1.4 The current Curriculum debate
2 . CHAPTER TWO THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Foucault’s Archaeological works
2.2 Concepts that express the theme of Continuity
2.3 Definition of Discourse
2.4 Discursive Practice
2.5 Discursive Inter-relations
2.6 Discursive Formation
2.6.1 The Formation of Objects
2.6.2 The Formation of Enunciative Modalities
2.6.3 The Formation of Concepts
2.7 From Archaeology to Genealogy
2.8 Conclusion
3 . CHAPTER THREE . A GENEALOGICAL STUDY OF THE TEACHING OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE
3.1 The Colonial Past
3.2 Union 1910 and Segregation
3.3 Apartheid
3.4 South African literature in the interregnum, 1970-1995
3.5 Conclusion
4 . CHAPTER FOUR CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND CURRICULUM ANALYSIS
4.1 Critical educational studies
4.1.1 Meaning construction
4.1.2 Cognitive development
4.1.3 A confrontational approach
4.1.4 Foucault and critical educational studies
4.2 Curriculum analysis
4.2.1 Composition of the English literature syllabi at
4.2.2 African literature teaching in SA university English departments in 1992
4.3 Composition of the English literature syllabi at SA universities in 1996
4.4 A comparative study of the 1986 and 1996 syllabi with reference to the university departments that offered courses in South African literature
4.5 Conclusion
4.6 Tables
5 . CHAPTER FIVE TOWARDS A PEDAGOGICS OF RECONSTRUCTION
5.1 Re-placing the canon
5.2 Lacunae and challenges
5.3 Pedagogical issues
5.4 Conclusion
6. CHAPTER SIX CONCLUSION
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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