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Close(d) Reading and the “Potential Space” of the Literature Classroom after Apartheid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2020

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Abstract

This article explores psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about play and “transitional space” or “potential space” in relation to reading, pedagogy, and the legacy of apartheid in South African universities. Following the work of Carol Long, who argues that “apartheid institutions can be understood as the opposite of transitional spaces,” the author draws on her experiences of teaching in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape to reflect on how pedagogy is shaped by institutional culture. The article focuses particularly on “close reading” in the South African university classroom and how a rigid understanding of it has sometimes closed and constrained the experience of reading for students in order to argue for a more open model of “close reading” that values the immersive and creative aspects of reading as well as the analytic, following Winnicott’s understanding of meaningful cultural experience as rooted in play.

Keywords

D. W. Winnicottplaypotential spacetransitional spacepedagogyaesthetic educationpartheidclose readingUniversity of the Western CapeZoë Wicomb
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Literary Pedagogy Confronting Colonialism , September 2020 , pp. 274 - 285
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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11 The English Department’s curriculum, largely unchanged while I taught there from 2012 to 2019, still adheres implicitly to a notion of “English literature” as a canonical body of work centered in Britain, with the departmental website describing the department as offering “traditional literary studies with new courses in media, theatre, creative writing and practical training in various modes of cultural critique.” After a wide-ranging introductory first-year course (including texts from South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka, as well as one Shakespeare play and one Dickens novel), in second-year students are introduced to romantic literature (comprising poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, and sometimes also Byron and Coleridge, and Frankenstein) and then nineteenth-century literature (comprising Wuthering Heights, Victorian short fiction and poetry, and Huckleberry Finn). In third-year, students do courses on Renaissance studies (Utopia, The Prince and Hamlet), modernism (Mrs. Dalloway, The Sound and the Fury, Heart of Darkness) and postcolonial literature and postmodern fiction (Their Eyes Were Watching God, The God of Small Things, Foe, The English Patient, and Beloved). There is also a second-year course on Africa and the world (|Xam texts, The River Between, Half of a Yellow Sun, We Need New Names and South African poetry), which precedes the course on romantic and Victorian writing, but the core of the degree is geared toward coverage of a largely British canon.

12 It only moved to its current site in February 1963; the first intake of students was very small—60 (“Stepping into the Future”).

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51 The significance of what Frieda doodles—the “infantile line of train carriages”—was pointed out to me by a student, Zahier Abrahams, whose honors thesis on Wicomb, titled “‘Wasted Education’: Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town as Post-colonial Bildungsroman,” I supervised in 2019 at the University of the Western Cape.

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