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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2020
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.
1 Winnicott, Donald, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 135.Google Scholar
2 Long, Carol, “Transitioning Racialised Spaces,” in Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis (London: Palgrave, 2013), 63.Google Scholar
3 The idea was taken up by Murray Schwartz in the 1975 article “Where Is Literature?” (College English 36.7 [1975]: 756–65) and also by Mary Jacobsen (“Looking for Literary Space: The Willing Suspension of Disbelief Revisited” [1982]), and has since been taken up by others, notably by Cristina Bruns in various articles and her book Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching (London: Continuum, 2011) and in a collection of essays, Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of DW Winnicott, edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky (1994).
4 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 130.
5 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 129, emphasis added.
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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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29 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 43.
30 The Rand Afrikaans University, established in 1955, was built in the shape of a laager. The BJ Vorster building at Stellenbosch University, housing the Arts Faculty, and built in the 1970s is similarly inward looking, with many of the teaching rooms being windowless.
31 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 41.
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40 “Department of English: Written Work on the Drama,” J. M.Coetzee Collection (Makhanda: Amazwi Museum of South African Literature), Folder 2002.13.2.21.
41 On them is a handwritten note, initialed DG, which I assume stands for David Gillham.
42 “Department of English: Written Work on the Drama,” no page number.
43 Quoted in Doherty, A Genealogical History, 59.
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49 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 40.
50 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 42.
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.
52 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 40.
53 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 55.
54 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 62.
55 Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 61.
