Litnet

"I want to be different, and that's always in the back of my mind, and I think a big part of being different or standing out from everyone else is just being yourself. I'm not sure if I get it right all the time, but I try."

Mbulungeni Madiba of UCT in conversation with Gerda Odendaal and Marius Swart, Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, Stellenbosch University. The discussion centred on a chapter in Neville Alexander's book Thoughts on the New South Africa, problematising  the issue of language in the modern South African university. 

"This book is the work of a critic and scholar of commitment and mature wisdom."

"Mark Winkler’s command of the warp and weft of his  plot, his depiction of place, and his powerful and clear delineations of  character, both Nathan’s and the surrounding characters – all make for a strong  read."

"One of your core preoccupations is the ethics of reading, and in writing you an e-mail, this makes me think about what's at stake in the process, of you - so often the writer - becoming my reader; that is to say, this event of 'I-becoming-you'."

Treurgrond is definitely a hot potato. Casting Steve might, as you suggested, give  the (false) impression that this is right-wing propaganda. It is not.

"So Chumani Maxwele is correct: we South Africans who are not  first-language speakers of African languages need to lose our arrogance, our  feelings of superiority and our fear of making fools of ourselves, and learn  what it is like to flounder in a language that is not our own, but still make  sense."

"And for all that the Franschhoek Literary Festival is irredeemably disengaged from the lived reality of much of South Africa ..."

David Attwell's new publication JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing was launched at Clark's Bookshop in Cape Town on Tuesday, 12 May. Finuala Dowling conducted the interview.

Here is the programme to this year's festival, which takes place from the 28th to the 30th of May 2015.

"One could say that this story is about a death in a family and how it  can be a tipping point, the nudge that will unravel the almost well-united  family. But in another breath  it’s correct to say that this is simply a story about lies and deceit, some of  those planned and plotted, and some just silly decisions or inaction."

"This lyrical, lucid and indeed spiritual meditation on our current condition seeks to challenge the hyper-individualism of our times by restating the centrality of community in cultivating the real self."

Karin  Schimke looks at who's who in the internationally flavoured programme at this  weekend's Franschhoek Literary Festival.

"Every Monday morning she came walking up the dirt road from the black township, wearing her brightly coloured Basotho blanket around her shoulders and her orange-and-black headscarf."

"Dust is a major novel – a complex text that takes on a huge topic: no less than nearly five decades of Kenya’s fraught history, linked to the experiences of a core of characters who are either members of, or whose stories are entangled with, an unusual family from the dry, far north of Kenya."

"In the end I did what came naturally to me and that was honesty. I just wrote about what I was feeling and did what I felt I wanted to do ..."

What is the role of the media in the time of xenophobia?

Lou-Marié Kruger, psychologist, researcher and convenor of a workshop based on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence", shares notes by some of the presenters of this multi-disciplinary workshop held at Stellenbosch University.