Andrew van der Vlies
Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide, and Extraordinary Professor at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape. A graduate of Rhodes University and the University of Oxford, he has published widely on South African and African literature and art, most recently Present Imperfect (Oxford, 2017) and, as an editor, Race, Nation, Translation (essays by Zoë Wicomb; Yale, 2018) and South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2019). The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee is forthcoming in September.
In the dying months of the last century, I took a crash course in Modern British Fiction. I had opted for the most contemporary course on the Oxford English MPhil that covered the most contemporary period (1880 to the present, then generally understood to have ended circa 1970). My elective choices had all been a little unpopular: rather than a term parsing Ulysses, I read all of Conrad; where the ... (read more)
'A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out.’ Perhaps not unlike other fifteen-year-old males, he is prone to bouts of solipsism and radical empathy, as absorbed by superhero fantasies of escape (and retribution) as he is by the semiotics of text messaging and sneakers. He is as unique as the next genius-poet altar boy – b ... (read more)