This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. Understood as occurring within the context of literary studies within the South African university as it presently exists, it applies the concept of “work” as defined by Derek Attridge, who stipulates that it “names both the textual object and also the labor that went into its creation.”Footnote ¹ He clarifies this by differentiating between work and text, stating that “I want to save text, then, for the inert symbols of a language, seen or heard, and use work for the literary object these symbols constitute when a reader or listener skilled in that language and its literary conventions engages with it. The work doesn’t exist, then, as an object separate from the event of reception that brings it into being—and it is therefore as much an event as an object.”Footnote ² In seeking the reconfirmation of a critical reading practice, this article is, simultaneously, a form of a response to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom,”Footnote ³ published in a special issue on the subject of literature pedagogy confronting colonialism in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Although it does not wish to serve as a direct rebuttal of certain views that she expresses, it is intended that parts of this discussion must also be read as a riposte to aspects of the claims that she makes. More pertinently, the propositions that are set out are, where relevant, attempts to contest the projection of a reading practice that, she argues, inhibits and constrains rather than liberates. This article is, instead, premised upon an understanding of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities, a position propagated by Edward W. Said in his statement that “a trained openness to what a text says (and with that openness, a certain amount of resistance) is the royal road to humanistic understanding in the widest and best sense of the phrase.”Footnote ⁴ Said’s role in reconfiguring the humanities is unprecedented, and he was called upon to offer his special perspectives in respect of the state of the humanities in post-apartheid South Africa on more than one occasion. In 2001, he was invited to deliver the keynote address at a conference organized by the National Ministry of Education. John Higgins’s Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa: Essays and Interviews on Higher Education and the Humanities includes an interview with Said conducted around the time of the conference and includes the following telling response:

Moreover, his book of essays, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, remains one of the most crucial contributions to the revisioning of the humanities in the contemporary world. This is most emphatically evident in the following statement included in the closing paragraphs of the essay “Humanism’s Sphere,” necessarily reproduced in comprehensive terms here:

Higgins’s book continues to be a succinct delineation of the issues most pertinent to the humanities in South African higher education, and although it is, largely, a series of responses to formal policy directives and proposed legislation, several injunctions included in it must be reemphasized. The following assertions related to what Higgins defines as “the disciplines of Narrative, Analysis and Interpretation, and Literacies” are important to set out in the context of this discussion:

What is clear then is that reading, that which involves the analyzing and the interpreting of the text, is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. It may also be instructive to recall the closing remarks made by Said in the keynote address delivered at the conference convened by the South African National Ministry of Education in 2001.Footnote ⁸ These comments can now be considered as being extraordinarily prescient considering the current state of circumstances in South African society. Setting out the many challenges that confronted a relatively recently installed government at the time, Said insisted that a “special role therefore attaches to the very basic role of reading in education” and cautioned that an overwhelmingly utilitarian thrust to educational imperatives may very well result in “the absence of a viable and lively intellectual community able to deal sceptically and perhaps even subversively with injustice, dogmatic authority, corruption and all the blandishments of power,” adding the salient point that “Even after apartheid, these can reappear.”Footnote ⁹ He stated, furthermore, that the inculcation of a “critical reading” practice is a vital antidote that will ensure there is an “awakened understanding of how texts are constructed and how they function at the highest levels of imagination and originality, which in turn quickly furnishes the engaged mind with an alertness to the lazy rhetoric, automatic language, and distorted ideological discourses that have so often covered up abuses of power as well as pacifying citizens into a quasi-somnolent acceptance of what is presented as reality.”Footnote ¹⁰

The form of this critical reading that Said espouses is given further elaboration in his essay “The Return to Philology,” where he describes it as “a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history.”Footnote ¹¹ Similar sentiments such as these form the basis of a more recent exchange between Attridge and Henry Staten. In the first of these conversations, “Reading for the Obvious in Poetry: A Conversation,”Footnote ¹² Attridge sets out the terms of the interaction by remarking on what he regards as unwelcome developments in literary studies and makes the point that in his view, “The most basic norms of careful reading are sometimes ignored in the rush to say what is ingenious or different” and that, consequently, “We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without teaching them how to read.”Footnote ¹³

Set on a South African university campus bearing strong resemblances with the University of the Western Cape in the 1960s, Zoë Wicomb’s story, “A Clearing in the Bush,”Footnote ¹⁴ describes the experiences of an unnamed female student who struggles to cope with the demands made on her, illustrated by her difficulties with completing a first-year English essay. Apart from conveying her own experiences, she also focalizes the experiences of a female canteen worker, Tamieta. The subject of the student’s essay is the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.Footnote ¹⁵ It is, more than anything else, a novel that sets up questions about morality against questions about justice. The student is, initially, very keen to pursue her own opinions about the characterization of Tess and wants to put the approach taken by the lecturer, Retief, into question. These intentions are expressed in the following narration. where some measure of a counter-opinion is under formulation, even if it is relatively tentative at this point:

What parts of this passage reveal is that Retief, the English lecturer, has a very distinct method of teaching. The references to the “dictated lecture” point to a procedure where the students write out his dictation with the understanding that everything he says is not to be questioned. This conveys the impression that there is an aspect of the dictatorial in the manner in which he conducts his classes. The student’s will to devise a set of differing arguments in her essay is eventually dissipated despite a promising beginning, and it becomes apparent that it has become much more difficult for her to respond to the story and the complex moral questions that it provokes, an aspect Retief and the notes have pointedly dismissed:

The conclusion we draw from the directives the lecturer conveys to the students is that he insists on justice being effected in the case against Tess, that there can be no mitigating factors that would secure a reprieve for her, and that she must suffer the ultimate punishment. It is apparent too that the student’s ambivalence about the story is not consistent with the firm conclusions drawn by the lecturer and that some substantial challenge for her will ensue. This is made all the more inevitable by the interpretations contained in the reformulated notes provided to her. Now motivated by the more pragmatic need to conform to the imperatives determined by the academic institution, she reveals this change of plan as follows: “I read Retief’s notes and start afresh. This will have to be my final copy since there is no time to develop ideas, let alone rephrase clumsy language … My attempt to understand the morality of the novel has to be abandoned. Retief will get what he wants, a reworking of his notes, and I will earn a mark qualifying for the examination.”Footnote ¹⁸ Although the student has wished to write an essay opposing these views, in the end, she relents and, having complied, observes that she has also become complicit in the persecution of Tess. She goes on to confirm that in her essay, Tess has been “branded guilty and betrayed once more on this page,” a suggestion she believes that not only is Tess a victim of injustice in the novel itself but that the view of Tess communicated by Retief and the lecture notes have reinforced her victimization in much the same way as she has been forced to do in her essay.Footnote ¹⁹ The line from the notes that “Murder is a sin which should outrage all decent and civilized people” is a categorical statement bereft of any measure of nuance. It shows that there can be no ambiguity or difficulty and that the form of justice applied to Tess is beyond question. No extenuating circumstances need be taken into account. The point is made that this is not merely subjective opinion but is the understanding of “all decent and civilized people.” The immediate deduction to be made here is that any views that run counter to this are not that of “decent and civilized people.” These views have broader implications when subsequent events that involve a memorial for the murdered prime minister are considered. Hendrik Verwoerd, a key figure in the Nationalist Party, which set about implementing the policies of apartheid, was assassinated in the Parliament at the time when the story is set. In the story, the university authorities decide to commemorate his death formally but are not aware that the students have decided to boycott this event. After it becomes clear that the students will not be present, the rector makes a particular reference to the students’ actions in his speech detailed in this extract from the story:

The rector’s response cited previously is a clear indication of his stance in relation to the assassination and he, consequently, regards the actions of the students who boycotted the service as a sanctioning of the violence perpetrated against the prime minister. He, therefore, seeks to establish a link with their actions and the university’s overall mission of “civilizing” the population through education, implying that the gravity of this task is probably greater than it was first envisaged.Footnote ²¹ It is thus clear that concerns about justice and morality are indeed troubled or put into question by the assassination of Verwoerd. The rector’s views as expressed in his speech at the memorial event can be aligned with the stance taken by Retief, the English lecturer, who appears sure that Tess must be punished for committing a similar act of murder. In each case, though, the murder of Verwoerd in the one instance and the murder of Tess’s tormentor, Alec, in the novel, there is a complicated moral problem at play, one that calls for a much more sophisticated and considered understanding. Neither the rector nor Retief appear to be willing or able to acknowledge this, though.

Highman makes the Wicomb story a central feature of her article, and it is evident that she seeks to establish linkages between the student’s experiences of the English Department during the mid-1960s with that of her own, more recent interactions at the same institution. She thus marshals the story to underscore her own arguments premised upon the contention that a particularly dogmatic approach to the reading of the literary text cannot be countenanced. It becomes clear that she advocates a much more accommodating and eclectic perspective as opposed to one that is determined by procedures emanating from what she defines as “unexamined articles of faith.”Footnote ²² A much less convincing aspect of the propositions that she makes is her characterization of the current English Department at the University of the Western Cape. In this respect she conveys an impression of it that is decidedly one-dimensional and perfunctory and, though acknowledging that fifty years have since elapsed, insinuates that many if not all within the department are not unlike the fictional Retief, who is distinguished by an unremittingly utilitarian attitude toward literature. In the story, the lecturer appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the blunt employment of the Hardy novel as an instrument that can be made to validate the existence of the apartheid regime. His reading, to be sure, is hardly exemplary of the vaguely stipulated principles associated with the more traditional conceptions of close reading but relies much more on a crude Arnoldian take on a morally inspired cultural practice. In addition to references to the Wicomb story, Highman also cites the comments made by the poet Arthur Nortje, who attended the then University College of the Western Cape as a member of its very first cohort of students. She responds to Nortje’s comments by claiming that the mode of authoritarian teaching that he had encountered decades earlier has still not been eradicated and alleges that elements of this mode remain in the manner in which, she contends, “the faculty sometimes “teach down” to our students as it were, rather than in participating in a more collaborative act of meaning-making.”Footnote ²³ Reflecting on Nortje’s views expressed in a letter to a close friend in which he stated that “The more I think about it, the more I consider that the miserable world needs every living and deceased man or woman who has something poetic to contribute … something from the spirit,”Footnote ²⁴ she concludes that this is a position he would have developed from his engagement with literature, “even while the institution itself appeared to militate against it.”Footnote ²⁵

An even more conclusive indictment of the current English Department is, however, reserved for her concluding remarks, where it is stated that “something of the apartheid logic that marked it then persists,” which for her is evident in what she describes as “the occasional fetishization of the ‘literary’ as inherently not ‘political’ or ‘sociological,’ defined instead by what it excludes; but is also evident in a demand for a ‘close analysis’ that is not properly theorized, and in a sometimes rigid and overly prescriptive approach to the set texts and essays.”Footnote ²⁶ A further difficulty is encountered with her view that “what is often parroted in our department at UWC as at the core of what we do and teach is not close ‘reading,’ but close ‘analysis,’ suggesting a particular, dichotomized relationship between reader (subject) and text (object).”Footnote ²⁷ If the use of the decidedly prejudicial verb in this description is ignored, then the distinction that is drawn between reading and analysis in this formulation can be scrutinized more carefully. It is unfortunate that this distinction is not explained in greater detail as it can be argued that it may not be able to be upheld for too long. Furthermore, it may be said that an element of all attempts at critical reading involves the concomitant procedures of analysis and interpretation working, more often than not, in concert with each other. In his A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, Jeremy Hawthorn explains this in the following manner: “Analysis is conventionally distinguished from interpretation on the ground that it involves a separation of that which is to be studied into its component parts—literary analysis would involve the dividing of a literary work into the separate elements by which it is constituted.”Footnote ²⁸ For his part, Higgins makes this point even more lucidly: “These two modes of critical attention are of course linked, and they are perhaps best understood as the two ends of a spectrum of techniques and skills in advanced or critical literacy that run from the (apparently) simple act of paraphrase through to the often considerable complexities of interpretation.”Footnote ²⁹

For her claims to be sustained as anything resembling the credible, it must be the case that the indisputably instrumentalist mission pursued at the time of the institution’s founding has endured despite decades of scrutiny and challenge, whether from pressures imposed by an ever-evolving sociopolitical environment or from many cohorts of students intent on bringing the university in line with incremental political changes over the same period. No less significant would be the highly consequential developments in theory that have forced literature and language departments worldwide to reflect critically on their work as a matter of course. Highman’s discussion in relation to what she cites as having “marked literary debates in South Africa” is highly selective with an inordinately unbalanced focus on the “fantasist rantings” of one academic at the expense of other, more progressive developments.Footnote ³⁰ One has only to cite a volume of literary theory published in 1982 to acknowledge that any major privileging of what she terms “American new criticism” is misplaced.Footnote ³¹ This volume consisted of essays from ten scholars, many then teaching in language and literature departments across the country at the time; it covered a range of theoretical approaches, including Russian formalism, semiotics, Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism.Footnote ³² Highman’s presiding rationale implies that the many individuals who have constituted the department over the intervening years must have upheld a stubborn adherence to what can be defined only as a selective confection of discredited and outdated theoretical stances and, consequently, wilfully neglected any forays into critical work that would have put these positions into question. It is difficult to respond to the phrase “fetishization of the ‘literary’” without some measure of exasperation, implying as it does that any insistence on the distinct existence of what can be constituted as the literary should be deemed as an unhealthy preoccupation. Circumscribing the literary, as the title of this article suggests, is vital for the preservation of literary studies as an academic pursuit. That the sociopolitical makes significant impacts upon the literary is undoubted but sustaining that which distinguishes the literary remains a significant task for those committed to the retention of its place in society. During a time when a state of emergency governed the South African state and resistance to apartheid was at its height, the novelist J. M. Coetzee felt it necessary to make an appeal for the recognition of the literary by his avowal of the separation between history and fiction. In his talk published as “The Novel Today,”Footnote ³³ he argued that the story, generically speaking, is capable of surviving all manner of threats to its continued existence and sets out an argument that maintains that fiction is not subservient to history, stating that:

In what serves as the presumptive theoretical framing for her reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Lucy, but published under the title “Reading with Stuart Hall in “Pure” Literary Terms,”Footnote ³⁵ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers an even more eloquent and careful rationale for the importance of the distinction, stating:

If the spurious assertions about the English Department at UWC are set aside and further attention is devoted to Highman’s call for more innovative strategies in our work with literary texts, then it is possible that a constructive outcome from her intervention may yet be secured. The caricature of the department incited by the comments in her article, in fact, borders on the gratuitous if the primary objective is considered to be a critical reexamination of pedagogical approaches for the reading of literary texts. Furthermore, there should be no doubt about the latter being a decisive objective for literary studies as designated by Chakravorty Spivak when she affirms that:

The crucial assertion most relevant to the scope of this discussion is the final one; that reading, as a critical practice, must be a central aspect of teaching; that this, by Attridge’s important qualification, must involve imparting the skills of reading and interpretation and forays into the literary conventions with which these practices are associated. The nature of the pedagogical approach is, consequently, as important as the assertion itself. The overriding perspective of reading that Highman describes is one in which it appears to be harnessed as an instrument of institutional and societal control. This unambiguously pessimistic attitude toward reading is qualified in the following statement:

This, it must be said, is a comparatively idiosyncratic schematic, relying as it does on particular presumptions about what acts of reading will produce and on an understanding of language as compliant with set intentions. She eventually explains her reason for her tone of caution by stating, “What I am describing as ‘closed reading,’ or rather a classroom that enjoins such reading, runs the risk … of eliciting from the student a defensive ‘false’ self within or beneath which a more authentic self is not recognized and must be hidden.”Footnote ³⁹ An immediate response to this claim is who or what determines the distinction between the two apparently separate selves as indicated here and whether this, too, is not dependent on a set of presumptions taken as a given?

The most compelling articulation in Highman’s discussion, however, is that which advocates for an approach to reading that encourages what may already be implicit in the nature of language if we are to accept Jacques Derrida’s conceptualization of play.Footnote ⁴⁰ Should this be the case, then her call for “reading as opening space” is a preexisting possibility and not one that has to be established in a deliberate and distinctly separate sense.Footnote ⁴¹ This direction to her arguments is motivated by an effort to “return the self to literary criticism”Footnote ⁴² and informed by the proposition that reading “can enable an experience,” which Highman, citing psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott refers to as “‘transitional space’ or ‘potential space’ and how texts can be ‘transitional objects.’”Footnote ⁴³ She seeks to explain this premise by evoking Winnicott once again, stating that “potential space is a space of play, where, in his words, ‘paradox is to be accepted and tolerated and respected and not to be resolved.’”Footnote ⁴⁴ This can be read as an attitude toward reading that regards the text as an instrument of psychosocial transformation. A concern is whether the discipline of literary studies, as it is currently constituted, can, in fact, sustain this as a defined objective.

Derrida’s exposition of play may, however, not be precisely what she envisages if it is regarded as merely a cue for a form of broadly creative expression that she elaborates upon in the more anecdotal passages of her arguments. The point here is that the potential for a productive approach is already inherent in the work of reading if Derrida’s account of it is accepted; that paradox and ambiguity are implicit in the nature of language and, thus, in acts of reading. He explains this in the following manner:

He proposes that this “disruption of presence” must be taken as “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of the world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The concept of play as it is defined here is, of course, more substantial, and it may be useful to cite Niall Lucy’s clarification “that ‘play’ means something like ‘give’ or ‘tolerance’ which works against ideas of self-sufficiency and absolute completion” and that “Before there is presence or absence, in other words, there is play. There is always already some play or movement—a little give or tolerance—within the opposition of presence and absence, such that the opposition depends on this play as the condition of its possibility.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This should counter the notion that what Derrida had sanctioned was an unrestricted and wholly improvised interpretation of meaning but, instead, point out the considerable degree of openness that is a tacit element in language. It is crucial that this concept of play should be taken together with the reading practice Derrida had circumscribed in as much as he was willing to do in his Of Grammatology. In a section headed “The Exorbitant. Question of Method,” he states that “the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Here he describes the reading of a text as being constituted of what could be termed as an initial reconstructive reading taht maintains some fidelity to broadly discernible intentions of the author and to the assumed original context. A second or corresponding reading of the same text is much less compliant and pursues what may be outside the parameters of the original context and the author’s apparent intentions, and, as such, can be characterized as deconstructive. The first is as necessary as the second so as to ensure that a random improvisation of meaning is not countenanced; that it must mitigate the possibility of developing a reading “in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He makes the point, though, that the first, reconstructive reading “has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The second reading is, thus, premised upon an acknowledgment of the “absence of the referent or the transcendental signified” and of the recognition of the operation of difference already implicit in language and its effects on the production of signification.Footnote ⁵¹ Derrida described this as the operation of “two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play”Footnote ⁵² and clarifies this point by asserting that the

He makes another reference to this doubling aspect of interpretation in his essay “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” where he points out that the “original opening of interpretation essentially signifies that there will always be rabbis and poets. And two interpretations of interpretation.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The distinction between the two elements of interpretation as he describes it in these direct references to it is given a further degree of clarity in an end note to the latter quotation. This clarification states that the “‘rabbinical’ interpretation of interpretation is the one which seeks a final truth, which sees interpretation as an unfortunately necessary road back to an original truth” and goes on to say that the “‘poetical’ interpretation of interpretation does not seek truth or origin, but affirms the play of interpretation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The consequence of this distinction drawn between the two elements of interpretation is that the one is a reproductive reading in which an attempt is made to reconstruct the text by some measure of fidelity to it, whereas the other interpretation is premised upon a productive reading in which the pursuit of meaning is less constrained by the impositions of authorial intention or original context.

This doubling procedure affirms reading and interpretation as even more dynamic and intricate than is commonly acknowledged. It ensures too that the work of reading, as envisaged by Attridge in the definition cited in the opening paragraph of this discussion, must be attended by an attitude that recognizes the critical role it should still play in society. I have very little doubt that no essay sets out the merits of this point with greater conviction than Barbara Johnson’s “Teaching Deconstructively,”Footnote ⁵⁶ and it is essential that her first paragraph be quoted in full so as to transmit the force of its persuasiveness:

Patrick Cullinan’s poem “The Passion. Western Cape. 1985”Footnote ⁵⁸ dramatizes a situation of severe difficulty for the speaker who finds himself preparing a class on a John Donne poem in the midst of violent unrest that has erupted on a university campus.Footnote ⁵⁹ This difficulty is a consequence of a complex series of relations between the speaker as a teacher committed to his duty and, by extension, to literature and the impact of the overtly political on these commitments. The nature of this dilemma depicts an involved and astringent predicament for the speaker, one in which no easy resolution is possible. He persists in his preparations until the fumes from teargas set off by the state’s forces of law and order make it unbearable for him to continue and he is forced to abandon the relative sanctuary of his office. Distinct temporal and spatial shifts are apparent between stanza one and stanza two, with the move from the “South of England,” the setting of the Donne poem, to where the speaker is situated; a place markedly different where, “Outside my window, students rioting/ Threw stones at teargas.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He demonstrates a strong commitment to teaching, notwithstanding the deteriorating circumstances: “I could understand/ Their passion well: but kept on writing/ Notes upon the poem which I would teach/ To these same students, should God so will.”Footnote ⁶¹ This indicates that, much like the speaker in the Donne poem, he too relies on divine intervention to resolve the worldly conflict to which he is a witness. In the closing three stanzas, the speaker declares that it was not “faith nor ideology” that made him “keep on writing words.”Footnote ⁶² He reveals that it was what he describes, firstly, as “some grace” and, later, as “the virtue quickening, held/ Within his verse” that continued to inspire and motivate him.Footnote ⁶³ He makes this revelation even when he considers whether “John Donne’s art was awkward, out of place,” implying that Donne’s poem may be considered as irrelevant or inappropriate within the context of the student protests occurring on the university campus.Footnote ⁶⁴ The speaker, however, makes it clear that he is convinced that the “virtue” or “grace” he detects is present in the Donne poem and is vital “since art outside was cheap.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Applying what Attridge describes as “some kind of minimal reading as a critical virtue” to the poem, it may be possible to interpret the speaker’s persistence in completing his teaching notes as a sign of his strong will to uphold a paragon of the canonical English literary tradition, even under the most precarious of conditions.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the end, he has to submit himself and his intentions to the much more powerful impositions wielded by the state, which prioritizes a much more instrumentalist perspective on education and appears to have become increasingly intolerant of any resistance to its dictates. In the closing lines, the speaker attempts to show that some connections, however tenuous, between the sentiments expressed in the Donne poem and his own predicament, caught between the protesting students and the security police, can be sustained. These connections rely on his reappropriation of the “angry faith” expressed by the speaker in Donne’s poem, implying that this attitude is equally relevant within an environment in which injustice is being perpetrated by the forces of state power.Footnote ⁶⁷ He goes on to claim that a sense of “virtue” that is apparent in the Donne poem is the most noteworthy aspect that is as equally appropriate to his current situation.Footnote ⁶⁸ This “virtue” appears to be a commitment to “art,” which the speaker declares has been sullied by the vulgarity of political violence and power.Footnote ⁶⁹ In establishing a fine yet distinct alliance between the sentiments expressed in the Donne poem and the students’ resistance to state power, there is the implication that a text representing the English literary tradition can be mobilized as a form of solidarity with the students in addition to the speaker’s declaration that he “could understand/ Their passion well.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The speaker in the poem thus positions the sentiments evoked by the Donne poem on the side of the students who are expressing their outrage, their righteous anger against the injustices of the apartheid state. Connections are, thus, pursued between the anger of the students and the angry faith of the speaker who, in turn, finds a strong sense of allegiance between his own angry faith and that of the speaker in Donne’s poem set in a time and a place far removed from his own location. The resonances between these facets of the poem are tenuous, and there may be the degree of the improbable in the view that a text associated with the English literary canon is meant to be reflective of protests that have a strong anticolonialist quality to it. It would, however, be difficult to summarily dismiss a reading that invites this possibility.

Even more intriguing is the suggestion that this sense of “virtue” is in any way connected to the “poetic spirit” that Nortje had identified himself with and sought to pursue in the face of the “miserable world” in which he found himself. If so, then Highman herself appears to concede that this is something worth striving for and, consequently, must find a measure of synergy with the sentiments expressed by the speaker in Cullinan’s poem. On the basis of how Derrida’s work has required a revision of our understanding of language, it may be said that the speaker’s trust that a moral substance is an inherent presence in the Donne poem is doubtful. This does not, however, discount the possibility that a degree of the ethical cannot be gleaned or recovered; that in the manner of its use the language is able to infer or allude to what could be interpreted as the ethical or moral.

An equally ambivalent attitude toward the English literary tradition is evident in the Wicomb story where the student expresses a sense of confusion about the Hardy novel. The student’s reaction to the moral complexities conveyed in the novel is not encouraged but precipitously curtailed. The story itself, though, rather than the coincidental actuality that may be situated behind or alongside it, insists upon a potential openness that can be read into it as a work of narrative fiction. The student’s resistance to the authoritarian and uniform interpretation made by the lecturer remains a vital aspect of the story notwithstanding her eventual compliance and abandonment of a more involved engagement with the novel. These ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. A semblance of openness through a reading of the text is, it seems to me, undeniable and points to what students may always encounter as the difficult yet rewarding consequence in responding to the work of text as an event, following Attridge’s assertions. This openness or productive potential through interpretation is, in my view, sufficiently engaging and compelling as a practice. The manner in which individual students or groups of students may respond to literary texts and how their experience of reading may affect or transform them cannot be preempted, and any claims in relation to this may, it can be argued, be understood as presumptuous. Situating reading as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature, though, must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency. This may yet secure the means for acknowledging that innumerable literary texts carry within them the possibilities of a “quickening virtue”; the “critical virtue” or productive openness that reading is often able to disclose.