Guy Butler Research Articles

Guy Butler's Demea

While the relation between classical mythology and postcolonialism may appear as an inconsistency, many postcolonial writers identify postcolonial issues in the literary reception of the classics, and look back to classical mythology and their own precolonial myths to gain a better understanding of their present. In the intersection of myth criticism and postcolonialism, this article discusses Guy Butler’s Demea, a postcolonial drama written in the 1960s but, due to political reasons, not published or performed until 1990. Butler’s play blends the classical myth of Medea with South African precolonial mythology, to raise awareness of the apartheid political situation, along with gender and racial issues.

Guy Butler's Demea

While the relation between classical mythology and postcolonialism may appear as an inconsistency, many postcolonial writers identify postcolonial issues in the literary reception of the classics, and look back to classical mythology and their own precolonial myths to gain a better understanding of their present. In the intersection of myth criticism and postcolonialism, this article discusses Guy Butler’s Demea, a postcolonial drama written in the 1960s but, due to political reasons, not published or performed until 1990. Butler’s play blends the classical myth of Medea with South African precolonial mythology, to raise awareness of the apartheid political situation, along with gender and racial issues.

A centennial celebration of Guy Butler, Shakespeare scholar and teacher

This is a slightly revised version of the text of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture, delivered at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) on 23 April 2018. It pays tribute to Guy Butler as Shakespeare scholar and teacher; the author shares his personal experience as a student before turning his attention to Butler’s work on King Lear.

The Importance of being Guy Butler: The Centenary Lecture

This lecture was commissioned by the National Arts Festival to mark the centenary of Guy Butler’s birth and was presented during the 2018 Festival in the Olive Schreiner Auditorium in Grahamstown. Guy Butler was the father of the National Arts Festival, a former President of the English Academy, and its first Gold Medallist. He was also a poet, a Christian, a family man, a historian of the 1820 settlers, an autobiographer, a short story writer, a cultural theorist, a founder of university departments and several cultural institutions, a political commentator, an academic, a Shakespearean scholar, a permanent head of department serving on numerous university committees, a conference organizer, a theatrical director and producer, an amateur artist, painter, sketcher and ‘doodler’, a prolific correspondent, a wood-worker, a convivial host, a conversationalist and raconteur of note, an urban conservationist, an amateur palaeontologist and interpreter of rock paintings, a mentor for countless poets and writers, young and old, and a great teacher.

Three decades of the Shakespeare Society of southern Africa: 1986–2016

Under the title “‘In states unborn and accents yet unknown’: Shakespeare and the ISEA”, this essay first appeared as a chapter in ISEA, 1964-2014: A South African Research Institute Serving People, edited by Monica Hendricks (Grahamstown: NISC, 2016). The Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) was founded by Guy Butler at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in 1964. Among its many undertakings were several development projects for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, established in 1986. The article describes the context in which the Society was formed and provides an overview of key activities undertaken in collaboration with the Institute during the course of its first three decades. The piece also reflects more generally on the social, cultural, educational and political history of Shakespeare in South Africa, asking: “Will Shakespeare continue to thrive in South Africa?” The piece has been lightly revised.

Guy Butler and NELM’s Literary Project: A Contested History

This article seeks to investigate the relationship between the National English Literary Museum (NELM) and the perceived legacy of its founding personality, Guy Butler. In so doing, the article unpacks the varied historic and contemporary responses to the institutional and cultural work of Guy Butler, while casting Butler as an archival ‘patriarch’, using Derrida’s Archive Fever ([1995] 1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press) as a theoretical framework. The article explores the conceptual reach of the term ‘archive’ according to contemporary South African academic archive studies, and posits that under this academic perspective the work of NELM and the legacy of Butler might be considered ‘archival’. The article concludes that Butler’s work on behalf of the institution of literary academia and historiography in the latter half of the twentieth century might be connected to the nineteenth century colonial roots of many of South Africa’s knowledge institutions, and that conceptually, the archive, the library, and the museum, are imbricated in a South African geography of coloniality. The article closes with a consideration of NELM’s contemporary moment, given the fraught relationship that South Africa is presently experiencing with its own heritage institutions.

South African Literary Archives after the ‘Archival Turn’: a Case Study of the Guy Butler collection at the National English Literary Museum

This article seeks to investigate the largest collection of literary artefacts in South Africa, housed at the National English Literary Museum, and particularly the relationship between the founder of the museum and archive, Guy Butler, and how NELM has come to operate in the South African literary landscape in a post-colonial and post-apartheid moment. It is necessary to invoke the post-colonial moment from the outset in order to explore the question of post-colonial archives from a critical perspective.This research is informed by what has come to be known as the ‘archival turn,’ which considers the ‘meta-text’ of archival formation. The work investigates the locations of power and regularities of logic that have informed the collection of certain items and histories, and the neglect of others.

Guy Butler's Poetry and Poetics

Guy Butler, who was born and spent much of his life in the Eastern Cape, is an important South African poet. Yet his verse may seem unremarkable. Take ‘Servant Girl’, a poem written towards the beg...

English Academy Lecture Guy Butler's South Africanism: ‘Being present where you are’

A peer-reviewed lecture delivered at Rhodes University on the occasion of the presentation to Professor Wright of the English Academy's Gold Medal, 16 November 2011. Guy Butler (1918-2001) has been gone some ten years. This lecture sets out to illuminate the thinking behind his important role in South Africa's national life. The institutions he created continue to make vital cultural contributions in South Africa's efforts to make sense of its own complex historical make-up, working towards a happier, richer, and more equal future. However, despite what he achieved, there is little surety that today the rationale informing his massive effort to foster processes of artistic and cultural endeavour has been appreciated or accurately understood.

“Being present where you are”: Guy Butler's South Africanism (with notes on Kirkwood and Coetzee) Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life. By Chris Thurman. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010. 374pp.

This review article explores the roots of Guy Butler's unique contribution to South African culture and society. Concurring with Chris Thurman's affirmation in his book, Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life, that many of his critics have been ill-equipped to discern the central thrust of Butler's cultural life-work, the discussion links the many-faceted achievements of Butler's long career to that inner matrix of thought and feeling which drove his poetic and religious strivings, as well as his responses to the varied legacies of Western rationalism in social thought. To illustrate some of the misprisions which scar the work of his critics, notice is taken of dismissive and uncomprehending attacks mounted by commentators as different as Mike Kirkwood and J M Coetzee. The article concludes by affirming the continuing social relevance of Butler's contribution and legacy, expressed in his vigorous and enduring expression of a committed South Africanism.

‘In all of us two continents contend’: Re-examining the Legacy of Guy Butler

This article reviews the contribution of Guy Butler (1918-2001) to South African literature and cultural life over more than half a century. Concentrating on Butler's poetry, the paper argues that despite Butler's high-profile and at times controversial public role in the promotion of what he regarded as the humane and liberal values associated with his English heritage, the poetry reveals a deeply unquiet, private, and questing spirit seeking illumination and fulfilment as much in confessional verse as in religious certitude.

Through a different lens:

ABSTRACT Bongani Ndodana-Breen, born in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape in 1975, was educated at St Andrew's College in Grahamstown, Rhodes University (where he studied Music as an undergraduate), and the University of Stellenbosch (where he studied composition). He started composing in his late teens, and by 1998, aged only twenty-one, had won a Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award for Music. Acclaimed early work included the chamber opera Themba and Seliba (libretto by Gwyneth Lloyd; premiered in 1996), Uhambo – the pilgrimage, an opera-oratorio based on South African poet Guy Butler's long poem, Pilgrimage to Dias Cross, performed at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 1998 (Ndodana-Breen was Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year in the same year), and several orchestral and chamber works. He migrated to North America in 1997, and is currently Artistic Director of the Toronto-based contemporary music ensemble, MusicaNoir, which he co-founded in 2000, and which has developed a reputation for multimedia projects engaging with issues of cultural diversity and identity, with an emphasis on exploring cultural expressions of the African diaspora. For a comparatively young composer – thirty-two at the time of this interview – Ndodana-Breen has produced a large body of richly suggestive work, and worked with or had his work performed by an impressive selection of leading orchestras and ensembles – including the Belgian National Orchestra, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Natal Philharmonic, New York City's Vox Vocal Ensemble, Cape Town City Ballet, and Chicago's Cube Ensemble.

Shakespeare at the National Arts Festival, 2007 : theatre review

What is today the National Arts Festival began, in 1974, with a Shakespeare Festival organised by Professor Guy Butler and colleagues to inaugurate the Monument complex on Signal Hill overlooking Grahamstown. Though no longer the main offering, Shakespeare is still on the festival menu; there are no fewer than five 'Shakespearean' shows in 2007, and the bard's work has been Joburged, hiphopped, quarto'd, Zimbabwe'd and, would you believe it, even played 'straight'.

Guy Butler's Political Ecology: History, Appropriation, Alienation, Belonging

Summary This article explores various aspects of Guy Butler's “ecowriting” and “ecocriticism”. The first section considers his evocation of the relationship (or the rift) between natural history and human history. The second section addresses the problematic processes of “naming and taming” – subduing, controlling and claiming ownership of the land – and the ways in which these inform and are informed by conquest and colonisation. The third section weighs Butler's shifting responses to the (in)-hospitable African climate and landscape. In the fourth section, the ecological imperative driving much of Butler's work is shown to complement his efforts to overcome racial and cultural divides in South Africa.

Can the Sum of an Anthology be Greater Than Its Parts?

Stephen Gray's volume of interviews reflects a convergence of his oppor? tunities and his interests. It is organized chronologically and the earlier interviews are longer and more focused in their exploration of writers' work and ideas. Of the first twelve writers (Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Guy Butler, Douglas Livingstone, Sipho Sepamla, Fatima Dike, Alan Scholefield, Ross Devenish, Doris Lessing, Jeremy Cronin, Gcina Mhlophe, and Dennis Brutus), all but three were, when interviewed, resident in South Africa. Then there is a sudden shift and of the remaining eleven writers (Edouard J. Maunick, Taban Lo Liyong, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nuruddin Farah, Ahmadou

Africa, old and new: Guy Butler and ‘The African Renaissance’ – A long view

Guy Butler's place in South African and African literature is a contentious one. To some, he was a protean figure, a conscientious man of letters and action. To others, he was a colonial relic, a pale liberal best forgotten in the post-apartheid era. Nevertheless, throughout his life Butler attempted to resolve the conflict between global (European) and local (African) heritages, and his shifting responses to the dilemma serve as catalysts for an exploration of wider debates about ‘the African Renaissance’ in the twenty-first century. This article discusses both the ways in which Butler's depiction of Africa changed as he grew older and as South African society changed around him, and the extent to which the values he espoused remained consistent; finally, it assesses his response to the vision of an ‘African Renaissance’ – through a ‘long view of history’ incorporating contemporary cultural politics, archaeological perspectives and even insights from evolutionary biology.

Colonial intellectuals at the end of Empire: Manning Clark's Australia and Guy Butler's South Africa

Extracted from text ... Colonial intellectuals at the end of Empire: Manning Clark's Australia and Guy Butler's South Africa Jonathan Hyslop* It is increasingly coming to be recognised that one of the limitations of South African historiography is its insularity, although it remains uncertain how we might write South African history in a more `global' way. But one important dimension of the South Africa of the first half of the twentieth century that certainly needs to be reexamined is its position within the British Empire. In a world in which the nation state is the predominant unit, it is hard to keep in ..

Euripides in South Africa: Medea and Demea

With the abrogation of apartheid in South Africa, that country and its writers happily face new beginnings. But from 1948, when apartheid was first instituted, until its recent dismantling, the situation of the white writer in apartheid-ridden South Africa has been a difficult and complex one. Using the privileges given to men and women with white skins, understanding their access to publishers and to the literate world both within and beyond South Africa, the white writers largely directed their talents to reviling the very system and society that privileged them. To be a member of the dominant group and to challenge that dominance from within required nearly as much fortitude as attacking the dominant group and doing so from the ranks of the disadvantaged and oppressed. White writers such as Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Breyten Breytenbach, Andre Brink, Stephen Gray, J. M. Coetzee, Alan Paton, and Guy Butler used their writing to attack the apartheid system under which they have lived. As a result they had their works rejected and banned, and they themselves were sometimes imprisoned or placed under banning orders by their fellow whites. At the same time, they were reviled for their privileged white lives by their oppressed black and coloured fellow countrymen. The plight of white anti-establishment writers in South Africa was surely not an enviable one. Such writers had, furthermore, a double public, their own countrymen and the international community; and in many cases the writers wished not to plead South Africa's special circumstances but instead to use the South African situation to illuminate more universal truths. Among the most impressive white South African writers is Guy Butler, who had for decades used his position as a professor at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and his talents as a poet, playwright, historian, and belletrist to shape a view of a South African history colored as that history had been by racialism and by the formalization ofthat racialism into the 1948 and post1948

William Fulbecke: A New Shakespeare Source?

Journal Article William Fulbecke: A New Shakespeare Source? Get access Guy Butler Guy Butler Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 33, Issue 3, September 1986, Pages 363–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/33.3.363 Published: 01 September 1986

Reviews

Dominic Mulaisho, The Smoke that Thunders. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979. Christopher Heywood, ed., Aspects of South African Literature. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976. Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Guy Butler and Chris Mann, eds., A New Book of South African Verse. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1979.