T.T. Cloete as literary critic, theoretician and historian (Part 1): Columns, anthologies and literary criticism

Abstract

This article deals with the narrative approach in scholarship. Narrative research had seldom been seen as explanatory, but rather descriptive and in general had an emancipatory aim in the sense that absent or marginalised ‘stories’ were foregrounded. According to Hyvärinen (2006:2011) there had been not one but four ‘narrative turns’ since 1960: in narratology, historiography, methodology and in the social sciences. This article falls in the ambit of a narrative methodology by its personal approach, use of a case study and by its focus on a neglected aspect of the oeuvre of T.T. Cloete. Siegfried Schmidt, in Hjort (1992:225–249), discerned four ‘roles’ within the Literary System, that of literary production, dissemination, reception and literary processing. According to this definition T.T. Cloete, the well-known author and critic, played all of these roles. In the first part of the article the focus was mainly on Cloete as the writer of columns, anthologist, creative writer and literary critic.