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.
It had already been stated that Siegfried Schmidt (in Hjort 1992) 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, had played all of these roles. In this second part of a two-part article the focus is on Cloete as a literary historian and in particular on his theoretical (methodological) perceptions pertaining to literary history. It is abundantly clear that in all of his different roles a historical awareness was always present. For Cloete the literary work of art was inbedded in a historical timeframe which imposed hermeneutical imperatives on the critic; on the other hand the literary work of art is present in the here and now and accessible to any skilled reader. One of the objectives of this study is to argue that there was thus an implied dichotomy in Cloete’s thinking on literary history. On the one hand there had been a relativistic view that positioned literary texts in the past, and on the other hand a normative view that implied that certain texts (due to inherent qualities like integration and complexity) could gain a certain permanence. In the last part of this article-true to the narrative approach, an implied confrontation with Cloete’s (methodological) views of literary history lead to a personal standpoint as a confrontation with the self (cf. Sools 2009:27). This explication of a personal view on the writing of a literary history (as an implied homage to Cloete) concluded the article.
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