Paul Walters

Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. (Rhodes)

email address: p.walters@ru.ac.za

Teaching & Research Interests: American literature (especially Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner); narratology; Renaissance literature; the transformation of teaching and learning styles in the field of English at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.

Professor Walters' most recent publications include papers on pre-primary and primary school education in South Africa, the teaching of literature in South African schools, and the teaching of American literature in South African schools.

Academic Articles

(With Mark Ranier) "The Myth of Graduate Unemployment and the Teaching of English Literature." Rebranding English. Proceedings of the Conference of AUETSA. University of the Witwatersrand. July 2001. ed. Jessica Tiffin. Cape Town. University of Cape Town, April 2004.

P.S. Walters, A. van der Vlies, T. van Niekerk, C. Hornby (eds.) Romantics and Revolutionaries. Proceedings of the 1998 AUETSA Conference. Rhodes University. Grahamstown.

"Why Teach American Literature in South Africa Today? Some Preliminary Answers." Fissions and Fusions : Procedings of the First Conference of the Cape American Studies Association. Ed. Lesley Marx, Loes Nas and Lara Dunwell. UWC: 1997.

"Issues in English Language Teaching in Primary Schools" in V. de Klerk (ed.) Varieties of English Around the World (Vol.15): Focus on Southern Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996.

"Bizarre Combinations : ex-DET Pupils in Clase Model C Schools at Std 6 : Some problems and attempted solutions." Journal for Language Teaching. 28.2 (199): 176-191.

With L.Quinn. "Survival in the Multi-lingual Classroom: teachers share some strategies." CRUX. 28.3 (199): 27-30.

“Access to Std 6: some linguistic barriers." CRUX. 27-2 (May 1993): 17-28.

"Bizarre Combinations : ex-DET Pupils in Clase Model C Schools at Std 6 : Some problems and attempted solutions." Proceedings of the 12th SAALA Conference. UPE (1993): 208-222.

"The Child with Special Needs." The Pre-School Years. 22 (1992): 17-19.

With V. England. "The Teaching of English Literature in Black High Schools. Report of an HSRC Larger Grant Research Project, 1988. Working Document. Grahamstown: ISEA, Rhodes University, 1991: 741.

With V. England. "The Teaching of English Literature in Black High School: Notes towards an Empirical Study." Teaching English Literature in South Africa. Ed. L.S. Wright. Grahamstown: ISEA, Rhodes University, 1990: 204-231.

"The Molteno Project : Teacher Development beyond the intensive in-service course." Proceedings of a conference on the professional growth and development of teachers, Technikon Natal. 1989: 139-148.

“Seventeenth Century Spirituality." Lecture 24 on John Donne and George Herbert. Christian Spirituality. Course 376, Theological Education by Extension College, 1989.

"Student Writing and the Treatment of Error." Aspects (Bulletin of the Academic Support Programmes at UTASA Universities). 5 (1986).

"An Applied Linguistic Approach to 'Practical Criticism'," CRUX. 20 (4 October 1986): 57-61.

Editor, Teaching at Rhodes. 2.2 (October 1985).

"Aims, Objectives and Assessment." Teaching at Rhodes. 2.2 (October 1985): 14-16.

"Dickens, Hard Times, and Education."A Collection of Lectures. Rank Xerox Schools' Festival of English: 1820 Foundation, 1981: 73-78.

"Some Problems of Identity and Vocation in Great Expectations." A Collection of Lectures. Rank Xerox Schools' Festival of English: 1820 Foundation, 1980: 51-53.

"Some Thoughts on Teaching the Novel." ELTIC Reporter. 4 (May 1979): 21-23.

"Hallowed Ground: Group Areas in the Structure and Theme of Absalom, Absalom!" Theoria. XLVII (October 1976): 35-56.

"I hate odes..." (The Odes of John Keats)." CRUX. 5 (Jan-March 1971): 5-14.

"Theory and Practice in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury." English Studies in Africa. 10 (March 1967): 22-39.

________________________________________

Public Lectures and Conference Papers
(With Jeremy Fogg) "A Promise, Paternity and a Pair of Jaeger Pyjamas." English Academy / AUETSA Conference. UCT, July 2005.

"Teaching/Reading/Producing The Crucible in a Society where Witchcraft is Practised." Annual Conference, University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA. March 1998. (Paper read by Prof. Albert Wertheim, University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA.)

Conference Chair/Organiser, AUETSA Conference: "Romantics and Revolutionaries." Rhodes University, July 1998.

“English in Africa 2000 : Towards a New Millennium.” Inaugural lecture, Rhodes University,
1988: 34.

Research Seminar: 19 March 2013, Department of English

English Honours Seminar Room

17h15

All welcome

Writing revolution, failing, changing gear: the manuscript revisions of Waiting for the Barbarians

Prof David Attwell

Biography: Prof Attwell is Chair of Modern Literature, Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the Univeristy of York. He is currently on a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to write a critical biography of J. M. Coetzee, focussing on the genesis of the major novels.

‌English Department Research Seminar
14 March 2013
17h15
The Department of English Common Room
All Welcome

Merlin in the North:
History and Prophecy in Medieval Scandinavia
Sometime between 1123 and 1139, in Oxford, a man named Geoffrey of Monmouth
finished an historical work of dubious veracity known as the 'Historia regum Britanniae'
(the 'History of the Kings of Britain'). So popular was the work that some 217
manuscripts containing it have been listed, with about a third of those dating from before
the end of the 12th century. The book was translated into a wide array of languages,
including German, Italian, French, Welsh, and Old Norse. It was a medieval bestseller,
and the foundation upon which almost all subsequent Arthurian material is based.
Embedded in the larger work was a section called the 'Prophetiae Merlini' (the
'Prophecies of Merlin').
This presentation describes and analyses the interface between Old Norse vernacular
literature and Latin historiography. It also examines the variant approaches to history and
fiction that these two traditions maintain. In doing so the presentation illuminates some
of the more interesting facets of Old Norse literature, and also some of the problems
raised by medieval translation theory.

‌

English Department Research Seminar: 28 February 2013, 17h15

Department Common Room

Frontier Fictions: Settler Stories and the Origins of White Guilt

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (University of North Dakota)

Abstract: In this presentation, Weaver-Hightower will give an overview of her book, Frontier Fictions, which offers a comparative reading of South African, Australian, US, and Canadian books about settlement in what Mary Louise Pratt has called “the contact zone.” Weaver-Hightower will discuss her methodology and process before giving a more detailed reading of her argument, with a focus on 19^th century Anglophone South African literature. In particular, this paper will address the role of literature in managing the guilt and anxiety resulting from settlement by looking at how narratives function like defense mechanisms. This book, Weaver-Hightower will explain, comes from her attempt to address the nagging question of the sources (historical, psychological, and cultural) of what twentieth century conservatives call “white guilt.”

Biography: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is an Associate Professor of English specializing in postcolonial studies at the University of North Dakota. Her book Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest (Minnesota 2007), analyzes how island castaway tales presented fantasies that made the expansion of empire more palatable. Her current work analyzes Australian, South African, Canadian, and U.S. frontier literatures for how certain stories helped those cultures to process the guilt from the displacement of indigenous peoples during colonial settlement. She is also currently co-editing a volume on postcolonial film with Peter Hulme entitled Postcolonial Film and has recently co-edited a special journal issue on Australian literature. Weaver-Hightower has published more than a dozen essays on Caribbean, Irish, Australian, African, and British literatures and film; and she is Book Reviews editor of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She enjoys traveling internationally (most often to South Africa, Australia, and England) to work with dusty old books in archives and learn about the cultures of the places about which she reads and writes.

Paul Walters

Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. (Rhodes)

email address: p.walters@ru.ac.za

Academic Articles

Oxford Award for Excellence

DAVID ATTWELL

RUSSELL COMRIE

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

THANK YOU

Contact Us

2013 SEMINARS

Paul Walters

Professor EmeritusPh.D. (Rhodes)

email address: p.walters@ru.ac.za

Academic Articles

Oxford Award for Excellence

DAVID ATTWELL

RUSSELL COMRIE

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

THANK YOU

Contact Us

2013 SEMINARS

Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. (Rhodes)