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Prof 

Addison, Catherine

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department: English
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2492-0402
Research Interest(s): Ecocriticism, The novel and narrative theory, The verse-novel, Byron and other romantic poets, Neo-classical
Biography: After studying at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, up to the level of MA in English literature, Catherine Addison did her PhD in Canada, at the University of British Columbia. Later she graduated with a second MA, in General Linguistics, from the University of Stellenbosch. Because her doctoral thesis was on Byron, much of her research has focused on his poetry and that of other British Romantics. However, she has also diversified widely from this original specialisation, publishing as well on Early Modern, Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist literature; colonial and postcolonial writing; the prose novel; gender and African women’s fiction; and formal aspects of literature such as versification, narrative, simile and irony. In 2017 she published a book on the history of the verse-novel. She is at present working on a second book, on Romantic and Renaissance women warriors.
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2020 - 20232
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    Radical feminism and androcide in Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero
    2020
     | Taylor & Francis
    Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi, has been neglected by African feminist commentary, probably because of its radicalism. 20th-century African feminisms, under different names and descriptions, generally advocated a moderate approach to gender relations, refusing to exclude or stigmatize men. However, a change is underway in the attitudes of younger African feminists, especially in South Africa, as the recent #MenAreTrash and #AmINext hashtags and protests about rape culture have demonstrated. The protagonist of Saadawi’s novel, Firdaus, who discovers her true vocation in the action of killing a man, matches and outstrips the anger of these younger feminists. So radical is Woman at Point Zero that it appears to advocate androcide as a response to patriarchy, which, to Firdaus, represents multiple types of abuse and injustice, including capitalism. This paper explores degrees of feminist radicalism as well as developments in African feminist thought, before considering Woman at Point Zero as an example of the radical extreme whose time may have come. The novel exists, if not as a provocation to direct action, at least as a terrible warning to men – and members of other genders – and hence as a trigger of radical change.
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    Post-dictatorship protest and ecocriticism in selected works of Ogaga Ifowodo
    2023
     | Noyam Journals
    This article explored selected poems of the Nigerian poet and activist, Ogaga Ifowodo, in order to highlight the writer’s yet under-researched but invaluable contributions to the country’s evolving cultural archive. Following a concise survey of existing commentary on Ifowodo’s work, the study argued that his protest poetry, prison narratives and eco-critical criticism deserve greater scholastic attention and scrutiny for the ways in which they imaginatively document the tumultuous political repression in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that his engagement with the ecological and socio-economic fall-out of oil exploration in the country’s Niger Delta region from which he hails marks his oeuvre as a unique contribution to contemporary reconstructions of Nigerian nationhood situated in the intersections between literary historicisation, political resistance as well as cultural and eco-critical activism.
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