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The Past Coming to Roost in the Present

The Past Coming to Roost in the Present PDF Author: Adrian Knapp
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3898216861
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Since the final demise of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has undergone dramatic changes in the political, social, and economic sphere. It is not surprising that these changes have also resulted in contentious reassessments of recent history. Many contemporary South African writers have taken up the challenge and created works offering new ways of critically re-imagining the country's violent past. While André P. Brink's "Imaginings of Sand" and Zakes "Mda's Ways of Dying" constitute renegotiations of the past during the period of transition, J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" and Phaswane Mpe's "Welcome to our Hillbrow" represent deliberations of a past that has been hampered in its change by a flawed transition. Just as history can never be taken at face value and never constitutes a finite, all-inclusive narration of the past, the 'historical accounts' provided in these texts often present a one-sided picture of history when considered only on their representational level. On the metafictional level, however, these texts often put such 'misreadings' into perspective and, in doing so, open up an otherwise monochrome reflection of South Africa's rainbow.

The Past Coming to Roost in the Present

The Past Coming to Roost in the Present PDF Author: Adrian Knapp
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3898216861
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Since the final demise of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has undergone dramatic changes in the political, social, and economic sphere. It is not surprising that these changes have also resulted in contentious reassessments of recent history. Many contemporary South African writers have taken up the challenge and created works offering new ways of critically re-imagining the country's violent past. While André P. Brink's "Imaginings of Sand" and Zakes "Mda's Ways of Dying" constitute renegotiations of the past during the period of transition, J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" and Phaswane Mpe's "Welcome to our Hillbrow" represent deliberations of a past that has been hampered in its change by a flawed transition. Just as history can never be taken at face value and never constitutes a finite, all-inclusive narration of the past, the 'historical accounts' provided in these texts often present a one-sided picture of history when considered only on their representational level. On the metafictional level, however, these texts often put such 'misreadings' into perspective and, in doing so, open up an otherwise monochrome reflection of South Africa's rainbow.

Imaginings Of Sand

Imaginings Of Sand PDF Author: André Brink
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446466469
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
THE BOOK: A narrative counterpoint between two women, two South Africas. Kristien Muller returns from London to her homeland to fulfil a promise. Her grandmother lies on her deathbed unleashing a turmult of myth, legend and brute fact. Confronted by the realities of a land hurtling towards change, Kristien discovers that the present holds its own moments of savagery. A searing panorama of South Africa's experience, reminiscent in its political & imaginative scope of Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

Convergences and Interferences

Convergences and Interferences PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004333207
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time? This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.

Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel

Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel PDF Author:
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 940120845X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
The contributions to this volume probe the complex relationship of trauma, memory, and narrative. By looking at the South African situation through the lens of trauma, they make clear how the psychic deformations and injuries left behind by racism and colonialism cannot be mended by material reparation or by simply reversing economic and political power-structures. Western trauma theories – as developed by scholars such as Caruth, van der Kolk, Herman and others – are insufficient for analysing the more complex situation in a postcolony such as South Africa. This is because Western trauma concepts focus on the individual traumatized by a single identifiable event that causes PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). What we need is an understanding of trauma that sees it not only as a result of an identifiable event but also as the consequence of an historical condition – in the case of South Africa, that of colonialism, and, more specifically, of apartheid. For most black and coloured South Africans, the structural violence of apartheid’s laws were the existential condition under which they had to exist. The living conditions in the townships, pass laws, relocation, and racial segregation affected great parts of the South African population and were responsible for the collective traumatization of several generations. This trauma, however, is not an unclaimed (and unclaimable) experience. Postcolonial thinkers who have been reflecting on the experience of violence and trauma in a colonial context, writing from within a Fanonian tradition, have, on the contrary, believed in the importance of reclaiming the past and of transcending mechanisms of victimization and resentment, so typical of traumatized consciousnesses. Narration and the novel have a decisive role to play here.

Readings of the Particular

Readings of the Particular PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401204071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The present collection aims at throwing light on transculturality and the identities and masks that people put on, in writing as much as in life, in an age of global levelling and the struggle for a particular place in a postcolonial world. Topics covered include: North African identity in France; cultural citizenship and the Asian diaspora; novels of beur self-identity by Maghrebi immigrants in France; Scottish fiction, Britain and Empire; memory, amnesia, and the re-invention of the past in South Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere; borders, necrophilia and history in Southern African fiction; encodings of female control; spectating in black documentary cinema; theatre, performance, and the Western presence in Africa; masks, history, transtextuality, and other aspects of Irish poetry and drama; the masking and unmasking of identity in the African-American novel; violence and Titus Andronicus in black Nova Scotian poetry; notions of the national and of indigeneity in contemporary Canadian drama; Native Canadians, space, and the city. Authors and artists treated include: William Boyd; André Brink; George Elliott Clarke; David Dabydeen; Ralph Ellison; Bessie Head; Seamus Heaney; Tomson Highway; Isaac Julien; Daniel David Moses; Paul Muldoon; Albert Murray; Jean Rhys; Sir Walter Scott; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Wright; and W.B. Yeats.

Body, Sexuality, and Gender

Body, Sexuality, and Gender PDF Author: Flora Veit-Wild
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042016264
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Contains reflections on body, sexuality, and gender in African literary texts. While the sections 'Gifted Bodies' and 'Queered Bodies' show new developments in viewing body and sexuality as creative powers, the sections 'Tainted Bodies' and 'Violated Bodies' comprise essays that investigate the exposure of the body to physical aggression and other traumatic experiences.

Storyscapes

Storyscapes PDF Author: Hein Viljoen
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820467894
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
In Storyscapes we listen carefully to what South African writers reveal about themselves and their relations to South African space since the democratic transition of 1994. One main focus is the power of stories to uncover contradictory processes and investments of identity and to point readers toward a more meaningful life. Another main focus is the complexities of the post-colonial understanding of South African land, landscape, and space. Space in relation to race, class, and gender identity figures prominently in analyses and comparisons of diverse South African texts, such as Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart, André Brink's Imaginings of Sand, as well as the important South African subgenre of the farm novel. Questions of black or hybrid identity are highlighted by confronting older texts with new ones by black and women writers such as A.H.M. Scholtz and E.K.M. Dido. These texts - and a number of Afrikaans texts that are less well-known in the English-speaking world - are set in the wider frameworks of postcolonial criticism and global issues of cultural identity.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory PDF Author: Elleke Boehmer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441104305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist André Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel PDF Author: John J. Su
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, the postmodern and the postcolonial. As both an insightful critique into the themes that drive a range of today's best novelists and a bold restatement of what the imagination is and what it means for contemporary culture, this book breaks new ground in the study of twenty-first-century literature.

Coterminous Worlds

Coterminous Worlds PDF Author: E. Linguanti
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042004481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
The present collection of essays endeavours to furnish informed responses to central questions posed by the editors: Is the fact that the marvellous coexists with the factual and never resolves itself into the supernatural an indication that the whole literary project of 'magical realism' is an instrumental and representational form which can be regarded as particularly suitable for reconciling dichotomies and oppositions otherwise experienced as intolerable? Was 'magical realism' an explosive process in cultural dynamics, taking place at intersections of heterogeneous cultures most favourable to the efflorescence of this type of literature? The authors of the various essays - on Patrick White and David Malouf, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Salman Rushdie, Janet Frame, Wilson Harris and others - provide a dynamic focus on the reality at stake beneath the surface representations of 'magical realism' in post-colonial literatures.