The Worlding of the South African Novel
The Worlding of the South African Novel

Author: Jane Poyner

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-20

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3030419371

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The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”. The mediatising of truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping for “unimagined communities” of an inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature to register the “shock” of an uneven modernity produced by a capitalist world economy.

A World of Strangers
A World of Strangers

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2002-10-07

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0747559988

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Toby Hood, a young Englishman, shuns the politics and the causes his liberal parents passionately support. Living in Johannesburg as a representative of his family's publishing company, Toby moves easily, carelessly, between the complacent wealthy white suburbs and the seething, vibrantly alive black townships. His friends include a wide variety of people, from mining directors to black journalists and musicians, and Toby's colonial-style weekends are often interspersed with clandestine evenings spent in black shanty towns. Toby's friendship with Steven Sithole, a dashing, embittered young African, touches him in ways he never thought possible, and when Steven's own sense of independence from the rules of society leads to tragedy, Toby's life is changed forever.

The Late Bourgeois World
The Late Bourgeois World

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1408836009

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Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues.Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the Black Nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take such a risk in the face of Max's example of the uselessness of such actions? Yet ... how can she not?

None to Accompany Me
None to Accompany Me

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0374707529

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None to Accompany Me is arresting and reverbant - perhaps the most powerful novel to date by one of the world's most commanding writers. In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation into the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land.

On Literary Attachment in South Africa
On Literary Attachment in South Africa

Author: Michael Chapman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1000431797

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This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child". A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility? Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.

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

Author:

Publisher: Brill

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 940120845X

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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.

The Rights of Desire
The Rights of Desire

Author: André Philippus Brink

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13:

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Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. Retired, widower, son's emigrating, others' emigrated. Tessa comes knocking looking for lodging.