The Worlding of the South African Novel

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.

Autorentext

Jane Poyner is Senior Lecturer in World and Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published essays on South African literature and culture, including several books on J. M. Coetzee. She also writes on issues of environmental justice.

Klappentext

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 Africäs 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 Africä. 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.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction: Spaces of Transition: the Worlding of the South African Novel.- Chapter 2: Zakes Mda's Black Intellectuals: Utopia and the Public Sphere in Ways of Dying and The Whale Caller.- Chapter 3: Fictions of Terror: the Worlding of South African Fiction.- Chapter 4: Theatres of Truth in the Post-Apartheid Novel.- Chapter 5: White (Dis)Possession in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf and Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor : Land, Race, Class.- Chapter 6: South African AIDS Narratives and the Question of Modernity.- Chapter 7: Environmental Racism and the Post-Apartheid Novel.- Chapter 8: Art, Visual Culture and the Work of Cultural Memory in Ivan Vladislavi's Portrait with Keys (2006).