The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since                1945

Cornwell, Gareth; Klopper, Dirk; MacKenzie, C. Ronald

doi:10.7312/corn13046

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Critical responses have indexed the intensity of frustration and anomy that the narration inspires by ungenerously interpreting it as a flaw in the novel's realism. To Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie, Liz is merely “a typical Gordimer narrator: cold, knowing, even smug, but frustrated, desperate, full of self‐loathing” (2010, p. 11). They characterise the novel as a “bleak and unforgiving narrativ[e]”, lacking the “intimate… textures of real life” (pp.…”

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Narratorial disidentification in the midst of this lack of agency thus draw the reader towards the sense of exteriority represented by the PAC activist whom Liz ends up helping. Life and reality are indeed elsewhere, outside the world of narration, so that it is entirely apt that the narrative is not “charged with … the intimate … textures of real life” (Cornwell et al., 2010, p. 12). In The Late Bourgeois World narratorial disidentification reflects the limitations of realist narration within this context, producing a novel that “performs the useful function of confessing with maximum honesty its own poverty and the poverty of its times” (Hesse, cited in Attwell, 2020, p. 283).…”

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

Emmett

2022

Literature Compass

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Entrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself-with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi-peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus's The Stranger can be productively re-read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists-from Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World under apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb's Playing in The Light and

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Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modernism In the Late Bourgeois Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

Emmett

2022

Literature Compass

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“…Only a story inset within Van Wyk’s “miniature” might be considered a flash. Nor is flash fiction discussed in the major post-apartheid literary histories (Attwell and Attridge, 2012; Chapman, 2003/1996; Cornwell et al, 2010; Van Wyk Smith, 1990). The South African flash has not been regarded as a serious form; but it is also the case that most of these landmark anthologies and histories were compiled too early to catch its remarkable burgeoning from the mid-2000s.…”

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confidence: 99%

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

Blair

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article begins with a survey of flash fiction in "post-transitional" South Africa, which it relates to the nation's post-apartheid canon of short stories and short-short stories, to the international rise of flash fiction and "sudden fiction", and to the historical particularities of South Africa's "post-transition". It then undertakes close readings of three flash fictions republished in the article, each less than 450 words: Tony Eprile's "The interpreter for the tribunal" (2007), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green's "Music for a new society" (2008), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime and the "'new' South Africa"; and Stacy Hardy's "Kisula" (2015), which maps the psychogeography of cross-racial sex and transnational identity-formation in an evolving urban environment. The article argues that these exemplary flashes are "hypercompressions", in that they compress and develop complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. It therefore contends that flash fiction of SouthAfrica's post-transition should be recognized as having literary-historical significance, not just as an inherently metonymic form that reflects, and alludes to, a broader literary culture, but as a genre in its own right.

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Anglophone Literature of South Africa

Blair¹

2021

A Companion to African Literatures

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The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

Inequality, legitimacy and disidentification: From South African to global modernism

Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

Anglophone Literature of South Africa

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