Literature Struggles
To Belong to South Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6091600 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Chapman (0000-0002-1299-8336, 1 Durban University of Technology South Africa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 237-257 |
| Publication date | 2020-02-13 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Matatu (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0932-9714 • E-ISSN: 1875-7421 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/18757421-05002003 |
| OpenAlex | W3006091664 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 1 |
Literature struggles in South Africa—or, struggles of interpretation?—evince, and continue to evince, a thematic and stylistic impulse to belong to a common society, but, paradoxically, a society that is often more disjunctive than conjunctive. How, then, to belong? I trace the trajectory from the black-and-white voices of the 1970s to a more heterogeneous conception of the society, after apartheid, and particularly over the last decade, or so. What is peculiar about literature struggles is that the heroic mode has played a relatively marginal role in sense-making or imaginative projection; rather, the critical insight ensures that political language—too often crude in its singularities of either/or—has seldom enjoyed the unalloyed assent of literary language. Considerations of nation-building hardly feature alongside the concerns of living in a functioning society
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Salient · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · South African History and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |