Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2114151
Ileana Dimitriu
The article focuses on Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus while referring also to the earlier two novels in what is called the ‘Jesus trilogy’. Instead of pursuing the trail of literary studies – novels of migration, of the postcolonies of the South, of whether in their formal representation the novels are allegories or not allegories – I turn towards religious studies. As the novels do, I grant significance to Coetzee’s ideas on a moral education in contexts of ideological duplicity; on the struggle of the soul between passion and reason; and on a message that society anticipates from an exceptional child who wishes to be a saviour. Beneath such concerns, I argue, we encounter the palimpsest of an older story: that of Jesus of Nazareth, to which the name ‘Jesus’ in the title of each novel should have pointed us but did not. Like the almost invisible author, the reader in secular times is reluctant, perhaps, to venture beyond earthly belief and engage with the challenge of what Walter Benjamin termed the ‘spiritual rag picker’ of ‘weak messianic power’. How does The Death of Jesus, or indeed Coetzee, struggle with such a challenge?
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Pub Date : 2022-04-11DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2022.2030292
(2022). Editor's Notes. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 1-1.
(2022)。编者笔记。《当代写作:南部非洲的文本与接受》，第34卷第1期，第1-1页。
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035072
Laura A. Zander
For over 60 years, Nadine Gordimer has chronicled South Africa’s changing political climate. Her final novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), has therefore been received primarily as fictionalised historiography that traces and reflects on the woes and the accomplishments of the young democracy. However, so far, this narrow emphasis on historical reality has led to the neglect of the imaginative vision of the novel. I would like, instead, to pursue two contrastive readings. In ‘Writing Back,’ I will read the novel as political chronicle and lay out to what degree it advocates historical contingency. In reflecting on the ‘present’ as perennially troubled by former apartheid policy, it provides insight into the specific historical period of the first decade of the new millennium. In ‘Reading Forward,’ I will shift the focus to Gordimer’s aesthetics, in particular her language, style and character conceptualisation to align Gordimer’s political project with her aesthetic one, ultimately allowing for form and content to be framed as one intricate coherent whole.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2034892
M. Chapman
Responding to the theme of this issue, ‘The Last 30 Years: Looking Back, Going Forward’, the article assesses the work of several writers of fiction who have garnered attention in both South African-based literary journals and literary journals abroad: Vladislavić, Wicomb, Van Niekerk, Krog, Mda, and, under the grouping ‘“A Tumultuous Urbanism”, and More’, Mhlongo, Mpe, Duiker, Galgut, Beukes, and Matlwa as well as others of briefer reference. The fiction is considered in relation to the predominant interpretative frame of the last thirty years: namely, the ‘postcolonial’.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035078
Wamuwi Mbao
The awarding of a prize to a work of art is meant to convey something about the value of that work in the world. But art prizes always provoke questions that evade easy answering: what purpose do prizes serve? What visions of life are promoted when we choose one book over another? How do the judges arrive at their choices? This response tells a partial story about the process of judging a literary award and what informs the event of decision-making. I frame the exercise as an illuminating immersion in the mood and feeling of the literature currently being published in South Africa.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035076
Alana Muller
While the term ‘Afrofuturism’ has entered the global popular lexicon and is appropriately used to describe films like Black Panther, the term’s descriptive potential is necessarily culturally bound. In this article, I argue that the term is bound to an African-American context and that it cannot slip shoddily be applied to futuristic texts by African creatives in Africa. To problematise the term’s application in an African context, I provide an historical overview of futuristic speculative fictions (novels, films, and video games) from southern Africa, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding with the present.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929x.2022.2034902
K. Goddard
This article explores aspects of what JM Coetzee might mean by ‘grace’ in his novel Disgrace (1999). It suggests that the primary definition of grace in the novel is the traditional one of ‘love,’ but more importantly, selfless love. As a result, the novel’s focus is on the close association between the physical and the spiritual, particularly in David Lurie’s ‘spiritual’ journey. At the foundation of this exploration lie the three writers about whom Lurie has written books as well as the bible and its associated ‘sacred history’ (heilsgeschichte). Boito the opera creator, Richard of St Victor the medieval mystic, and William Wordsworth, in their own different ways can be seen as influences on the definition of grace and love in the novel. The argument concludes by suggesting that Lurie comes to see that neither physical love, nor art, nor even the love of animals is an entirely adequate means of grace. Only the isolated, pared-down self, willing to take the Other into itself, might experience grace, but in Coetzee’s world, there is no certainty.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035073
E. Nabutanyi
The recurrence of the theme of sexual violence in recent South African fiction has elevated sexual violence to a symbol of apartheid’s legacy of patriarchy. Although texts that feature sexual violence are often analysed as allegories of the legacy of apartheid’s patriarchal control and racial domination, I argue that texts like Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples de-allegorise and/or de-politicise sexual violence. Rather than read The Smell of Apples as an exculpatory narrative of white South Africa’s complicity in apartheid’s atrocities, I argue that Behr’s depiction of sexual violence in a space where the child is supposed to be safe and by a perpetrator who is known to the victim and from whom the victim expects protection complicates the South African rape narrative. Thus, I contend that Behr crafts an ingenious and nuanced register for his witness-protagonist to subvert the muzzling power of the rapist-father to disclose the horror of sexual abuse for both victim and witness.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035075
D. Demir, O. Moreillon
Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 has, Michael Chapman, argues, both quantitatively and qualitatively departed from South Africa’s literary output in the preceding decade. This development has been tentatively labelled as the beginning of the ‘post-transitional’ phase within South African Literature by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie. Conceiving of it as a temporal marker rather than an artistic movement, they describe the post-transitional writing as one ‘which is often unfettered to the past in the way that much apartheid writing was, but may still reconsider it in new ways. Equally it may ignore it all together’ (2010:2). While Frenkel and McKenzie identify an aesthetic/stylistic shift, Margaret Lenta observes that authors of this new wave have broadened the understanding of ‘South Africanness’ by not shying away from formerly tabooed topics, such as intercultural and same-sex relationships or the marginalisation of women. We suggest a more panoptic view by adopting a 'world-literary' approach. We opt for a (more) ‘distant close reading’, where ‘distant’, as suggested by Franco Moretti, involves the engagement with, or reading of, a greater number of texts under the auspices of various thematic and formal aspects. In order to do so, we follow the Warwick Research Collective in its theorisation of World-Literature as ‘the Literature of the world-system – of the modern capitalist world-system’ (2015: 8).
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