Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.39 (925 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0198793766 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-04-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
At the leading edge of work answering this need comes Present Imperfect. "In Present Imperfect, Andrew van der Vlies provides an insightful, absorbing and theoretically astute investigation of the status of contemporary South African literature, adopting as a revealing lens through which to examine this body of remarkable writing the idea of 'disappointment', anaffective response to the failure of the New South Africa to live up to the hopes with which it was born and a marker of the distinctive temporality of this phase in the country's history." --Derek Attridge, Professor Emeritus, University of York"Twenty years after the transition to democracy in Sou
It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoe Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a
Andrew van der Vlies, Reader in Global Anglophone Literature and Theory, Department of English, Queen Mary University of London & Extraordinary Associate Professor, Department of English, University of the Western CapeAndrew van der Vlies is Reader in Global Anglophone Literature and Theory in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London and Extraordinary Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is the author of South African Te