Literary Transactions in South Africa

A representative overview of some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary literary criticism in South Africa, demonstrating literary form's shaping power in the interpretation of politically contentious content. Rather than pressing literature into the service of a political cause or programme, this study's purpose - its politics of interpretation - is to open literature to the potential of human experience in both the personal and the public life. The society of focus - South Africa - is a society of political contestation. Instead of prioritizing the what of contestation, however, Michael Chapman explores contestation through the how of the literary work. In sharp transactions between an intransitivity of form and a compulsion to communicate, the book elucidates an ethics of aesthetics in J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, and the best of modernism and the worst of modernism in Roy Campbell's poetry. It also asks: Can Themba's 'style' of the shebeens in the 1950s be re-visited in a contemporary context of gender-based abuse? Why or how are Ellen Kuzwayo and Mtutuzeli Matshoba, writing in the 'struggle' years of the 1970s, simultaneously less than artists and more than artists? Has the interpretative frame of the 'postcolonial' best served fiction after apartheid? What language of interpretation best releases the voices of contemporary women's poetry: a poetry which in its play on identities and identifications looks both inwards to its locality and outwards to the globe? Alert to both South Africa's colonial past and its assertions of today, Literary Transactions in South Africa pursues the challenge of interpreting a literature of disjuncture between Africa and the West, or the South and the North.

Michael Chapman is Professor and Researcher-in-Residence at Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Prior to his current position, he was Professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly University of Natal), South Africa. His publications include over 100 journal articles and six monographs, including most recently On Literary Attachment in South Africa: Tough Love (2021).

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Literature in History 1. The 'Oral' in the South of Africa: Usable Pasts, Translation, Transaction 2. Thomas Pringle, An 'Unsettling' Settler: Literature in History 3. Africanism and Westernism: Interpreting, Evaluating S. E. K. Mqhayi Part II. Styles of the Times 4. The Best of Modernism and the Worst of Modernism: Roy Campbell, A Politically Incorrect Poet 5. Gender-based Abuse, the Sophiatown Shebeens, and Presentism in Can Themba's Stories Beyond 'The Suit' 6. The Story of Community: 'To be less than an artist to be more than an artist' 7. Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee: An Aesthetics of Necessity Part III. After Postcolonialism? 8. After Coetzee, After Postcolonialism: Writing Fiction, Interpreting Fiction 9. Transactions of the Local and the Global: Writing, Interpreting Poetry Notes References Index