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An audacious departure for the internationally acclaimed South African novelist--a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today's headlines. Who was Christo Mercer, and why was he brutally stabbed to death in a remote Saharan town? For Robert Poley, an unhappy writer of political thril-lers, the welcome distraction posed by this question has become an obsession. With the mysterious delivery of a laptop computer and a cryptic E-mail message, he finds himself slowly entwined in the vagaries that constituted Mercer's life and death. An illegal-arms trader haunted by his nightmares, his past, and his clandestine involvement with a ruthless rebel-- and with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great --Mercer lived on the grand stage of history, yet remained obscured by shadows until his seemingly fated demise. Now, piece by piece, in a complex web of social, political, personal, and fictional disclosures, the intricacies of Mercer's troubled psyche begin to reveal a pattern as corrupt as South Africa's in the aftermath of apartheid--years of judicial inquiry, the Truth Commission, and continued social unrest. With alchemical bravura, Mike Nicol turns history into fiction and fiction into history, bringing to allegorical life the haunting story of a murder emblematic of South Africa's recent past. From the Hardcover edition.
A study of the use of history as political ammunition and literature as historical counter-discourse in Mongane Serote's "Gods of Our Time", Mike Nicol's "The Ibis Tapestry", and Zakes Mda's "Ways of Dying". Moslund shows how literary engagement with the past seeks to rupture the continuity of a strongly dichotomised epistemology and through that dissolve the inherited polarisation of society. Falsification of history is exposed as constructed discourse and past simplifications of reality as sharply demarcated into homogenous self-justifying, categorisations of, Us against Them, are challenged with paradox, doubt and introspection.
This second collection, complementing ASNEL Papers 9.1, covers a similar range of writers, topics, themes and issues, all focusing on present-day transcultural issues and their historical antecedents: TOPICS TREATED Preparing for post-apartheid in South African fiction; Maori culture and the New Historicism; Danish-New Zealand acculturation; linguistic approaches to 'void'; women's overcoming in Southern African writing; new post-apartheid approaches to literary studies; Afrikanerdom; postmodern psychoanalytic interpretations of Indian religion and identity; transcultural identity in the encounter with London: Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani; hypertextual postmodernism; fictionalized multiculturalism and female madness in Australian fiction; myopia and double vision in colonial Australia; Native-American fiction and poetry; Chinese-Canadian and Japanese-Canadian multiculturalism; the postcolonial city; African-American identity and postcolonial Africa; Johannesburg as locus of literary and dramatic creativity; theatre before and after apartheid; the black experience in England. WRITERS DISCUSSED Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY Ken Arvidson; Thomas Bruckner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppe; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Ku nir; Chantal Kwast-Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O'Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stephanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Ronning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schroder; Joseph Swann; Andre Viola; Christine Vogt-William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold. CREATIVE WRITING BY Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol THE EDITORS: Geoffrey V. Davis and Peter H. Marsden teach at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen; Benedicte Ledent and Marc Delrez teach at the University of Liege.
This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about (and from) scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine.
In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.
The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”. The mediatising of truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping for “unimagined communities” of an inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature to register the “shock” of an uneven modernity produced by a capitalist world economy.
The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.
Internationally recognized for its superior scholarship, Modern Fiction Studies was one of the first journals to publish articles on postcolonial studies. Since postcolonialism's inception, scholars have defined, clarified, and enriched its conceptions and theoretical development in the pages of MFS. This anthology collects the best and most important articles on postcolonial literary studies published in MFS in the past thirty years. Postcolonial Literary Studies brings together groundbreaking scholarship focusing on significant works of fiction by such writers as Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and more. The essays feature ideas that helped shape the discipline from its earliest stages to the present and represent some of the finest examples of literary, theoretical, historical, and cultural criticism. With its focus on literary figures and texts, rather than solely on theory, this volume fills a significant gap in the fields of postcolonialism, global studies, and literary criticism in general. This rich collection of essays by the field’s leading scholars will prove indispensable to instructors and students across a broad spectrum of humanistic studies. It not only highlights the development and transformation of postcolonial literary study but also, by mapping out new directions of study, considers its continual significance and expansion.
Provides up-to-date profiles on the careers of leading and emerging poets.
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.