Literary Transactions in South Africa - by Michael Chapman (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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, the author explores contestation through the how of the literary work. Through the works of writers like J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Roy Campbell and Mtutuzeli Matshoba, the book pursues the challenge of interpreting a literature of disjuncture between Africa and the West, or the South and the North"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Interspersed with nuggets of oft-overlooked or unfamiliar archival material, Michael Chapman's Literary Transactions in South Africa, is a pivotal read, a tour de force of literary scholarship and the politics of interpretation. The culmination of a lifetime of critical engagement and teaching, the book seamlessly delivers its declared aim: 'to explore, afresh, significant "moments" of the past in relation to current debate, ' bringing literary history and South African literary production right up to your doorstep and climaxing in an interrogatory discussion of the 'glocal' 'posts-, ' viz. 'After Coetzee - After Postcolonialism.' No-one will regret the making of space on his or her overcrowded bookshelf for this 'must read', 'must have' publication" --Rosemary Gray, Professor Emerita of English, University of Pretoria, South Africa

"South African literature is not only gifted with some of the world's foremost contemporary fiction writers, but also one of its most lucid critics. Michael Chapman achieves in Literary Transactions in South Africa nothing less than the reinvention of a canon post-decoloniality. From Zulu praise poetry to Zoë Wicomb's prose, his reassessments of the relation between work and interpretation glimmer with profound insight." --Oscar Hemer, Professor Emeritus of Journalistic and Literary Creation, Malmö University, Sweden

About the Author

Michael Chapman is Professor and Researcher-in-Residence at Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He was previously 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).