Description
- Abstract:
- Debates in Postcolonial and South African studies have long centered on the relative value of two different approaches to literature, which Benita Parry has categorized as "discourse analysis" and "historical materialist analysis." This methodological difference has generated enduring scholarly conflicts such as the one between Jacques Derrida, Anne McClintock, and Rob Nixon about how to theorize the word "apartheid." In a 1986 issue of Critical Inquiry, Derrida contests McClintock and Nixon's claim that the methodology of deconstruction divorces the language and discourse of apartheid from its historical reality. The exchange between Derrida and his interlocutors McClintock and Nixon exemplifies an ongoing methodological challenge in Postcolonial Studies. Critics who are committed to a sociological perspective on literature argue that the most dominant strains in Postcolonial and South African studies privilege "discourse analysis" over "historical materialist analysis," thereby neglecting the social, economic, and political contexts of Postcolonial fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that the most productive readings of South African fiction begin by thinking beyond the materialist / textualist divide. This hybrid approach has been advocated by critics such as Edward Said, whose work draws equally on Foucaultian discourse analysis and the Marxist concept of hegemony. Inspired by Said's dual orientation to language and history, text and context, my project combines the synchronic approach favored by poststructuralists with the diachronic focus of materialist criticism. My argument is twofold. First, I suggest that the vocabulary of modernism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism can be useful for understanding how authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs and Darryl Accone use form and narrative to theorize space and identity in their novels. Second, I stress that the forms and styles of their texts are nevertheless contingent on, and entangled with, the particularities of cultures, histories, and geographies. In this way, I demonstrate the ways in which the writers allow us to see that the textual is powerful as text not because it transcends the historical, but because it incorporates and mediates the historical.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013)
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Citation
Genette, Adriane,
"Social Spaces and Literary Spaces in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction"
(2013).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z090223S
