The case of Coetzee: South African literary criticism, 1990 to today
Wednesday, 09 December 2009
[Plenary Paper, International Conference on the Humanities in Southern Africa
University of Pretoria, 22-25 June, 2008]
Michael Chapman
English Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The 1970s and
80s witnessed a vigorous, often polemical debate in the South African literary
field between those dubbed 'instrumental' (or political) critics and those of
'art' persuasion.The end of apartheid
promised a new phase of discussion.What
has happened, however, is not so much a turn to artistic issues, but a turn to
continental philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Levinas) as theorists of an
ethical respect for and responsibility to 'Otherness'.At the centre of such critical attention has
been the novelist, J.M.Coetzee.
The last decade has shown renewed interest in the
object and/or concept ‘world literature'.
I say renewed interest for, as Damrosch's book What Is World Literature?1 (2003) reminds us, the term
has a history dating back to Goethe's (1984) coinage (‘Weltliteratur') in his interviews in 1827 with his young disciple,
Johan Peter Eckermann. Weltliteratur offered Goethe a new
literary perspective and cultural awareness, a sense of a rising global
modernity. Linking modernity to
capitalist economy Marx and Engels in 1848 would go on to employ the term:
Is there a role for
literature - or, to be specific, imaginative literature, or the literary - in
postcolonial studies? And where may one
locate South Africa in a field delineated by northern
institutional purposes, practices, paradigms and, more pragmatically,
career/publishing opportunities? Such
questions provoked by a current project, titled "Postcolonialism: A
South/African Perspective", which has eventuated in this selection of essays.
The Politics of Identity: South Africa, Storytelling, and Literary History
Monday, 17 July 2006
The Politics of Identity: South Africa, Storytelling, and Literary History
Michael
Chapman
My study Southern African Literatures[1]
has since its publication in May 1996 occasioned heated responses in South Africa. Briefly, arguments involve the matter of
identity politics: whose language,
culture, or story can be said to have authority in South Africa when the ends of
apartheid has raised challenging questions as to what it is to be a South
African, what it is to live in a new South Africa, whether South Africa is a
nation, and, if so, what is its mythos, what requires to be forgotten and what
remembered as we scour the past in order to understand the present and seek a
path forward into an unknown future?
The Critic in a State of Emergency: Towards a Theory of
Reconstruction
(after February 2)1
[Kunapipi XIII:1&2: 1991: 1-22]
South Africa has entered upon times of high emotion...
By design or accident F.W. de Klerk hit the fast-forward button on February 2:
there will be no return to the old
South African ways.2Given that this
was written not by a hack journalist but by one of our leading social analysts,
we begin to gauge the impact on South Africans of the unbannings, the mass
rallies and, most strikingly, the release of Nelson Mandela.
[The EnglishAcademy Review 5
February 1988: 23-53]
Michael Chapman
South Africa is undergoing a
huge socio-political revaluation. This continues to
be provoked by forces which have arisen in general opposition to a
fundamentally unjust social and economic system, more particularly since the
early 1980s to the sham of ‘tricameral' politics. (In our age of so-called
reform, a state of emergency was declared in 1985, lifted briefly, and
re-imposed with greater severity on 12 June 1986.) We are simultaneously
undergoing a crucial literary and artistic revaluation.
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