Full Text Available
Note: Clicking the button above will open the full text document at the original institutional repository in a new window.
Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum
Twentieth-century South African literature is a subject often oversimplified by familiar binaries. These include the categories of apartheid and post-apartheid, metaphors of death and birth, and pre-occupations with the tensions between public and private life, township and suburb, and oppressor and...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | Eng |
| Published: |
Department of English Language and Literature
2024
|
| Subjects: | |
| Tags: |
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1867613215368675328 |
|---|---|
| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Henning, John |
| author2 | Twidle, Hedley |
| author_browse | Henning, John Twidle, Hedley |
| author_facet | Twidle, Hedley Henning, John |
| author_sort | Henning, John |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Twentieth-century South African literature is a subject often oversimplified by familiar binaries. These include the categories of apartheid and post-apartheid, metaphors of death and birth, and pre-occupations with the tensions between public and private life, township and suburb, and oppressor and oppressed. Such patterns of signification continue to chase their target – a centuriesold national symptomology – with dwindling degrees of success. This dissertation, in response, seeks out literary micro-spaces from the country's transition (or ‘interregnum') and reads them in terms of their incursive potential on the grand historical and spatial discourses in which they lie. To this end, the project takes its reader on a tour of small places. On one side is a compost hole from Ivan Vladislavić's Missing Persons (1989) – an evocator of the neuroses at the ‘heart of apartheid' – and, on the other, a one-room shack from Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) – an ostensible symbol of an early post-apartheid imaginary. The discussion stretching between these two points, as it moves from nests and tortoiseshells to graves and train carriages, advocates reduced frames of reading. In so doing, it draws attention at once to the claustrophobia of apartheid pettiness and, in the literary sensitivities that it precipitates, to growing associations between smallness and protest, smallness and vocality, smallness and poetry. I argue that micro-spaces are not only abundant in the literature of South Africa's political transition but also yield unique insights into the stubborn extension of its interregnum. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/39555 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | Eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:32:36.207Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publishDateRange | 2024 |
| publishDateSort | 2024 |
| publisher | Department of English Language and Literature |
| publisherStr | Department of English Language and Literature |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/39555 Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum Henning, John Twidle, Hedley English Language and Literature Twentieth-century South African literature is a subject often oversimplified by familiar binaries. These include the categories of apartheid and post-apartheid, metaphors of death and birth, and pre-occupations with the tensions between public and private life, township and suburb, and oppressor and oppressed. Such patterns of signification continue to chase their target – a centuriesold national symptomology – with dwindling degrees of success. This dissertation, in response, seeks out literary micro-spaces from the country's transition (or ‘interregnum') and reads them in terms of their incursive potential on the grand historical and spatial discourses in which they lie. To this end, the project takes its reader on a tour of small places. On one side is a compost hole from Ivan Vladislavić's Missing Persons (1989) – an evocator of the neuroses at the ‘heart of apartheid' – and, on the other, a one-room shack from Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) – an ostensible symbol of an early post-apartheid imaginary. The discussion stretching between these two points, as it moves from nests and tortoiseshells to graves and train carriages, advocates reduced frames of reading. In so doing, it draws attention at once to the claustrophobia of apartheid pettiness and, in the literary sensitivities that it precipitates, to growing associations between smallness and protest, smallness and vocality, smallness and poetry. I argue that micro-spaces are not only abundant in the literature of South Africa's political transition but also yield unique insights into the stubborn extension of its interregnum. 2024-04-30T13:09:42Z 2024-04-30T13:09:42Z 2023 2024-04-25T14:08:59Z Thesis / Dissertation Masters Literature http://hdl.handle.net/11427/39555 Eng application/pdf Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities |
| spellingShingle | English Language and Literature Henning, John Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| title_full | Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| title_fullStr | Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| title_full_unstemmed | Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| title_short | Reading smallness: micro-spatial constructions in South Africa's literature of the interregnum |
| title_sort | reading smallness micro spatial constructions in south africa s literature of the interregnum |
| topic | English Language and Literature |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/39555 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT henningjohn readingsmallnessmicrospatialconstructionsinsouthafricasliteratureoftheinterregnum |