| Description |
1 online resource (xiv, 250 pages) |
| Series |
African articulations |
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African articulations.
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| Contents |
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface: Encountering non-fiction -- 1 Introduction Historical and theoretical approaches -- 2 Unusable pasts. The secret history of Demetrios Tsafendas: assassin, madman, messenger -- 3 Literatures of betrayal: Confession, collaboration and collapse in post-TRC narrative -- 4 In search of lost archives. Nostalgia, heterodoxy and the work of memory -- 5 A very strange relationship: Ambition, seduction and scandal in post-apartheid life writing -- 6 Some claim to intimacy: Political biography and the limits of the liberal imagination -- 7 In short, there are problems: Literary journalism in the postcolony -- 8 Unknowable communities: Necessary fictions and broken contracts in the heart of the country -- 9 A new more honest code: Memoirs of the 'born frees' and the futures of non-fiction -- 10 Afterword: The extracurriculum -- Bibliography and Further Reading -- Index |
| Summary |
Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic; have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with great ambition, texture and risk. Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social reconstruction in South Africa. The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with other important non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition. -- Page 2 of cover |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
South African literature -- History and criticism
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Creative nonfiction -- History and criticism
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BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
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Creative nonfiction
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South African literature
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Nichtfiktionale Prosa
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Englisch
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Politische Literatur
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Dokumentarliteratur
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Südafrika
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781787445079 |
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1787445070 |
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