“How can you build a nation without telling its stories?”: Transgressive, Testimonial Fiction in Post-TRC South Africa

Collett, Keenan

Title: “How can you build a nation without telling its stories?”: Transgressive, Testimonial Fiction in Post-TRC South Africa
Creator: Collett, Keenan
ThesisAdvisor: Marais, Susan Jacqueline
Subject: South African fiction (English)
Subject: Violence in literature
Subject: South Africa -- In literature
Subject: AIDS (Disease) in literature
Subject: Duiker, K Sello -- Thirteen cents
Subject: Moele, Kgebetli -- The book of the dead
Subject: Staggie, Jason -- Risk
Date: 2020
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147092
Identifier: vital:38592
Description: Transgressive fiction refers to works of literature that are fundamentally concerned with the provocation of their reader. This effect is typically accomplished by authors crafting novels that feature upsetting content: extreme violence, taboo sex acts, and drug abuse – often narrated by protagonists who are either the recipients or enactors of violence and trauma. Given their rootedness in familiar social settings, these works of fiction manage to relay critiques of their particular societies. Over the past three decades, transgressive fiction has amassed a small critical reception with focus predominantly directed toward texts from the United States and the United Kingdom. In an attempt to build on existing scholarship, this thesis explores recent and disturbing works of South African literature in order to gauge whether the markers of transgressive fiction are as easily applicable in a new national setting. K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, Kgebetli Moele’s The Book of the Dead and Jason Staggie’s Risk form the basis of the discussion. Each novel exposes a concern with social developments within a ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, and codes its respective critique in narratives concerned with the violation of consent, as depicted in profoundly unsettling ways. The spread of publication dates across the three novels also allows for an examination of morphing social critique from 2000-2013.
Format: 114 pages, pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, English
Language: English
Rights: Collett, Keenan

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