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Author Kock, Leon, author.

Title Losing the Plot : Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing / Leon Kock.

Publication Info. Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2016.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (ix, 277 pages) : PDF file(s)
text file
PDF
Note Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 09 May 2018).
Summary In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot - the mapping and making of social betterment - appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism.
South African fiction (English)
Post-apartheid era -- South Africa -- In literature.
Post-apartheid era.
South Africa.
Crime in literature.
Crime in literature.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: 9781868149643
ISBN 9781868149674 (electronic book)
1868149676 (electronic book)
9781868149650 (electronic book)
186814965X (electronic book)
9781868149643 (paperback)