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 fl exible 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 forensically detect the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfi ction. 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 fi ctional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fi ction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.
- ISBN10 1868149641
- ISBN13 9781868149643
- Publish Date 1 September 2016
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 12 March 2021
- Publish Country ZA
- Imprint Wits University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 276
- Language English