ABSTRACT

This book reflects on South African literature from the perspective of 2020. It emerges from Duncan Brown’s experiences of three decades of working in this field of writing and scholarship. It is a personal intellectual exploration and an engagement with the institutional history of literary studies in South Africa and elsewhere.

Finding My Way also attempts to find more creative, engaging and intriguing modes of writing about literature and the humanities universally. It seeks to recover a sense of the imaginative, the literary, and the affective, not only as things to value in the literary texts we read but also as ways of understanding and reading texts, as ways of writing criticism—of registering how books make us feel, as well as how they make us think.

Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Finding My Way

chapter Chapter One|28 pages

Reimagining South African Literature

chapter Chapter Two|25 pages

Reimagining the ‘Literary’

chapter Chapter Three|15 pages

Reading ‘With’

chapter Chapter Four|20 pages

Writing Belief, Reading Belief

chapter Chapter Five|23 pages

Creative Non-Fiction

A Conversation with Antjie Krog

chapter Chapter Six|14 pages

Oral Literature in South Africa

Twenty Years On

chapter Chapter Seven|13 pages

‘That Man Patton’

The Personal History of a Book

chapter |16 pages

Conclusion

Recursive Futures? Or: What Rough Beast?