ABSTRACT
The study of ‘South African literature’ has, since its substantive constitution as a field of study in the 1970s, been caught in the doubleness of those conflicting impulses. Michael Chapman’s landmark study, Southern African Literatures, which appeared in 1996, is the most sustained attempt to explore the substrate linking the distinctive islands of Gray’s archipelago. Nevertheless, Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie consciously set out to ‘chart’ the field of South African literature in English since 1945, arguing that without a ‘basic map, we may find ourselves missing a sense of general picture’. Attwell and Attridge are critical of Van Wyk Smith’s argument against a notion of ‘South African literature’, in that they perceive the specific criteria of Bloom’s argument to be incommensurate with diversities of the South African literary and cultural landscape. While Coetzee’s novel is concerned with, among other things, the question of white identity and belonging in postapartheid South Africa, and so is profoundly ‘political’ in the larger sense.
