ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author concentrates more on the notion of the ‘literary’ in literary studies in universities in South Africa. Literary studies is routinely referred to as a discipline in crisis, in many cases manifesting a condition that is apparently terminal. While a ‘retreat’ from the literary is a global phenomenon in literary studies, part of the problem in South Africa lies in the specific way in which South African literary studies constituted its project in the 1980s and 1990s. In a stand-alone piece, Cornwell himself has argued with characteristic acerbity that the emergent discipline of literary studies calling itself ‘English’ in the Anglo-American world spent the first half of the twentieth century defining its object of investigation and refining its methodology. It spent the second half of the century undermining these achievements and destroying the consensus on which they depended. But the post-2000 literary terrain is more complex and challenging than that suite of novels might suggest.
