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Vorheriges Semester
Post as Present: Literature and the Politics of Time in South Africa
DozentIn: Dr. phil. Laura Zander
Veranstaltungstyp: Blockseminar
Ort: 41/B11
Zeiten: Termine am Freitag, 11.07.2025 09:30 - 16:30, Samstag, 12.07.2025 10:00 - 14:30, Freitag, 18.07.2025 09:30 - 16:30, Samstag, 19.07.2025 10:00 - 14:30
Beschreibung: In her final novel, No Time Like the Present, Nadine Gordimer wrote: “now is everything after.” This seminar takes Gordimer’s provocation as its starting point, interrogating the ways in which the “post” of postcolonialism, post-apartheid, and post-transitional justice continues to be structured by what came before. If the past does not simply recede but remains embedded in the present, how do South African literary texts negotiate this entanglement? How does literature register the impossibility of leaving the past behind, even as it narrates the urgency of the now?
Through readings of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Damian Barr’s You Will Be Safe Here, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as well as short stories by Gordimer, and essays such as Arthur Maimane “Can’t You Write About Anything Else,” we will examine how South African writers reckon with a past that refuses closure. These texts expose the fictions of historical rupture, confronting the recursive nature of violence, memory, and racial injustice. At the same time, they articulate the potential of literary form to reimagine temporality—whether through narrative fragmentation, spectral hauntings, or unresolved tensions between expectation and return.
Engaging with theories of postcolonial temporality, historical trauma, and political transition, this seminar will explore how literature destabilizes the linearity implied by the “post” and insists on the unfinished affairs of history. How does fiction register time as recursive rather than progressive? How do writers articulate both a longing for new beginnings and the persistence of old wounds? What role does narrative play in shaping our understanding of justice, accountability, and the limits of the present? By situating South African literature within broader debates on time, memory, and historical reckoning, this course invites students to rethink the meaning of the “post” as something more than an aftermath—something irreducibly entangled with what precedes it.
