The Contemporary South African Novel

Modern trauma theory, which combines disciplines such as medicine (neurobiology), psychoanalysis, historiography, literary theory, and narratology in an interdisciplinary way, has become one of the most important hermeneutic schemes with which we try to make sense of our world. From the perspective of modern trauma theory, not only the fate of individuals but also historical events such as the holocaust have served as examples. What modern trauma theory and poststructuralist theory have in common is the fact that both understand `meaning` as something which is `latent` or deferred towards the future. The goal of our project is to show how trauma theory may be applied to the analysis of the novel and, from this perspective, to gain an insight into the most important forms, themes, and functions of contemporary South African fiction. In addition to that, we will be able to make a theoretical contribution to the question of how trauma theory, narratology, and poststructuralist/postcolonialist theories can be combined. In this way, important poststructuralist theorems, especially the concept of `meaning`, will be challenged. The project will contribute to the research of contemporary South African literature in English, which has found little attention in Europe so far, and will thus break new ground. It will also challenge poststructuralist literary theory and point out possibilities of how `the ethical turn` in (postcolonial) literary scholarship can gain sharper outlines.

Contemporary South African novelists show an unceasing concern with their past, the traumatising effects of colonialism, and the legacy left behind by the Apartheid regime. The South African literary scene abounds with novels featuring traumatised individuals, who strive for closure, who struggle to leave their traumas behind but are persistently `re-visited` by the past in form of flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation, and other psychosomatic symptoms. This interdisciplinary research project combines disciplines such as psychoanalysis, historiography, postcolonial literary theory and narratology. It approaches the contemporary South African novel from the perspective of modern trauma theory. Our research amounts to a comprehensive introduction into the most prominent themes and forms of contemporary South African fiction. We investigate how traumatic memory can be translated into narrative memory, how to write from the perspective of a traumatised character, and how the structural elements of time, space, action, and language are related to this issue. The theoretical focus here is on the role of narration in the process of working through trauma. The project, moreover, addresses other important theoretical issues: it integrates the category of trauma into postcolonial theory, which, since the 1980s, is strongly associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. We illustrate how trauma theory may be used to challenge important poststructuralist assumptions, and elucidate the relation of politics and aesthetics. By looking at the South African situation through the lens of trauma, we explain how the psychic deformations and injuries left behind by centuries of racism and colonialism cannot be mended through economic reparation or by a simple reversal of economic and political power structures. One of the most important results of our project is the insight that trauma, in the South African context, is not always the result of an individual event but can also be the outcome of structural violence created by decades of apartheid legislature. Trauma means entanglement: Like its causes, the forms of trauma are manifold: they range from individual trauma via communal or societal trauma to intergenerational trauma. Our project shows that Western trauma theories, which centre on the individual and a specific event, are insufficient instruments to explain its multiple forms and causation in a South African context. All in all, this project makes an important contribution to the study of the so-called New English Literatures, and here to South African literature, which hitherto has only sporadically (and partially) attracted the attention of scholars of English in German-speaking countries, and puts it on the Austrian map. The focus is not only on the few Nobel prize winners such as Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee but on a wide range of other authors whose works engage with the contemporary South African situation. Our project shows that the novels analysed provide fascinating insights into a country, which, after rough times, presently is still fighting for political stability, the peaceful co-existence of ethnicities, and its cultural and national identity. All in all, the project demonstrates that literature can make an important contribution to South Africas healing.