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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | 'Every place is three places': bursting seams in recent fiction by Diane Awerbuck and Henrietta Rose-Innes |
Author: | Barris, Ken |
Year: | 2014 |
Periodical: | Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (ISSN 2159-9130) |
Volume: | 26 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 59-69 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | prose literary criticism |
About persons: | Diane Awerbuck Henrietta Rose-Innes |
External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2014.897799 |
Abstract: | Much attention has been paid to the pastoral, and to writing the city respectively. These preoccupations with city and country share a focus on ways of seeing, and modalities of being, that construct and are constructed by urban or rural environments. It is probable that less attention has been paid to literary spaces in which city and nature interpenetrate to form zones of instability. The author locates such zones primarily in urban/rural seams which are given shape (or made shapeless) by a secondary set of binaries related to power and gender, order and chaos, linear versus narrative time, and organic versus mechanistic worldviews. He theorises his argument further through the figure of the 'flâneur' as construed by Baudelaire and by Walter Benjamin, and through the hybrid genre of urban pastoral. In this paper the author considers such zones of instability in 'Phosphorescence' and 'The Keeper', short stories by Diane Awerbuck (South Africa, 2011), and in the novel, 'Nineveh' (South Africa, 2011), by Henrietta Rose-Innes. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |