Critical Perspectives on Damon Galgut

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-10979-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 232 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

When Damon Galgut won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Promise in 2021, he was already an established writer. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010, had been the author of eight novels and four plays, but before the success of The Promise he remained relatively unknown to the general public outside South Africa. This volume is an attempt to engage an international set of specialists in postcolonial studies, South African literature and, in several cases, established writers themselves, in a debate devoted entirely to Galgut’s novels. This publication demonstrates that Galgut’s work exceeds what readers tend to expect from post-apartheid white writing. Rather than offering the standard narratives of guilt, despair, and frustration, Galgut’s novels, in dialogue with each other, and in dialogue with cultural and philosophical trends, propose a more intricate fabric. The writer’s diagnosis of the human condition ultimately seems to transcend the constitutive turmoil and the crises, offering a vision of surprisingly and fascinatingly complex reality.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bialas, Zbigniew

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Afrikanische Literaturen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Contributors

Editor’s Preface

Zoë Wicomb – Repetition and Recursivity in Two Galgut Texts

Ewa Dynarowicz – Politics of (Not-)Belonging in Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

Slawomir Maslon – Of Love and Murder, and Nothing: The Political Moment of The Quarry

Marek Pawlicki – The Genuine Ambivalence of Detachment: Exploring the Socioecological Unconscious in Damon Galgut’s The Impostor

Robert Kusek – Between Two Worlds: Dybbuks and Doppelgängers in the Works of Deborah Levy and Damon Galgut

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain – “Over and done. Never over, never done”: Unstable Identities and Haunted Voices in Damon Galgut’s The Promise

Sarah LeFanu – S/He Has No House: Shared Rooms, Displacement and Contested Property in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, In a Strange Room, The Impostor and The Promise

Julia Szoltysek – A Literary Bromance: E. M. Forster’s Rites of Passage in Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer

Zbigniew Bialas – “Dominion over the domestic scene”? Damon Galgut’s The Promise as a Forsterian plaasroman

Nedine Moonsamy – First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: Humour and Disaffection in Damon Galgut’s The Promise

Zbigniew Bialas in conversation with Elleke Boehmer – Damon Galgut and the Matter of South Africa

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Zbigniew Bialas is Professor of English in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) and author of five novels. He was Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany, Fulbright Senior Fellow in the USA and Rockefeller Research Fellow in Italy. His academic books include Post-Tribal Ethos in African Literature (1993), Mapping Wild Gardens: The Symbolic Conquest of South Africa (1997) and The Body Wall: Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices (2006). His first novel, Korzeniec (2011) was awarded Silesian Literary Laurels and was turned into a successful theatrical play. Zbigniew Bialas edited/co-edited twelve academic volumes, published over sixty academic essays and translated English, American and Nigerian literature into Polish.