Writing under pressure: A post‐apartheid canon?

Abstract

Many critics have noticed a shift in emphasis in South African fiction from the public sphere of politics and protest during apartheid to the private sphere, post‐apartheid, to reflection and self‐questioning. Nevertheless, I argue, novelists are maintaining the principles of what I will call “engaged” writing, suggesting that the public/private dichotomy needs reformulating. Representations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) serve as my example because, as contemporary novelists have shown, the TRC problematically collapses this dichotomy by bringing truth and confession into the public domain.