Explore the vast range of titles available.

Neomodernist novelists seek to recreate and rearrange the basic propositions and methods of modernism not to just to keep the modernist enterprise alive but also to expand its range of presentation and interpretation. The art of Neomodernist novelists falls in line with that of their predecessors in that it endeavours to analyse innermost emotions and state of things as they actually are using typically modernist procedures. In other words neomodernist novelists subject modernist principles of taste and style to a new process to analyse contemporary issues. The paper examines how Damon Galgut, in the novel under reference, employs typical modernist strategies to foreground the complications and complexities issuing from an Afrikaner family's inability to keep the promise of passing on a bequest to their Black servant, Salome. This by implication parallels the situation engendered by the policy of racial discrimination or segregation (apartheid) formerly practised in South Africa. It also analyses how the use of characteristic modernist techniques like narrative flexibility, which is easily perceptible through oscillating points of view, allows the author to present the characters from divergent perspectives. Finally the paper looks at how this panoptic narrative perspective lends meaning to the sequence of events.

The apartheid regime has left behind a range of chronic and structural disturbances of home/lands in contemporary South Africa. This article examines the representation of housing in Damon Galgut’s The Impostor. In this post-apartheid novel, houses feature prominently; they are not only the axle around which the plot revolves, but characters in their own right. Houses are depicted as relational and dynamic sites, invested with traumatic repressed material. By drawing on critical house studies, psychoanalysis, memory, and postcolonial studies, it will be shown that there is a strong intersection that needs to be unpacked between inhabited spaces, the mnemonic economy of the self, its displacements and unexpected flights, and the larger socio-economic and political sphere. This article argues that houses in Galgut’s novel emerge as psychological and affective contents, as symptoms of historical amnesia and displaced whiteness; characters’ psychic disturbances find fertile terrain in a country which, while parading itself as “new” and “open”, risks regressing towards new forms of “decosmopolitanization” (Appadurai).

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor enjoyed a positive reception from reviewers as an incisive, if bleak, portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and its failure to realize the idealistic promises of \"rainbow nationalism.\" It also drew criticism from some scholars who argued that it attracted prestige and recognition precisely by pandering to the neocolonial values of a conservative metropolitan readership and its predilection for works which portend the demise of the former British colony. In this article, I offer a close reading of The Good Doctor that contests its reception as an opportunistic disseminator of post-apartheid disillusionment, and argue instead that it offers a scrupulous interrogation of the forms of vocalization and self-fashioning available to white South Africans in the aftermath of apartheid. In accounting for the emphasis Galgut places on the ongoing labour of self-interpretation in this context, I turn to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur whose work on narrative identity, I demonstrate, strongly resonates with the value The Good Doctor finds in a hermeneutically examined life.

Starting from a reading of Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, this article examines the changing nature of social space in South Africa since 1994 as reflected in recent writing by Galgut, Ivan Vladislavić, Jonny Steinberg, K.S. Duiker and J.M. Coetzee. Adapting Mikael Karlström's distinction between 'dystopian' and 'eutopian' responses to social phenomena, I argue that post-apartheid literature bears witness to the perpetuation of a fundamentally dystopian society. South Africa, by these lights, has seen no significant opening up and making public of space either physically or otherwise. Discussing the urban environment, crime, xenophobia, gender relations and sexuality, the article shows that power remains in the private sphere, with space still constructed in terms of exclusion rather than inclusion.

This article evaluates the position and experience of whites in South Africa after the advent of a black majority government, insofar as these are represented by the English-speaking white male protagonist in The Good Doctor (2003) by Damon Galgut. Analysis of the novel will illustrate that the legacy of colonisation and apartheid continues to influence the settler descendants' perceptions of self and the other and their place in the country.

According to some recent reviews, Galgut is 'the bold, fresh voice of South African fiction', and The Imposter is 'a latter day Heart of Darkness' Fellow South African authors have been similarly effusive in their praise, citing his 'deadly accurate reading of the South African psyche' (Christopher Hope) as 'one of the most shining milestones on our literary, moral and philosophical journey from past to future' (André Brink). The cosmopolitan portrait of the author that emerges, I suggest, contests (or at least complicates) his categorization as a 'representative' South African writer, a reception that The Imposter appears to have secured. 2 In his editorial to the most recent edition of Current Writing, subtitled 'South African Literature: Beyond 2000', Michael Chapman considers the developments that have characterized South African literary production over the last decade. The extent to which South African writers who choose to remain estranged from this context will eventually enjoy the same degree of legitimacy is yet to be seen.4 If current reception sees Galgut as a representative voice of contemporary South Africa, a very different portrait of the author emerges in his recently published semi-autobiographical narratives, \"The Follower', \"The Lover' and 'The Guardian'.5 The three stories show no allegiance to South Africa as a focal referent, but instead work out problems of subjectivity and authorship in relation to strange, foreign locales. Throughout the trilogy, Galgut's South African context is de-prioritized and features as only one of many aspects of his identity. [...]as his journey unfolds, the singularity of the South African context is diminished and, as he travels though Zanzibar, Tanzania and Malawi, South Africa appears as only one of many locales in transition.

This article considers Damon Galgut’s In a strange room as a work of contemporary epistolary fiction. Recent studies of epistolarity argue that the epistolary tradition remains identifiable and apparent even once woven into other genres. Though not strictly an epistolary novel, In a strange room addresses the same thematic concerns that exist in all epistolary writing – exile,loneliness, unrequited love, self-identity and trial. This article asks the same three questions that all epistolary fiction invites: To whom, for whom and why does Damon write? The epistolary mode is considered with reference to Jacques Lacan’s gaze theory. The gaze sets up an inherent secret, revealing the truth only in the final dénouement. In epistolary work, it anticipates the voyeuristic reader, compelling him or her to watch. The gaze can be found in only one of Galgut’s three novellas. It is for this reason that In a strange room makes for difficult reading. It is also why the novel is so confounding and compelling, presenting as it does the internal dialogue of a lonely man.

A central claim of contemporary trauma theory stresses that terrifying experiences cause a speechless fright that cannot be fully articulated afterwards. This thesis conducts a close analysis of representations of trauma in five twentieth century novels: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written 1928-40, published 1965, Russia), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970, USA), Gina B. Nahai’s Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (1999, Iran), Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991, South Africa), and Pak Wanseo’s Three Days in that Autumn (1985, South Korea). The objective of this analysis is to cross the boundaries of languages and nations as well as those of literary and cultural traditions to excavate literary devices, in particular, metaphoric images, which give some expression to individual traumatic experience through a visual mode. Missing buttons, rose petals, a giant squid, blue eyes, a flying body, corpses, bleak landscapes and a strange chair allow secret, pockets of pain to be made more accessible. The theoretical framework of this study is drawn from trauma theory, psychoanalysis and literary fiction that consider the effect of trauma on narrative. By drawing on these theories, I argue that the relationship between images in the chosen novels and trauma is paradoxical: metaphor is a useful tool for approximating traumatic experience, but, simultaneously, draws attention to its own limitations. Several characters in the novels endure compulsive re-experiencing of the past as their suffering seems not sufficiently accessible in language in a controlled, self-reflexive manner. The psychological effects of their trauma manifest in various flashbacks, dreams, images and syntactic patterns embedded within the narratives that repetitively bear witness to some earlier exposure to violence. This study explores the form and language of these narratives which offer unique, visual representations of disturbing and painful elements that would otherwise remain unrepresentable. My intention is to open up an inquiry into the relationship between literary imagination and the survival of an ordeal by considering fictional traumatic representations from diverse cultures within convulsive historic periods.

The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and the International IMPAC Dublin Award, and Galgut was praised for his complex character development and interaction.