Record Details

Vilifying apartheid perpetrators through narrative devices

Literator

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Vilifying apartheid perpetrators through narrative devices
 
Creator Sibuyi, Dzunisani
 
Subject Theory of Literature; Narrative theory; Structuralist narrational strategies; time(s) of the narration; narrating voice; dialogism; sympathy; Gérard Genette; Mandla Langa; Mikhail Bakhtin; apartheid.
Description Mandla Langa’s debut novel, Tenderness of Blood, received no critical review compared with his later works of fiction. To close this gap, I will provide critical analysis focussing on Langa’s use of narrative devices that function to generate meaning focussed on specific issues, themes, and topics vilifying apartheid perpetrators, which has been interpreted as Langa’s chosen means of overthrowing apartheid. These devices will be drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories of the Dialogic Imagination. This entails narrational strategies of the extradiegetic and intradiegetic, respectively, deployed by the anonymous third-person narrator and Mkhonto, the protagonist. These strategies render the text as a multi-voiced polyphonic narrative that aims to accentuate the plight of Mkhonto in his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid injustices from two different and complementary narrative perspectives. In addition to the narrational strategies, there is an employment of devices such as times of narration in simultaneous, subsequent, and interpolated narration, which enable the situating of the story in time of its ‘presentness’ and moments of the action.Contribution: This article highlights the plight of, and challenges experienced by the characters, and is helpful in generating sympathy for the events, especially for Mkhonto and his people in the struggle to overthrow apartheid.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor Not Applicable, please see the acknowledgements.
Date 2024-02-29
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Literary Analysis —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/lit.v45i1.1970
 
Source Literator; Vol 45, No 1 (2024); 8 pages Literator; Vol 45, No 1 (2024); 8 pages 2219-8237 0258-2279
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1970/3869 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1970/3870 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1970/3871 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1970/3872
 
Coverage South Africa Apartheid South Africa Novel: Mandla Langa's Tenderness of Blood (1987)
Rights Copyright (c) 2024 Dzunisani Sibuyi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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