y separately published work icon Current Writing : Text and Reception in Southern Africa periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2023... vol. 35 no. 1 2023 of Current Writing : Text and Reception in Southern Africa est. 1989 Current Writing : Text and Reception in Southern Africa
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2023 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
‘The Options Were Shrinking. Choices Were Being Removed’ : Selected Literary Representations of the Consequence of Climate Change, Jessica Murray , single work criticism

'This article considers the ways in which selected contemporary novels represent the limitation of options as a primary consequence of climate change. I will offer an ecocritical literary analysis of the following four novels by female authors: The New Wilderness (2020) by Diane Cook, A Children’s Bible (2020) by Lydia Millet, Weather (2020) by Jenny Offill and The Last Migration (2021) by Charlotte McConaghy. The novels present worlds where very definite choices, in already severely constrained contexts, need to be made. These choices are matters of survival and they have nothing to do with fulfilling constructed consumer dreams. The texts offer worlds in which characters navigate radically new terrains where survival is an urgent imperative. I will consider how the notions of limitation and shrinking (of their worlds and their options) recur as leitmotifs throughout the novels and I will explore how this shrinkage forces them to reconsider not only their own actions but also the consequences of the actions of people in general, with a specific focus on the causal relationship between those actions and climate change.' (Publication abstract)

 (p. 33-42)
J M Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy : A Search for Answers, Hania A. M. Nashef , single work criticism

'The 2019 novel by the South African-Australian Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus, is a third book in a sequence that includes Jesus in its title; like its predecessors it follows the lives of a recently constructed family in the dystopian Spanish-speaking towns of Novilla and Estrella. The surreal trilogy, which began with The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and then The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), presents us with unreal worlds, leaving us searching for meaning. This fable-like fantasy, which expands the author’s ‘late style’, challenges the genre of fiction itself. Typical of late style, the trilogy resists closure and resolution. The debated ideas are generated by characters who were forced to forsake their memories and histories. Even though the protagonists begin to embody the very ideas they debate, answers are not forthcoming.' (Publication abstract)

 (p. 43-51)
Interrogating the Self : Colonialism and Female Identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives, Rose Symonds , single work criticism
'This article analyses the representation of identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives. It is an autobiographical text focusing on issues of guilt, complicity and entanglement that resonates with a literature of shame, as recently identified in postcolonial studies. Vita, the protagonist, expresses how she is creatively blocked by her guilt as a beneficiary of apartheid and this is mirrored in her relationship with Royce where she is a beneficiary of his powerful and wealthy patronage. Vita’s story, highlighting feminist issues of complicity, is also a metafictional device that represents the writer’s feelings about her post-apartheid, colonial identity. In a series of confessional letters between herself and Royce, Vita maps her journey to selfhood. My paper critically examines the literary and deconstructive features of Dovey’s text in which a rite of passage is represented as a textual interrogation of self.' 

(Publication abstract)

 (p. 71-83)
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