Representations of revised white male subjectivity in No Man's Land and Plot-Loss
Date
2009-07-10T08:20:12Z
Authors
Van Onselen, Jessica
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Abstract
ABSTRACT
This research report examines two novels, Carel van der Merwe’s No Man’s Land (2007) and
Heinrich Troost’s Plot Loss (2007) as examples of what can be thought of as a ‘new wave’ of
white writing in South African fiction. The protagonists’ journeys serve to help readers deepen
our understanding of white identity in contemporary South Africa, and what the past and the
present signify for these white men, by resisting oversimplified or ‘bleached’ representations of
whiteness.
Recent critical writing has chosen to view emerging texts such as these in a celebratory light. For
these critics, the psychological journeys of the characters and shifts in consciousness represented
are hopeful, and indicative of a new complexity in writing white male experience in South
Africa. The theme of transformation through revisiting the past certainly runs clearly through
both texts, but the conclusions of these novels, I will argue, exemplify the paucity of
representation that still plagues white male writing in South Africa