The Short Story After Apartheid', Dr. Graham Riach, Thursday 21st March at 5pm, PCH 1.04 , Spuistraat 134

Look at a top-ten list of South African literature and you will often see the same titles: Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, or any number of other canonical – which is not to say universally appreciated – suggestions. What you probably won’t find, however, are short stories. And yet, the South African short story is one of the country’s most extraordinary literary achievements. This talk, through an analysis of key texts from the postapartheid period, will complicate models of South African literature dominated by the novel while bringing formalist and postcolonial studies into dialogue. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and in this talk I propose an original model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought. This talk asks why contemporary authors, working across diverse languages and cultural traditions, continue to find value in the educational novel—and how a better understanding of this phenomenon might expand the reach of learning and critical thought both within and outside educational institutions.