WHEN AESTHETICS MEETS ETHICS: THE SOUTH AFRICAN SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH, 1920-2010

This thesis explores the development of the short-story genre in English in South Africa from the late 1920s to the present day. I intend to close read a corpus of short stories by eight South African writers (Rolfes and Herbert Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Ahmed Essop, and Zoë Wicomb) with particular focus on the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics performed by these texts vis-à-vis the evolution of South Africa’s socio-political situation (before, during, and after apartheid). Often considered a minor genre, the short story actually thrives in post-colonial contexts, like South Africa, where the writing and publishing conditions available to writers can be under a set of material constraints; the brevity of the short story, however, allows for swifter conditions of production and circulation than the ones required by the novel. Consequently, my analysis also focuses on the various publishing venues of these short stories, in particular local newspapers and little magazines, considered as pivotal spaces for the intersection between ethics and aesthetics, which often results in a cross-fertilization between journalism and the short story. Negotiating the different tensions of literature, politics, journalism, and commercial interests, the shifting contexts and editorial policies of newspapers and magazines represent particularly interesting case studies from which the unstable nature of the definition of the ‘literary’ emerges, which is never detached from a political dimension. This study also seeks to expose the fictional and ideological nature of the ‘poetics of authenticity’ that frequently characterises the selected short stories, which display (and often play with) the conventions of realism to achieve a certain patina of authenticity. The poetics (and politics) of authenticity is, I believe, the most significant feature of the interdependence of ethics and aesthetics in the South African short stories in English analysed in this thesis. Between the late 1920s and the early 1980s – that is, before and during apartheid – claims to authenticity mark, albeit in different ways and through different fictional strategies, the selected short stories. This reflectionist trend, which is always a literary construct, responds to the ethical imperative of documenting the lives of the Black population under a segregationist regime, but it is also influenced by the available publishing venues (newspapers and magazines). As the South African short story in English progresses in its post-apartheid phase, essentialist, fixed notions such as ‘authenticity’ are exposed as a fictional construct by authors such as Zoë Wicomb. Ultimately, this study aims to foreground the impossibility of separating the literary (both the text and its materiality) from the political.