From Introduction: Thus for the black South African, the act of creative writing is inescapably a form of political action, and unless he turns his back on the reality which confronts him and retreats into a private imaginary world, it is also a form of social action, Yet Ezekiel Mphahlele has rightly cautioned that "creating an imaginary world" can never be an effective substitute for social act ion . Composing fictions about social and political problems is an indubitably oblique way of seeking a solution to them, and even the tendentious recreation of reality is only a metaphor for its actual transformation. Protest writing in South Africa is paradoxically a form of social action which is also only a parasitical imitation of social action, and therefore its avoidance . The freedom of literary creation described above is ambiguously not only a freedom to express reality, but also a freedom from the constraints of reality. And this suggests why the outlaw was such an important symbol to an earlier generation of rather more self-conscious writers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:rhodes/vital:2169 |
| Date | January 1979 |
| Creators | Cornwell, Gareth |
| Publisher | Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, English |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | 214 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Cornwell, Gareth |
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