Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries: (Cross/Cultures)

Borders separate but also connect self and other, and literary texts not only enact these bordering processes, but form part of such processes. This book gestures towards a borderless world, stepping, as it were, with thousand-mile boots from south to north (even across the Atlantic), from South Africa to Scandinavia. It also shows how literary texts model and remodel borders and bordering processes in rich and meaningful local contexts. The essays assembled here analyse the crossing and negotiation of borders and boundaries in works by Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Winterbach, Deneys Reitz, Janet Suzman, Marlene van Niekerk, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Harris, Frank A. Jenssen, Eben Venter, Antjie Krog, and others under different signs or conceptual points of attraction. These signs include a spiritual turn, eventfulness, self-understanding, ethnic and linguistic mobilization, performative chronotopes, the grotesque, the carceral, the rhetorical, and the interstitial. Contributors: Ileana Dimitriu, Heilna du Plooy, John Gouws, Anne Heith, Lida Krüger, Susan Meyer, Adéle Nel, Ellen Rees, Johan Schimanski, Tony Ullyatt, Phil van Schalkwyk, Hein Viljoen.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Acknowledgements Illustrations Introduction Ileana Dimitriu: Representing the Unpresentable: Between the Secular and the Spiritual in Gordimer's Post-Apartheid Fiction Heilna du Plooy: Narrative Dynamics and Boundaries: The Undermining of Event and Eventfulness in The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach John Gouws: Deneys Reitz and the Bounds of Self-Understanding Anne Heith: Challenging and Negotiating National Borders: Sami and Tornedalian AlterNative Literary History Lida Kruger: The Visual Representation of the Boundary Between Past and Present: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Suzman's The Free State Susan Meyer: Earth as Home: Nature and Refuges/Living Spaces in Some Afrikaans Narratives Adele Nel: Borders and Abjection in Triomf Ellen Rees: Body, Corpus, and Corpse: Delineating Henrik Ibsen in A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale Johan Schimanski: Pronouncing it the Porder: Ascribing Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen's The Salt Bin Tony Ullyatt: The Normal and the Carceral: Boundaries in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs Phil van Schalkwyk: The Aid of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of AIDS: Eben Venter's Ek stamel ek sterwe Hein Viljoen: Navigating the Interstitial: Boundaries in Lady Anne by Antjie Krog Notes on the Contributors

About the Author :
Hein Viljoen is professor of Afrikaans and Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at the North-West University’s Potchefstroom Campus in South Africa. His research interests include Afrikaans poetry, literary theory, and literary and cultural hybridity. With Chris N. van der Merwe he edited Storyscapes (2004) and Beyond the Threshold (2007). He is also editor-in-chief of Literator, a journal for national and comparative literature and linguistics (www.literator.org.za).