Representations of revised white male subjectivity in No Man's Land and Plot-Loss

• Main Author: Van Onselen, Jessica
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10539/7088

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