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Lofs Wife Syndrome and Double Publics in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Grace A. Musila
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Extract

In a Compelling Reading of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, Bhekizizwe Peterson Remarks on the Work's Inscription of multiple imagined readers with different investments in the narrative (79). Quoting from Jean-Paul Sartre's reflections on the intricacies of addressing fractured, and sometimes future, publics, Peterson writes:

[T]he works of writers who find themselves on the “margin of the privileged class” contain a “double simultaneous postulation,” a consequence of the “fracture” in the “actual public” in which their art is produced and consumed. Because the “real public” consists largely of the conservative forces that compose the dominant class and ideology, the marginal writer is compelled to address “the progressive forces, or the virtual public” even if “the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading.” In engaging the future and its virtual public—“an emptiness to be filled in, an aspiration”—the writing exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite. (81)

Type
theories and methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1452 - 1461
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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