Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
About this episode
The episode explores the relationship between literature and place through the works of Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson, focusing on South Africa's changing urban landscape.
How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to capture the experience of place—and in particular the experience of a place as it changes across time. The resulting work may feel fragmentary, Ivan allows, but that is a function of the nature of place rather than an imposition on the part of the writer. Finally, the conversation turns toward Ivan’s choice to study Afrikaans literature in the 1970s. As a tradition often at odds with Afrikaner politics and urgently concerned with the world Ivan himself inhabited, reading the work of Afrikaans writers such as Ingrid Winterbach, Entienne Leroux, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach offered…
People in this episode
Guests: Ivan Vladislavić, Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Topics covered
- literature
- place
- South Africa
- narrative form
- urban transformation
- Afrikaans literature
Keywords
- Ivan Vladislavić
- Jeanne-Marie Jackson
- Johannesburg
- literary city
- Afrikaans literature
- narrative
- place and space
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The Folly, Double Negative, The Near North, You Can
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