Chris Van Wyk's The Year of the Tapeworm: Beyond the Realism of Struggle in South Africa

Abstract

Apartheid literature was founded and nourished on realism. The birth of freedom, however, opened and engendered a new vista of literary expression: one of experimentation and literary elitism. Chris Van Wyk's The Year of the Tapeworm, examined against the background of post-modern aesthetics, thus constitutes the subject of this paper. The paper highlights the importance of form in the new literature, its relationship to content and the extent to which literary artefacts like The Year of the Tapeworm can be manipulated or relied upon in the interpretation of emergent realities in the new South Africa.


(The Journal of Cultural Studies: 2001 3(2): 412-431)