Present Imperfect gives the study of South African literature a shot in the arm with a productiove dose of affect theory (the latest trend of interpreting culture and politics through non-linguistic, non-conscious registers by focusing on the body's visceral knowledge).
Jan Wilm, Times Literary Supplement
Present Imperfect marks our Van der Vlies as an astute reader of both ... Read moretextual archives and the archives of feelings encoded textually as part of the work of literature. [....] Modelling a method of interpretation that is ultimately hopeful, this book has much to say about the fates of literary reading in uncertain times, and the potential expansiveness of scholarly interest against the segmentation and marketization of academic labour.
Asha Rogers, Modern Language Review
In Present Imperfect, Andrew van der Vlies expertly shows how South African writing after apartheid reflects and refracts not only the critical change in political dispensation but also the push-and-pull of hope and despair marking
still marking
the post-apartheid nation. ... Present Imperfect demonstrates how literary affect - the representation of feelings that are good, bad, and ugly - mirrors the imperfect present of its title as well as opens cracks, apertures, and even windows of hope for the future.
Pallavi Rastogi, Safundi
Focusing on the disappointments that emerge when the dream of freedom flounders or collapses, Van der Vlies provides an expansive and comparative study of the troubled relationship between affect, time, and the tragic and brilliantly demonstrates how disappointment enables new structures of feelings and a new language for fiction. Present Imperfect is one of the most lucid and original reflections on South African writing after Apartheid.
Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University
In Present Imperfect, Andrew van der Vlies provides an insightful, absorbing and theoretically astute investigation of the status of contemporary South African literature, adopting as a revealing lens through which to examine this body of remarkable writing the idea of "disappointment", an affective response to the failure of the New South Africa to live up to the hopes with which it was born and a marker of the distinctive temporality of this phase in the country's history.
Derek Attridge, Professor Emeritus, University of York
Twenty years after the transition to democracy in South Africa, there is a pressing need in the literary field to assess the state and condition of recent writing in that country. At the leading edge of work answering this need comes Present Imperfect. Thoughtful, searching (in every sense), astute, and extraordinarily attentive both to the works under discussion and to the wider critical and theoretical conversations they invite, it is an enjoyable as well as an illuminating and enriching guide, and the first full-length study of affect in South African literature-an achievement in itself.
Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Present Imperfect reads postapartheid fiction for traces of an unanticipated struggle: to recalibrate unmet expectations and grapple with "bad feelings" of disappointment, nostalgia, even boredom. A deeply informed and inventive critic, Van der Vlies offers a stirring, necessary account of reading, the novel, and the literary as a fragile yet life-sustaining space where glimmers of alternative possibility may dwell and take hold.
Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University
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