A case of story: Coetzee, Gordimer, Bosman...!

Abstract

The paper suggests that the imaginative climate in South Africa after apartheid is conducive to shorter forms of fiction and that it is propitious, therefore, to pay tribute to Herman Charles Bosman. (The year 2005 will see the centenary of this storywriter’s birth.) Revisiting Bosman, I ask why the short story – possibly more ‘popular’ than the novel in terms of a reading audience in South Africa – continues in literary education to be a relatively neglected form. This is the case despite the fact that, besides Bosman, South Africa has produced considerable talents in shorter fiction, including its two Nobel prizewinners for literature, Gordimer and Coetzee.