Graduation Year
2019
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Michelle Decker
Reader 2
Aaron Matz
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2018 Corey Carter
Abstract
Following the formal conclusion of reconciliatory processes in a newly post-apartheid South Africa, narrative remained a perdurable, centripetal force. Extending into the realm of literature, the inquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were altered and enlarged. The mode of magical realism, in particular, emerged as a viable method not only for representing the world, but for working through uncertain futures and traumatic histories. Shimmering with the extraordinary and ineffable strangeness of the magical realist text, Achmat Dangor’s short story “The Devil”, offers expansive, recognizable and revelatory ways of dealing with the trauma of apartheid. Crucially, the narrative represents the private efforts of individual, personal healing in contradistinction with official processes of reconciliation. This thesis examines the ways in which “The Devil” proposes the body as a site of exploring the structuring antipodes of individual-collective and public-private, ultimately untethering these binaries through a process of bodily dis/entwining.
Recommended Citation
Wilson, Corey Carter, "Dis/entwining Bodies: Magical Realism, Corporeality, and Reconciliation in Achmat Dangor’s Short Fiction" (2019). Scripps Senior Theses. 1307.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1307
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.