Complex Collaborations : Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story

• This essay examines how South African author Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2001) critiques collaborative life writing. More specifically, it argues that the faltering collaboration between the protagonists David and the unnamed amanuensis in David’s Story serves as an illuminating critique of past collaborative works such as Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980) by shifting the focus from the end product to the collaborative writing process that precedes it. The analyses in this essay reveal that the fallibility of language demonstrated in Wicomb’s novel serves as a reminder of the impossibility of the narrative project that the amanuensis and David have set out to work on. Moreover, this essay argues that Wicomb’s novel highlights what can be unequal power relations between an amanuensis and an autobiographical subject in a collaborative writing process.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Elsa Joubert

The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena

Zoë Wicomb

David's Story

collaborative autobiography

South Africa

English literature

Engelska med litteraturvetenskaplig inriktning

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)