Leon de Kock's Books

Losing the Plot

Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing

By: Leon de Kock

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Losing the Plot

Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing

By: Leon de Kock

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.

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395

Publisher

NYU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

186814965X

ISBN 13

9781868149650

The Love Song of André P. Brink

A Biography

By: Leon de Kock

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The Love Song of André P. Brink

A Biography

By: Leon de Kock

The Love Song of André P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source – running to a million words – Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road. De Kock's biographical study of the author who came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature not only synthesises the journals but also subjects them to searching critical analysis. In addition, the biographer measures the journals against additional sources, both scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimony of Brink's friends, family, wives and lovers. The Love Song of André P Brink subjects Brink's literary legacy to a bracing scholarly re-evaluation, making this major new biography a crucial addition to scholarship on Brink.

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543

Publisher

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1868427935

ISBN 13

9781868427932

On The Contrary

Leading The Opposition In A Democratic South Africa

By: Tony Leon

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On The Contrary

Leading The Opposition In A Democratic South Africa

By: Tony Leon

The memoirs of former Opposition leader Tony Leon provide a unique glimpse into the political life of South Africa in the democratic era. In incisive, finely focused prose, On the Contrary records Leon's thirteen-year leadership of the Democratic Alliance and its predecessor, the Democratic Party, years in which the party grew from its marginal position on the brink of political extinction into the second largest political force in South Africa. This is an adventure in ideas that involves vivid real people - friends, colleagues and enemies alike. There is new light shed on many of the figures who have shaped modern South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki. A trained lawyer, Tony Leon entered Parliament at age 32 at the dawn of South Africa's period of revolution and reform. He actively participated in the constitutional negotiations that led to the birth of the democratic South Africa.

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Page Count

864

Publisher

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1868424936

ISBN 13

9781868424931

Losing the Plot

Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing

By: Leon de Kock

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Losing the Plot

Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing

By: Leon de Kock

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395

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

186814965X

ISBN 13

9781868149650

The Love Song of André P. Brink

A Biography

By: Leon de Kock

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The Love Song of André P. Brink

A Biography

By: Leon de Kock

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543

Publisher

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1868427935

ISBN 13

9781868427932

Bodyhood

By: Leon de Kock

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Bodyhood

By: Leon de Kock

‘Taut, sensual, funny and full of bodily intelligence. Are you there? Is it only me? these poems ask – as they look you in the eye.’ – Sarah Nuttall. The poems in Bodyhood open widely to the inside while looking outwards at the connecting points of body and being – in love, in feeling, in the entanglements of desire, and in the many felt senses of human cross-connection. At once reflective, wistful, wry and ironic, they chart the individual’s imprint on a world accessible only through the bonds and affiliations of an embodied life.

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Penguin Random House South Africa

Published Date

ISBN 10

1415203571

ISBN 13

9781415203576

Civilising Barbarians

Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-century South Africa

By: Leon De Kock

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Civilising Barbarians

Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-century South Africa

By: Leon De Kock

This is the story of how allegories of human value, cast in narrative dualities based on civilization and barbarism, were prescribed, reified and denied in the 19th-century's struggles over human identity in South Africa.

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231

Published Date

ISBN 10

1868142981

ISBN 13

9781868142989

A Clinical Guide for Contraception

By: Leon Speroff,Philip D. Darney

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A Clinical Guide for Contraception

By: Leon Speroff,Philip D. Darney

The thoroughly updated Fifth Edition of this practical handbook provides the essential information that clinicians and patients need to choose the best contraceptive method for the patient's age and medical, social, and personal characteristics.

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Page Count

464

Publisher

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published Date

ISBN 10

1608316106

ISBN 13

9781608316106

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

By: Andrew van der Vlies

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Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

By: Andrew van der Vlies

An explanation of the unique role of the book and book collecting in South Africa due to the apartheid This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives- historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book- collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of 'book history' for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.

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Page Count

778

Publisher

NYU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1868148017

ISBN 13

9781868148011

South Africa in the Global Imaginary

By: Leon De Kock,Pippa Skotnes,Loren Kruger

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South Africa in the Global Imaginary

By: Leon De Kock,Pippa Skotnes,Loren Kruger

Winner of the 2001 CELJ Award for the Best Special Issue This special issue of Poetics Today explores the development of a South African literary identity in the face of its staggering cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity. The collection uses the idea of the "global imaginary" to explore the ways the outside world has constructed ideas about South African literature as well as the way South Africans themselves have fashioned their literary selfhood. Articles address the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and wrestle with the fact that in spite of the fact that there are eleven official languages in South Africa and that many of the cultures have historically relied on an oral tradition, the dominant works continue to be those that are written down, in English. As de Kock writes in his introduction, the collection "raises a multiplicity of questions about the colonization of culture." There has been a "trope of binary pairing," he writes, between white and black, civilized and backward, home and exile, colonizer and colonized, which obscures the richness and complexity of the South African literary tradition. This collection promises to at least begin to correct that oversimplification. Contributors: Louise Bethlehem, Jonathan Crewe, Dirk Klopper, Leon de Kock, Loren Kruger, Sonja Laden, Simon Lewis, Peter Merrington, Patricia Watson Shariff, Pippa Skotnes

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Page Count

290

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822365367

ISBN 13

9780822365365

Bodyhood

By: Leon de Kock

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Bodyhood

By: Leon de Kock

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Penguin Random House South Africa

Published Date

ISBN 10

1415203571

ISBN 13

9781415203576

Book's by Leon de Kock

Losing the Plot

Losing the Plot

The Love Song of André P. Brink

The Love Song of André P. Brink

On The Contrary

On The Contrary

Losing the Plot

Losing the Plot

The Love Song of André P. Brink

The Love Song of André P. Brink

Bodyhood

Bodyhood

Civilising Barbarians

Civilising Barbarians

A Clinical Guide for Contraception

A Clinical Guide for Contraception

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

South Africa in the Global Imaginary

South Africa in the Global Imaginary

Bodyhood

Bodyhood

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