South African Democracy In Fiction: A Comparative Study Of Gordimer's July's People And Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

#Democracy, as the coveted end of the postcolonial struggle of the colonized against the oppressive colonialist, has been targeted in the literature of the newly fledged nation-States. The two Noble laureates, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, have concentrated their novelistic enterprises on the problem of democracy, its aftermaths, its mispresentation, and the morbid symptoms of colonization bequeathed to the post-democratic generation. The legacy of apartheid under the guise of democracy is the issue which has received different treatments on the part of these two novelists. The present paper revolves around the dialectical approaches of Gordimer and Coetzee to the plights of the New South Africa. Through the lenses that this comparative study provides, the paper drives at the prerequisite transformative and translative processes through which different socio-racial strata should pass in order to achieve the democratic state.