Literary Echoes of the Sacred Rewriting Faith, Ritual, and Absence in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction
Literary Echoes of the Sacred Rewriting Faith, Ritual, and Absence in Post-Apartheid South African Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The study seeks to treat post-apartheid South African fiction as a place in which the sacred is renegotiated under broken rituals, fractured theology, and avenues for aesthetic re-imaginings. The paper argues that literature-the works of J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Zoë Wicomb-can be the place where faith, memory, and moral imagination evade institutionalized religion. Basing itself on literary theology, postcolonial hermeneutics, and semiotic analysis, the study uncovers aesthetic strategies of silence, absence, and invisibility, which seek to counteract secular disenchantment and theological finality. These writers do not aim to restore traditional metaphysics; instead, trying to find some language for navigations of loss, despair, and brittle hope that articulate certain forms of transcendence that are at once elusive and yet palpable. It thus engages in larger dialogues about literature, theology, and culture by asking how fiction narrates the sacred in morally ambivalent and culturally fragmenting contexts.

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