Postmodernism, interculturality, (post)colonialism: Uwe Timm's 'Morenga' (1978) and Etienne van Heerden's 'Ancestral Voices' (1986)

This dissertation locates itself at the intersection of three discourses. It relates to the discourse of (post)colonialism, as it investigates two novels that deal with their countries' colonial pasts: Uwe Timm's Morenga and Etienne van Heerden's Ancestral Voices. It is simultaneously an intercultural investigation. It compares a German and a South-African novel, each of which deals with the importance of intercultural dialogue. Lastly, it engages with the discourse of postmodernism which also serves as its main theoretical point of departure.;My understanding of postmodernism is closely linked to the South-African debate in the 1980s. Taking place within the context of apartheid , this debate aspired to investigate the possibilities of postmodernism as an anti-hegemonic and anti-colonial way of writing. I define postmodernism as an indetermination between mimetic and anti-mimetic notions of literature, but also between a position of poetical self-reflection and a highly political stance of social engagement.;This dissertation differs from other theoretical studies of postmodernism in that it does not treat it as a theoretical framework that serves to "categorize" a (frequently large) number of literary texts. Instead, my study employs the concept of postmodernism to ground an extensive reading of the literary texts themselves.;In their novels, Uwe Timm and Etienne van Heerden respond to a specific genre of colonial texts. Their position with regard to this earlier genre is ambivalent: On the one hand, they utilize the colonial discourse by adapting some of the formal and thematic characteristics of those previous texts. On the other hand, they constantly undermine those texts' traditional literary conventions.;I understand Van Heerden's and Timm's ambivalent relationship to colonial texts as characteristic of the postmodernist indetermination, and investigate the way in which this dilemma is connected to these writers' particular poetological position(s) as well as to their specific political stance(s). This study concludes that while the novels respond to different cultural contexts, they share a critical and self-relativizing attitude towards generalizing statements of (historical) knowledge, as well as certain fundamental ideas about the position and role of literature.