Michael Chapman (South Africa)

Michael Chapman, Professor of English and, currently, Head of the School of Literary Studies , Media and Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal , was born in 1945 in Kimberley. Chapman, one of the South Africa 's foremost literary scholars and curators and a researcher rated A by the South African National Research Foundation, was educated at Kimberley High School and began his career as a school teacher in Durban. With degrees from the universities of London , Natal and South Africa , he secured his first lecturing post in English at Unisa in 1978. Returning to South Africa after studying in London , he made a decision to turn from what was then mainstream English – Shakespeare – Milton – Pope – Eliot – to the literature of this country. Chapman believed the time had arrived for South Africa to shake off its dependency, its imitation, of the UK and define its own priorities. His Masters thesis on the Durban poet Douglas Livingstone appeared in book form in 1981, signalling a very busy few years at Unisa during which he published the anthology A Century of South African Poetry (1981), Voices from Within: Black Poetry from Southern Africa (1982), Soweto Poetry (1982) and South African English Poetry: A Modern Perspective (1984). The last was awarded the national Sanlam prize for academic literature.

Chapman comments: “The field of South African Literature hardly existed in any academic sense. When I was appointed at Natal [University] as Professor of English in 1984, it was because the University realised that the discipline needed to turn its focus to South Africa and Africa. One of the challenges has been how to respond to our own internal divisions. My study of black short stories of the 1950s, The Drum Decade (1989), followed my earlier publications on black poetry in comparative understanding of white and black literature.”

Comparison and translation are the key principles of Chapman's 500-page literary history, Southern African Literatures (1996), the first attempt to integrate into a single study the literatures of the different languages in this region.

Chapman's recent work has become bolder in its comparisons: African literature or African literatures; South African poetry and its relation to the former

Eastern Europe; South Africa , India , the West. His anthology, The New Century of South African Poetry (2002), is not a revised version of his earlier Century , but a completely new book that views the range of our poetry from a post-apartheid perspective. In 2004, Chapman edited three books, The New Century of South African Short Stories, Douglas Livingstone: Selected Poems, and Roy Campbell: Selected Poems. In 2006, he published the well-received Art Talk, Politics Talk, a collection of essays, self contained yet cumulative in their argument and insight, that locate ethical and aesthetic challenges in the postcolonial condition of our times, both in South Africa (post-apartheid) and globally (post-Berlin Wall).

Selected Bibliography

Art Talk, Politics Talk, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006
The New Century of South African Short Stories, Ad Donker, 2004
Roy Campbell: Selected Poems, Ad. Donker, 2004
Douglas Livingstone: Selected Poems , Ad. Donker, 2004
The New Century of South African Poetry, Ad Donker, 2002
Southern African Literatures, Longman, 1996
Perspectives on South African English Literature (co-edited), Donker), 1992
The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s, University of Natal Press, 1989
African Poems of Thomas Pringle (co-edited), University of Natal Press , 1989
Companion to South African English Literature (co-edited), Donker, 1986
The Paperbook of South African English Poetry, Donker, 1986
South African English Poetry: A Modern Perspective, Donker, 1984
Voices from Within: Black Poetry from Southern Africa , Donker, 1982
Soweto Poetry, McGraw-Hill, 1982
Douglas Livingstone: A Critical Study of his Poetry, Donker, 1981
A Century of South African Poetry, Donker, 1981