The Construction of a Framework: Ezekiel Mphahlele

Abstract

There is one writer in whose work it is possible to trace, over a period of forty years, both the problems of literary production experienced by South African writers and the stages in the development of an appropriate critical approach: for Ezekiel Mphahlele functioned as artist and critic throughout that period, encountering in his creative and confronting in his critical work the alienation of consciousness and the appropriation of discourse, while his later criticism records the efforts of black writers towards reappropriation.