Abstract

VAN VUUREN, Helize. "Labyrinth of loneliness": Breyten Breytenbach's prison poetry (1976-1985). Tydskr. letterkd. [online]. 2009, vol.46, n.2. ISSN 2309-9070.

Breytenbach's prison poetry is first contextualized as part of a South African subgenre that flourished under apartheid, and then interrogated for its specificities: the singular prison conditions under which he wrote, the nature of the poetry, specific leitmotifs in each of the five volumes published between 1976 and 1985. A psychoanalytic approach is indicated to this strong middle phase in his extensive poetical oeuvre, comprising seventeen collections of poetry.

Keywords : South African prison poetry; depersonalisation; dissociation; dread / debility / dependency; DDD syndrome; solitary confinement; Breytenbach's ars poetica.

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