The Significations of Representing Dialect in Writing

Abstract

This article reviews some of the constraints and implications involved in the reporting of speech in fiction and elsewhere, paying particular attention to some of the issues that attend the representation of dialect. A number of cases are discussed, but a specific focus is the apparent absence of rendering of urban black South African speech in the fiction of the pre-eminent contemporary white South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and N. Gordimer. This absence of ‘giving voice’ is interpreted as an avoidance strategy, seemingly necessary but certainly troubled, given the charged socio-political context, in which for these authors to represent the voices of those individuals could too easily be construed as appropriation. In this case; as in others discussed, questions of power, distance versus affinity, and rights of free expression and of silence are involved.