"Let loose in the unthinkable unspeakable": waiting and alterity in Samuel Beckett's trilogy
- Authors: Marais, Jessica
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3917 , vital:20557
- Description: In this thesis, I examine the interrelated roles of waiting and alterity in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The conventional understanding of waiting is as an intentional relationship between a waiting subject and an awaited object. This kind of waiting is end-directed, and, in order for it to be worthwhile, the awaited must, at some point, arrive. In the trilogy, however, the awaited never does arrive, and it is my contention that the novels are concerned with an unconventional kind of waiting, which, being without object or end, takes the form of a non-intentional relationship between waiter and awaited. Significantly, through the non-intentional wait, the subject awaits the unawaited. She or he thereby encounters the radically other, or that which cannot be rendered familiar or assimilated in any way – an unthinkable, unspeakable, ungraspable excess that overflows the limits of thought and language. The texts foreground the vexed question of response to such alterity: how can one approach the ungraspable as ungraspable, when it is in the nature of any approach to attempt to grasp? I argue that the texts explore a paradoxical form of "incurious seeking" as an avenue to accommodate the absolutely other.
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- Date Issued: 2016
A case for contemporary third literature: the black experience in the postmillennial fiction of three Kwela authors
- Authors: Mthembu, Lumumba
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3322 , vital:20480
- Description: This study seeks to uncover the manner in which the young black experience is constructed in three novels by Sifiso Mzobe, Kgebetli Moele and K. Sello Duiker. Young Blood, Untitled and Thirteen Cents all feature teenage narrators navigating the social milieu of South Africa in the twenty-first century. My analysis is informed by Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theory because South Africa’s socio-economic landscape conforms to the divisions laid out in The Wretched of the Earth. I contend that post-apartheid South Africa is developing in a manner that is symptomatic of the Fanonian post-independence African state. My close reading of the novels teases out the conditions under which young black subjects must survive and express themselves. I look into the roles of the community, the government, the family, and the school in shaping this experience. Naturally, my discussion segues into questions of sexuality and gender as they intersect with race. I demonstrate how these texts fail and succeed as works of Third Literature, a genre derived from Third Cinema, which I have adapted due to its Fanonian ideological underpinning. Third Literature is a fundamentally revolutionary and activistic genre which seeks to pave the way for social change. In this regard, I concern myself with the recommendations these three authors may have for the readers of their texts. In conclusion, these texts demonstrate that racialized identities are social constructs with measurable experiential effects. However, there are ways of actively resisting or even
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- Date Issued: 2016
Being for the Other: Surveillance and Depictions of Race, Gender, and Animals in Contemporary South African Fiction
- Authors: Laue, Kharys Ateh
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3848 , vital:20549
- Description: This thesis examines the depiction, in contemporary South African fiction, of irresponsibility and responsibility in relation to the raced, gendered, and animal Other. Through a close analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison and Michel Foucault’s study of this design, I establish the notion of disciplinary surveillance or panopticism. This I take to be a mode of power that seeks, by means of an invisible gaze, to render its subjects docile. In my readings of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning, and selected short stories from Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away, I demonstrate that oppressive authoritarian regimes are rooted in Benthamic principles of hyper-visibility and concealment. Disciplinary power, I contend, is effective precisely because it places an individual in a constant state of Being-for-Others, a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the experience of objectification through another’s look. Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of black double consciousness frame my examination of, respectively, gender and racial oppression, while my discussion of animals appeals to Jacques Derrida’s work on the non-human. I show how surveillance, in each of the selected texts, functions through a racist and/or sexist and/or speciesist gaze that facilitates violent, irresponsible relationships with the human and non-human Other. The texts under discussion, however, also depict ways in which the Other actively resists and subverts regimes of oppression, often by means of a counter gaze that compels the protagonist, or the reader, to take up responsibility for Others. Ultimately, my study concludes that the fictional works of Coetzee, Wicomb, and Cartwright offer an ethics of empathetic responsibility, which I term Being for the Other, in opposition to mechanisms of disciplinary surveillance that seek to oppress, conceal, and dominate.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Changing planets and climates in select fantastic literature
- Authors: Ward, Brendan
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3994 , vital:20578
- Description: This thesis is concerned with literature’s engagement with the environment, specifically ecosystems and climate change. Literature of the fantastic, works that break from the tradition of mimetic literature and the limits of realism, are the focus of this thesis, which argues, alongside ecocriticism, that literature must be part of the interdisciplinary drive towards greater ecological awareness. Speculative literature adds fantastic elements or draws on scientific extrapolations into the future, and offers a platform to engage with the science of environmental issues alongside philosophical engagements with the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world around them. This thesis draws on ecocriticism to examine the role of reading and criticism in constructing more ecologically sustainable societies. From this position, it asks how fantasy can be used to convey these themes. As a result, this thesis is interested in definitions of fantasy, drawing on science fiction and fantasy to examine Kathryn Hume’s framework of the fantastic impulse. Placing fantastic texts on two axes, Hume examines the ways texts support or subvert the reader’s expectations, and encourage or discourage reflection on their extratextual worlds. This thesis contends that, texts that encourage engagement are most transformative, but that the spectrum of engagement and disengagement challenges authors to navigate between didacticism and emotive imagery. To show this, this thesis examines four series of novels drawing on the fantastic impulse. Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and Science in the Capital, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The first two are on opposite ends of both of Hume’s axes, and imagine the challenges of constructing Earth-like ecosystems on other planets, asking questions about the sustainability of such a project as well as the possibilities of transforming society. The latter two engage with rapid climate change, Robinson’s looking at contemporary climate change and Martin’s engaging with historical climate change. They interrogate the impact of the climate on human and more- than-human life, and reveal the tension between comforting didactic revisions of human- environment interactions and framework-disturbing alternate ways of relating to the environment. This tension is where the fantastic is powerful, allowing alternate visions to pierce sceptical readers’ defences.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Contesting masculinities: a study of selected texts of resistance to conscription into the South African Defence Force (SADF) in the 1980s
- Authors: Mason, Paul
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2332 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020842
- Description: The theoretical framework for this thesis and analysis of primary texts revolves around the problem of conscription into the South African Defence Force (SADF) in the 1980s. The ideology of masculinity that underpinned and sustained the practice of conscription is referred to throughout as the hegemonic version. This term is interchangeable with others, namely masculinism and ‗the real man.‘ The aim is to interpret the selected texts for strains of resistance to the practice of conscription and its assumptions as to what to what constitutes the natural or real man. In the Introduction to this thesis I begin by explaining the personal dimension of my role as researcher, after which I motivate my research project and explain its theoretical and methodological orientation, focusing on the concepts that play a significant role in analysis of the primary texts. The Introduction concludes with an outline of the content of Chapters 1–5. Chapter 1 begins with a brief discussion, on the general level, of the practice of conscription and resistance to it, and proceeds to a concern with conscription in 1980s South Africa. Attention is paid to prevailing attitudes towards gender and sexuality within both the SADF and the End Conscription Campaign (ECC). Discussion of gender and sexuality as constructs of identity proceeds to a focus on the conceptual tools for textual analysis provided by theories of masculinity. The final section of this chapter pays attention to specific post-structuralist notions of identity that serve analysis of the primary texts, that is, the notions of the subject, agency and the author. Having engaged mainly with secondary texts in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents the first sustained critical engagement with primary texts in which resistance was expressed against the institution of conscription and the hegemonic version of masculinity that underpinned it. These expressions of resistance occurred within a rock music counter-culture of the period, known as the Voëlvry movement. Attention is given to overlaps or links between this counter-culture and that of America in the 1960s, as well echoes between the Vietnam and Border Wars. Analysis of these links is applied to a memoir selected for its appropriateness. Threaded through the chapter is a concern with expressions of masculine identity within the Voëlvry counter-culture, the SADF and the ECC. Chapter 3 focuses on three novels and one collection of short stories, each narrated in the first person and written by gay authors who performed their National Service. Attention is paid to the protagonists‘ perceptions of themselves, their troubled relationships with their fathers, and the struggle to come out within a context that prohibited them from doing so. Chapter 4 concerns three wartime memoirs and two written by men who refused to perform their National Service. Underlying concerns in this chapter are the question of fact versus fiction in the genre of the memoir, authors‘ perceptions of and relationships with women, and expressions of vulnerability. Chapter 5 concentrates on the interviews that comprise the Appendix. The chapter establishes its theoretical ground by focusing on principles of narrative structure and the relation of personal to narrative identity. The chapter pays attention to the displays of power and the vulnerabilities of both veteran soldiers and resisters. Theory deployed in analysis of the primary texts serves the principal concerns articulated in the title to the thesis.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Exorcising the Past: History, Hauntings and Evil in Neo-Gothic Fiction
- Authors: Van der Wielen, Karlien
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2333 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1021257
- Description: This thesis explores the conventions of both historical and Gothic fiction in order to investigate what seems to be a recurrent impulse to exorcise the past in what I define as contemporary Neo-Gothic fiction. It therefore attempts to establish a distinction between Neo-Gothic fiction and other forms of contemporary Gothic fiction by focusing on the treatment of history, the supernatural and the grand narrative of progress in three contemporary Gothic novels: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates. This thesis argues that the most potent manifestation of history can be found in the representation of the revenant in Neo-Gothic fiction, which exhibits a disruptive and evil ontology that problematises the exorcism of the past. Furthermore, the reactions of ‘modern’ characters to these revenants illustrate the imperative to exorcise the past, and therefore the treatment of history and the past is reflected in the interaction between the ‘modern’ characters and the Gothic revenants. Through this interaction as well as the parody of traditional Gothic and historical fiction conventions, Neo-Gothic fiction constructs a critique of the Enlightenment’s grand narrative of progress. Paradoxically, this constitutes Neo-Gothic fiction’s own attempt to exorcise the past, which it recognises in a simplified and reductive narrative of history propounded through the grand narrative of progress. This thesis therefore pays particular attention to the configuration of revenants as evil and ‘modern’ humans as good, and the disruption of this simple binary that is effected through Neo-Gothic fiction’s subversion of the grand narrative of progress. This focus allows for the theorisation of the revenant through Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘the abject’, the investigation of the treatment of history in Neo-Gothic fiction and the exploration of very recent Gothic texts that have not yet received much critical attention.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Fusing fact and fiction: biography and autobiography in the novels of Virginia Woolf
- Authors: White, Joshua Craig
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/4005 , vital:20580
- Description: Virginia Woolf was noted for a preoccupation with the genre of life-writing throughout her career. Her aims when it came to reshaping the nature of biographical and autobiographical literature were numerous. She veered away from the aggrandising and patriarchal methods with which Victorian biographers tended to depict their subjects. She increased the focus on women in life-writing, examining and subverting traditionally prescribed gender roles prevalent in both her society and the literature that reflected it, and advocating a balance between male and female patterns of thinking. She also devised a method of incorporating both basic biographical fact and aspects of fiction into life-writing in order to approach a more truthful depiction of a subject’s personality or character. This method is linked to the aforementioned balance of gendered thought patterns, since Woolf often aligns factuality with male thinking and the contrasting qualities of fiction, such as intuition, ambivalence and perspicacity, with female thinking. This thesis examines three novels which demonstrate Woolf’s constant preoccupation with combining fact and fiction in order to capture the essence of personality. In her debut novel, The Voyage Out, she presents Rachel Vinrace, who must achieve a balance of male-oriented fact with female-oriented insight in order to fashion a sufficient identity for herself and to identify others in a selective and judicious manner, thus being simultaneously autobiographical and biographical. In Orlando, Woolf explicitly subverts the traditional Victorian biography by depicting Vita Sackville-West as a man who transforms into a woman and remains living for over 400 years. In presenting such a character, Woolf posits that personality consists of and is influenced by myriad aspects of a person’s life that cannot be documented in the restrictive manner employed by Victorian biographers. Orlando’s essence being obfuscated by manifold “selves” attests to Woolf problematizing attempts to attain such an essence. The same challenge is particularly important in her autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, in which she transposes the traumas of her own life into a fictitious narrative in order to achieve catharsis for her and her readers, and to present the difficulty in capturing the essence of character. The conclusion that Woolf eventually posits is that personality cannot be reduced to an essence, but rather that it consists of idiosyncrasies that are various, intertwining, and capricious.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Ideas of poetic form: aspects of the Romantic-Symbolist tradition
- Authors: Oldert, David
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/54554 , vital:26587
- Description: The subject of the work is some of the formal and technical developments of modern poetry in the Romantic-Symbolist tradition. These developments were stimulated partly by the ideas of the non-intellectual Symbol inherited from the Romantics and the idea that poetry could be a musical medium inherited from some of the French Symbolists. Their combined influence led to a number of technical problems in the structuring of imagery and the handling of syntax. The work begins, therefore, by tracing the philosophical assumptions behind the ideas of the Symbol and of the musical analogy. I then go on to examine two of the difficulties that these ideas produced. One is the tension between the analogical structure of a poem’s imagery and its metaphorical texture: quite simply, the more compressed and complex a poet’s metaphors become, the more they tend to disrupt the poem’s structure of imagery. The other problem is obscurity, which is caused by insufficient objectification of private images in a symbolic structure, and by fused metaphor, which is essentially a metaphor with an obscured ground of resemblance. Finally, I show how these difficulties were solved by poets outside the tradition who used a more articulate kind of syntax, yet who also managed to combine that syntax with the ideal of symbolic form. The implicit argument, then, is that the Romantic-Symbolist ideas of form, and the New Critics’ theories of form which were largely based on them, are able to elucidate an essentially different kind of poetry, and thus have some degree of truth and use beyond the tradition that generated them.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Meat and its meanings: representations of meat-eating in selected works of South African literature
- Authors: Coetzer, Theo
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3860 , vital:20550
- Description: This thesis is situated within the burgeoning field of literary animal studies. Its aim is to analyse critically the way in which animals-as-meat are represented in South African literature. While meat pervades our lives and literature, there exists very little scholarship that considers literary depictions of meat. The thesis suggests that literary texts can offer useful reflections of the cultural environments in which they are immersed and, furthermore, can encourage what J. M. Coetzee calls the ‘sympathetic imagination’ in relation to animals. The dissertation offers close readings of three primary texts, while also drawing on a broader range of local fiction. Chapter 1 discusses Eben Venter’s Trencherman, with a specific focus on Venter’s use of the plaasroman and literary dystopia. Both genres are important to the novel’s ubiquitous depictions of meat, serving to illustrate some of the destructive, and irreversible, excesses associated with traditional Afrikaner culture in South Africa. Meat consumption is not only depicted as being among these harmful excesses, but also comes to represent them collectively. Chapter 2 offers a reading of Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior, paying particular attention to its representation of the intersection between the objectification of women’s bodies and the transformation of animals into meat. In my approach to this text, I make use of Carol J. Adams’ notion of the ‘absent referent’. I suggest that while Mda ostensibly considers the subjugation of both women and animals, the novel does not ultimately demonstrate concern for animals in their own right. The final chapter considers the representation of suffering in Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. I argue that Galgut’s text is alone among the three primary texts in its attention to the animal suffering inextricably linked to meat production. The novel depicts this suffering as being comparable to human suffering, while simultaneously demonstrating humans’ indifference to their animal fellows. The dissertation concludes that while meat is infused with a range of meanings in South African literature, the most obvious and intrinsic one – the fact of animal death and animal suffering – is the one most often ignored.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Selfhood, identity and madness in the works of Milan Kundera and Peter Carey
- Authors: Graven, Ashley Holm
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3904 , vital:20554
- Description: Despite all the critical attention Milan Kundera’s and Peter Carey’s fiction has received, relatively little has been said about the way in which these authors problematise selfhood. In this study, I argue that these two writers share a preoccupation with the strictures placed on the individual by his/her location in language and discourse. I show that they deconstruct subjectivity with a view to intimating the possibility of momentarily transcending discursive control, and thereby inhabiting authentic selfhood. In addition, I demonstrate that both authors draw attention to the nature of language through their thematisation of madness, and I then trace the implications of this nexus between language and madness for the reader, who of course is a subject in language. My contention in this regard is that Carey and Kundera seek to instil in the reader a self-reflexive awareness of the ways in which his/her location in language shapes his/her perception of others. In turn, this awareness charges the reader with the responsibility of questioning his/her judgements, and thereby enables him/her to negotiate a measure of authenticity from his/her position in language.
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- Date Issued: 2016
The past in the present: race, gender and transnationalism in Zoë Wicomb’s October and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
- Authors: Nthunya, Manosa
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3939 , vital:20559
- Description: This thesis will interrogate the ways in which the most recent novels of Zoë Wicomb and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (namely October and Americanah) explore race, gender and transnational issues. Wicomb and Adichie share an interest in representing the lives of people who have been historically marginalised by racial and gender classifications. This thesis will argue that historical and stereotypical ways of looking at people, particularly African people, are still prevalent in the twenty-first century. Wicomb’s interest is in the coloured community and the impact that apartheid ideology has had on it. She shows, as this thesis will argue, that notions of shame and respectability still influence the coloured community, post-1994, in the same ways they did under apartheid. Furthermore, the thesis will show that religion, which was used to justify apartheid, has been instrumental in maintaining racist and sexist norms in the coloured community in post-apartheid South Africa. Adichie’s novel, on the other hand, shows the impact of gender norms in Nigeria on her female characters. Unlike characters in Wicomb’s novel, Adichie’s mostly experience racial bias when they move to Western countries. This thesis will argue that many Western countries, which were the main beneficiaries of colonialism, continue to ‘other’ Africans, in spite of their claims to respect all human beings. Wicomb’s and Adichie’s novels depict characters that are moving between different continents, along with the impact that this has on them. In the twenty-first century, more people are moving between different spaces and, as a result, interacting with different cultures. These migrations, as this thesis will show, give rise to paradoxical circumstances: people are still being judged according to their race and gender, in spite of the freedom that these moves are supposed to lead to. Of central importance to both novels then is the question of home and belonging. Since people are moving between different continents, is it still possible to belong to one place? Is it in fact possible to belong at all? These are some of the questions that will be raised and answered in this thesis. Lastly, the thesis will look at the thematic representations of reading and writing in the novels under consideration. This is most evident in Adichie’s novel where her main character starts blogging as a way to express her dissatisfaction with the racist and sexist environment she encounters in the United States of America. The thesis will explore how Adichie examines blogging as a mode of communication that is unique to the twenty-first century. It will argue that it is perhaps through new media that historically subjugated subjects, such as African people and women, will be able to express themselves. Less hackneyed modes of communication might provide the necessary channels for those who have historically been denied voice to finally find it.
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- Date Issued: 2016