Experiencing loss : traumatic memory and nostalgic longing in Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney and The Rowing Lesson, and Rachel Zadok's Gem Squash Tokoloshe
- Authors: Roux, Rowan Pieter
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Landsman, Anne, 1959- The Devil's Chimney -- Criticism and interpretation Landsman, Anne, 1959- The Rowing Lesson -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation South Africa. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Psychic trauma in literature Nostalgia in literature Repression (Psychology) in literature Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism Literature, Modern -- 21st century -- History and criticism South Africa -- Race relations
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2272 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006854
- Description: This thesis examines the experience of loss in Anne Landsman’s novels The Devil’s Chimney (1997) and The Rowing Lesson (2008), and Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005). Positing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an impetus for emerging literary traditions within contemporary South African fiction, the argument begins by evaluating the reasons for the TRC’s widespread impact, and considers the role that the individual author may play within a culture which is undergoing dramatic socio-political upheavals. Through theoretical explication, close reading, and textual comparison, the argument initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and literary analysis, differentiating between two primary modes of experiencing loss, namely traumatic and nostalgic memory. Out of these sets of concerns, the thesis seeks to understand the inextricability of body, memory and landscape, and interrogates the deployment of these tropes within the contexts of traumatic and nostalgic loss, examining each author’s nuanced invocation. A central tenet of the argument is a consideration, moreover, of how the dialogic imagination has shaped storytelling, and whether or not narrative may provide therapeutic affect for either author or reader. The study concludes with an interpretation of the changing shape of literary expression within South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Roux, Rowan Pieter
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Landsman, Anne, 1959- The Devil's Chimney -- Criticism and interpretation Landsman, Anne, 1959- The Rowing Lesson -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation South Africa. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Psychic trauma in literature Nostalgia in literature Repression (Psychology) in literature Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism Literature, Modern -- 21st century -- History and criticism South Africa -- Race relations
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2272 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006854
- Description: This thesis examines the experience of loss in Anne Landsman’s novels The Devil’s Chimney (1997) and The Rowing Lesson (2008), and Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005). Positing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an impetus for emerging literary traditions within contemporary South African fiction, the argument begins by evaluating the reasons for the TRC’s widespread impact, and considers the role that the individual author may play within a culture which is undergoing dramatic socio-political upheavals. Through theoretical explication, close reading, and textual comparison, the argument initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and literary analysis, differentiating between two primary modes of experiencing loss, namely traumatic and nostalgic memory. Out of these sets of concerns, the thesis seeks to understand the inextricability of body, memory and landscape, and interrogates the deployment of these tropes within the contexts of traumatic and nostalgic loss, examining each author’s nuanced invocation. A central tenet of the argument is a consideration, moreover, of how the dialogic imagination has shaped storytelling, and whether or not narrative may provide therapeutic affect for either author or reader. The study concludes with an interpretation of the changing shape of literary expression within South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
Self, family and society in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, Rachel Zadok's Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessings's The Grass is Singing
- Authors: O'Brien, Lauren Leigh
- Date: 2013 , 2013-09-08
- Subjects: Gordimer, Nadine. Burger's daughter -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation Lessing, Doris May, 1919-- The grass is singing -- Criticism and interpretation South African fiction (English) -- 20th century -- History and criticism South African fiction (English) -- 21st century -- History and criticism South Africa -- In literature South Africa -- Social life and customs Identification (Psychology) in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2271 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006771
- Description: This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: O'Brien, Lauren Leigh
- Date: 2013 , 2013-09-08
- Subjects: Gordimer, Nadine. Burger's daughter -- Criticism and interpretation Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe -- Criticism and interpretation Lessing, Doris May, 1919-- The grass is singing -- Criticism and interpretation South African fiction (English) -- 20th century -- History and criticism South African fiction (English) -- 21st century -- History and criticism South Africa -- In literature South Africa -- Social life and customs Identification (Psychology) in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2271 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006771
- Description: This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
The family in Shakespeare's plays: a study of South African revisions
- Authors: Hjul, Lauren Martha
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Parents , Parental bonds , Family , Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- In literature -- Research , Coetzee, J M, 1940-. Disgrace , Gordimer, Nadine. My son's story , Peteni, R L, 1915-. Hill of fools , English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism , Families in literature , English literature -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2181 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001832
- Description: This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the family in Shakespeare’s canon and the engagement therewith in three South African novels: Hill of Fools (1976) by R. L. Peteni, My Son’s Story (1990) by Nadine Gordimer, and Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. The study is divided into an introduction, three chapters each addressing one of the South African novels and its relationship with a Shakespeare text or texts, and a conclusion. The introductory chapter provides an analysis of the two strands of criticism in which the thesis is situated – studies of the family in Shakespeare and studies of appropriations of Shakespeare – and discusses the ways in which these two strands may be combined through a detailed discussion of the presence of power dynamics in the relationship between parent and child in all of the texts considered. The three chapters each contextualise the South African text and provide detailed discussions of the family dynamics within the relevant texts, with particular reference to questions of authority and autonomy. The focus in each chapter is determined by the nature of the intertextual relationship between the South African novel and the Shakespearean text being discussed. Thus, the first chapter, “The Dissolution of Familial Structures in Hill of Fools” considers power dynamics in the family as an inherent part of the Romeo and Juliet genre, of which William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but a part. Similarly, the impact of a socio-political identity, and the secrecy it necessitates, is the focus of the second chapter, “Fathers, Sons and Legacy in My Son’s Story” as is the role of Shakespeare and literature within South Africa. These concerns are connected to the novel’s use of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, King Lear, and Hamlet. In the third chapter, “Reclaiming Agency through the Daughter in Disgrace and The Tempest”, I expand on Laurence Wright’s argument that Disgrace is an engagement with The Tempest and consider ways in which the altered power dynamic between father and daughter results in the reconciliation of the father figure with society. The thesis thus addresses the tension between parental bonds and parental bondage
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Hjul, Lauren Martha
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Parents , Parental bonds , Family , Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- In literature -- Research , Coetzee, J M, 1940-. Disgrace , Gordimer, Nadine. My son's story , Peteni, R L, 1915-. Hill of fools , English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism , Families in literature , English literature -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2181 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001832
- Description: This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the family in Shakespeare’s canon and the engagement therewith in three South African novels: Hill of Fools (1976) by R. L. Peteni, My Son’s Story (1990) by Nadine Gordimer, and Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. The study is divided into an introduction, three chapters each addressing one of the South African novels and its relationship with a Shakespeare text or texts, and a conclusion. The introductory chapter provides an analysis of the two strands of criticism in which the thesis is situated – studies of the family in Shakespeare and studies of appropriations of Shakespeare – and discusses the ways in which these two strands may be combined through a detailed discussion of the presence of power dynamics in the relationship between parent and child in all of the texts considered. The three chapters each contextualise the South African text and provide detailed discussions of the family dynamics within the relevant texts, with particular reference to questions of authority and autonomy. The focus in each chapter is determined by the nature of the intertextual relationship between the South African novel and the Shakespearean text being discussed. Thus, the first chapter, “The Dissolution of Familial Structures in Hill of Fools” considers power dynamics in the family as an inherent part of the Romeo and Juliet genre, of which William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but a part. Similarly, the impact of a socio-political identity, and the secrecy it necessitates, is the focus of the second chapter, “Fathers, Sons and Legacy in My Son’s Story” as is the role of Shakespeare and literature within South Africa. These concerns are connected to the novel’s use of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, King Lear, and Hamlet. In the third chapter, “Reclaiming Agency through the Daughter in Disgrace and The Tempest”, I expand on Laurence Wright’s argument that Disgrace is an engagement with The Tempest and consider ways in which the altered power dynamic between father and daughter results in the reconciliation of the father figure with society. The thesis thus addresses the tension between parental bonds and parental bondage
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
The limitations and possiblilites of identity and form in selected recent memoirs and novels by white, female Zimbabwean writers : Alexandra Fuller, Lauren Liebenberg
- Authors: Eppel, Ruth
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Biography Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Fiction Zimbabwean fiction (English) -- 21st century Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Autobiography Fuller, Alexandra, 1969- Liebenberg, Lauren St. John, Lauren,1966- Rheam, Bryony
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2185 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001985
- Description: This study examines selected works by four white female Zimbabwean writers: Alexandra Fuller, Lauren Liebenberg, Bryony Rheam and Lauren St John, in light of the controversy over the spate of white memoirs which followed the violent confiscation of white farms in Zimbabwe from 2000 onwards. The controversy hinges on the notion that white memoir writers exploit the perceived victimhood of white Zimbabweans in the international sphere, and nostalgically recall a time of belonging – as children in Rhodesia – which fails to address the fraught colonial history which is directly related to the current political climate of the country. I argue that such critiques are too generalised, and I regard the selected texts as primarily critical of the values and lifestyles of white Rhodesians/Zimbabweans. The texts I have selected include a range of autobiographical and fictional writing, or memoirs and pseudo-memoirs, and I focus on form as a medium enabling an exploration of identity. The ways in which these authors conform to and adapt particular narratives of becoming is examined in each chapter, with a particular focus on the transition from innocence to experience, the autobiography, and the Bildungsroman. Gender is a recurring point of interest: in each case the female selves/protagonists are situated in terms of the family, which, in reflecting social values, is a key site of conflict. In regard to trends in white African writing, I explore the white African (farm) childhood memoir and the confessional mode. Ultimately I maintain that while the texts may be classified as white writing, as they are fundamentally concerned with white identity, and therefore evince certain limitations of perspective and form, including clichéd tendencies, all the writers interrogate white identity and the fictional texts more self-reflexively deconstruct tropes of white writing.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Eppel, Ruth
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Biography Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Fiction Zimbabwean fiction (English) -- 21st century Women, White -- Zimbabwe -- Autobiography Fuller, Alexandra, 1969- Liebenberg, Lauren St. John, Lauren,1966- Rheam, Bryony
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2185 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001985
- Description: This study examines selected works by four white female Zimbabwean writers: Alexandra Fuller, Lauren Liebenberg, Bryony Rheam and Lauren St John, in light of the controversy over the spate of white memoirs which followed the violent confiscation of white farms in Zimbabwe from 2000 onwards. The controversy hinges on the notion that white memoir writers exploit the perceived victimhood of white Zimbabweans in the international sphere, and nostalgically recall a time of belonging – as children in Rhodesia – which fails to address the fraught colonial history which is directly related to the current political climate of the country. I argue that such critiques are too generalised, and I regard the selected texts as primarily critical of the values and lifestyles of white Rhodesians/Zimbabweans. The texts I have selected include a range of autobiographical and fictional writing, or memoirs and pseudo-memoirs, and I focus on form as a medium enabling an exploration of identity. The ways in which these authors conform to and adapt particular narratives of becoming is examined in each chapter, with a particular focus on the transition from innocence to experience, the autobiography, and the Bildungsroman. Gender is a recurring point of interest: in each case the female selves/protagonists are situated in terms of the family, which, in reflecting social values, is a key site of conflict. In regard to trends in white African writing, I explore the white African (farm) childhood memoir and the confessional mode. Ultimately I maintain that while the texts may be classified as white writing, as they are fundamentally concerned with white identity, and therefore evince certain limitations of perspective and form, including clichéd tendencies, all the writers interrogate white identity and the fictional texts more self-reflexively deconstruct tropes of white writing.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
'Carrying the fire' : Cormac McCarthy's moral philosophy
- Authors: Davies, Christopher
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- -- Criticism and interpretation American fiction -- 20th century -- Moral and ethical aspects American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2217 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002260
- Description: In this thesis, I argue that the question of ethics, despite claims to the contrary, is a central concern in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. My principal contention, in this regard, is that an approach that is not reliant on conventional systems of meaning is needed if one is to engage effectively with the moral value of this writer’s oeuvre. In devising such an approach, I draw heavily on the ‘immoralist’ writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first chapter of the study contends that good and evil, terms central to conventional morality, do not occupy easily definable positions in McCarthy’s work. In the second chapter, the emphasis falls on the way in which language and myth’s mediation of reality informs choice. The final chapter focuses on the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, in which normative systems of value are completely absent. It argues that, despite this absence, McCarthy presents a compassionate ethic that is able to find purchase in the harsh world depicted in the novel. Finally, then, this study argues that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, requires a reconsideration of the critical claim that his work is nihilistic and that it negates moral value.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Davies, Christopher
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- -- Criticism and interpretation American fiction -- 20th century -- Moral and ethical aspects American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2217 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002260
- Description: In this thesis, I argue that the question of ethics, despite claims to the contrary, is a central concern in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. My principal contention, in this regard, is that an approach that is not reliant on conventional systems of meaning is needed if one is to engage effectively with the moral value of this writer’s oeuvre. In devising such an approach, I draw heavily on the ‘immoralist’ writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first chapter of the study contends that good and evil, terms central to conventional morality, do not occupy easily definable positions in McCarthy’s work. In the second chapter, the emphasis falls on the way in which language and myth’s mediation of reality informs choice. The final chapter focuses on the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, in which normative systems of value are completely absent. It argues that, despite this absence, McCarthy presents a compassionate ethic that is able to find purchase in the harsh world depicted in the novel. Finally, then, this study argues that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, requires a reconsideration of the critical claim that his work is nihilistic and that it negates moral value.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
'I want to tell the story again': re-telling in selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner
- Authors: Collett, Jenna Lara
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Warner, Alan Criticism and interpretation Winterson, Jeanette, 1959- -- Criticism and interpretation English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2248 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002291
- Description: This thesis investigates acts of ‘re-telling’ in four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner.Re-telling, as I have defined it, refers to the re-imagining and re-writing of existing narratives from mythology, fairy tale, and folktale, as well as the re-visioning of scientific discourses and historiography. I argue that this re-telling is representative of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and is evidence of a postmodern genre that some literary theorists have termed re-visionary fiction. Despite the prevalent re-telling of canonical stories throughout literary history, there is much evidence for the emergence of a specifically contemporary trend of re-visionary literature. Part One of this thesis comprises two chapters which deal with Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Weight (2005) respectively. In these chapters, I argue that, although the feminist and historiographic elements of her work are significant, there exist further motivations for Winterson’s acts of re-telling in both Sexing the Cherry and Weight. In Chapter One, I analyse Winterson’s subversion and re-imagining of historiography, as well as her re-telling of fairy tale, in Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Two provides a discussion of Winterson’s re-telling of the myth of Atlas from Greek mythology, in which she draws on the discourses of science, technology, and autobiography, in Weight. Part Two focuses on Warner’s first two novels, Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997). In both novels, Warner re-imagines aspects of Christian, Celtic and pagan mythology in order to debunk the validity of biblical archetypes and narratives in a contemporary working-class setting, as well as to endow his protagonist with goddess-like or mythical sensibilities. Chapter Three deals predominantly with Warner’s use of language, which I argue is central to his blending of mythological and contemporary content, while Chapter Four analyses his use of myth in these two novels. This thesis argues that while both Winterson and Warner share many of the aims associated with contemporary re-visionary fiction, their novels also exceed the boundaries of the genre in various ways. Winterson and Warner may, therefore, represent a new class of re-visionary writers, whose aim is not solely to subvert the pre-text but to draw on its generic discourses and thematic conventions in order to demonstrate the generic and discursive possibilities inherent in the act of re-telling.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Collett, Jenna Lara
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Warner, Alan Criticism and interpretation Winterson, Jeanette, 1959- -- Criticism and interpretation English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2248 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002291
- Description: This thesis investigates acts of ‘re-telling’ in four selected novels by Jeanette Winterson and Alan Warner.Re-telling, as I have defined it, refers to the re-imagining and re-writing of existing narratives from mythology, fairy tale, and folktale, as well as the re-visioning of scientific discourses and historiography. I argue that this re-telling is representative of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and is evidence of a postmodern genre that some literary theorists have termed re-visionary fiction. Despite the prevalent re-telling of canonical stories throughout literary history, there is much evidence for the emergence of a specifically contemporary trend of re-visionary literature. Part One of this thesis comprises two chapters which deal with Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Weight (2005) respectively. In these chapters, I argue that, although the feminist and historiographic elements of her work are significant, there exist further motivations for Winterson’s acts of re-telling in both Sexing the Cherry and Weight. In Chapter One, I analyse Winterson’s subversion and re-imagining of historiography, as well as her re-telling of fairy tale, in Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Two provides a discussion of Winterson’s re-telling of the myth of Atlas from Greek mythology, in which she draws on the discourses of science, technology, and autobiography, in Weight. Part Two focuses on Warner’s first two novels, Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997). In both novels, Warner re-imagines aspects of Christian, Celtic and pagan mythology in order to debunk the validity of biblical archetypes and narratives in a contemporary working-class setting, as well as to endow his protagonist with goddess-like or mythical sensibilities. Chapter Three deals predominantly with Warner’s use of language, which I argue is central to his blending of mythological and contemporary content, while Chapter Four analyses his use of myth in these two novels. This thesis argues that while both Winterson and Warner share many of the aims associated with contemporary re-visionary fiction, their novels also exceed the boundaries of the genre in various ways. Winterson and Warner may, therefore, represent a new class of re-visionary writers, whose aim is not solely to subvert the pre-text but to draw on its generic discourses and thematic conventions in order to demonstrate the generic and discursive possibilities inherent in the act of re-telling.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
Ill at ease in our translated world ecocriticism, language, and the natural environment in the fiction of Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, David Malouf and Wilma Stockenström
- Authors: Johnson, Eleanore
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- The English patient Ghosh, Amitav. The hungry tide Malouf, David, 1934- An imaginary life Stockenström, Wilma. The expedition to the Baobab tree Ecocriticism Human ecology in literature Nature in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2234 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002277
- Description: This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Johnson, Eleanore
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- The English patient Ghosh, Amitav. The hungry tide Malouf, David, 1934- An imaginary life Stockenström, Wilma. The expedition to the Baobab tree Ecocriticism Human ecology in literature Nature in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2234 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002277
- Description: This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
Perversity on paper taboo, abjection and literature: Iain Banks' The wasp factory, Ian McEwan's The cement garden, and Irvine Welsh's Marabou stork nightmares
- Authors: De Coning, Alexis
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Banks, Iain, 1954-, The wasp factory Banks, Iain, 1954-, Criticism and interpretation McEwan, Ian -- The cement garden McEwan, Ian -- Criticism and interpretation Welsh, Irvine -- Marabou stork nightmares Welsh, Irvine -- Criticism and interpretation English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Taboo in literature Abjection in literature Kristeva, Julia, 1941-, Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2205 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002247
- Description: This thesis explores the notion of perversity in literature, specifically with regard to representations of taboo and abjection in Iain Banks‟ The Wasp Factory, Ian McEwan‟s The Cement Garden, and Irvine Welsh‟s Marabou Stork Nightmares. Julia Kristeva‟s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, as well as her notion of revolt, constitute the central theoretical framework for my analysis. However, I also draw upon the concepts of monstrosity, grotesqueness and the uncanny in order to explicate the affect of abject fiction on the reader. I posit, then, that to engage with literary works that confront one with perversity, abjection and taboo entails exposing oneself to an ambiguous or liminal space in which culturally established values are both disrupted and affirmed. The subversive and revolutionary potential of the aforementioned novels is discussed with reference to the notion of the perverted Bildungsroman since, in their respective transgressions of taboos, the narrators of these novels disrupt social order, and their narratives end on a note of indeterminacy or the absolute finality of death, rather than self-actualisation. Moreover, in exposing the binaries of sex and gender as arbitrary and fluctuating, these narrators‟ perverse sexual and gender performativities gesture towards alternative modes of being (beyond social sanction), and invoke Kristeva‟s notion of individual revolt as a „condition necessary for the life of the mind and society‟.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: De Coning, Alexis
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Banks, Iain, 1954-, The wasp factory Banks, Iain, 1954-, Criticism and interpretation McEwan, Ian -- The cement garden McEwan, Ian -- Criticism and interpretation Welsh, Irvine -- Marabou stork nightmares Welsh, Irvine -- Criticism and interpretation English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Taboo in literature Abjection in literature Kristeva, Julia, 1941-, Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2205 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002247
- Description: This thesis explores the notion of perversity in literature, specifically with regard to representations of taboo and abjection in Iain Banks‟ The Wasp Factory, Ian McEwan‟s The Cement Garden, and Irvine Welsh‟s Marabou Stork Nightmares. Julia Kristeva‟s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, as well as her notion of revolt, constitute the central theoretical framework for my analysis. However, I also draw upon the concepts of monstrosity, grotesqueness and the uncanny in order to explicate the affect of abject fiction on the reader. I posit, then, that to engage with literary works that confront one with perversity, abjection and taboo entails exposing oneself to an ambiguous or liminal space in which culturally established values are both disrupted and affirmed. The subversive and revolutionary potential of the aforementioned novels is discussed with reference to the notion of the perverted Bildungsroman since, in their respective transgressions of taboos, the narrators of these novels disrupt social order, and their narratives end on a note of indeterminacy or the absolute finality of death, rather than self-actualisation. Moreover, in exposing the binaries of sex and gender as arbitrary and fluctuating, these narrators‟ perverse sexual and gender performativities gesture towards alternative modes of being (beyond social sanction), and invoke Kristeva‟s notion of individual revolt as a „condition necessary for the life of the mind and society‟.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
The unstable earth landscape and language in Patrick White's Voss, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and David Malouf's An Imaginary Life
- Authors: Lee, Deva
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- The English patient Malouf, David, 1934- An imaginary life Language and languages in literature English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2238 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002281
- Description: This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Lee, Deva
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- The English patient Malouf, David, 1934- An imaginary life Language and languages in literature English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2238 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002281
- Description: This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
Robert Herrick's self-presentation in Hesperides and his Noble numbers
- Authors: Faull, Lionel Peter
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 Criticism and interpretation Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674. Hesperides Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674. Noble numbers English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2207 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002250
- Description: Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Faull, Lionel Peter
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 Criticism and interpretation Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674. Hesperides Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674. Noble numbers English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2207 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002250
- Description: Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
The presentation of the orphan child in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature in a selection of William Blake's 'Songs of innocence and experience', and in Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre', and Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights'
- Authors: Singh, Jyoti
- Date: 2010 , 2013-07-18
- Subjects: Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Songs of innocence and of experience -- Characters -- Orphans Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 -- Jane Eyre -- Characters -- Orphans Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 -- Criticism and interpretation Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848 -- Wuthering Heights -- Characters -- Orphans Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848 -- Criticism and interpretation Orphans in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2267 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1005628
- Description: This thesis is a study of the presentation of the orphan child in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature, and focuses on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It is concerned with assessing the extent to which the orphan children in each of the works are liberated from familial and social constraints and structures and to what end. Chapter One examines the major thematic concern of the extent to which the motif of the orphan child represents a wronged innocent, and whether this symbol can also, or alternatively, be presented as a revolutionary force that challenges society's status quo in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Chapter Two considers the significance of the child "lost" and "found", which forms the explicit subject of six of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and explores the treatment of these conditions, and their differences and consequences for the children concerned. Chapter Three focuses on Charlotte Bronte's depiction of the orphan in Jane Eyre, which presents two models of the orphan child: the protagonist Jane, and Helen Burns. The chapter examines these two models and their responses to orphan-hood in a hostile world where orphans are mistreated by family and society alike. Chapter Four determines whether the orphan constitutes a subversive threat to the family in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and also explores the notion that, although orphan-hood often entails liberation from adult guardians, it also comprises vulnerability and exposure. The thesis concludes by considering the extent to which orphan-hood can involve a form of liberation from the confines of social structures, and what this liberation constitutes for each of the three authors.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Singh, Jyoti
- Date: 2010 , 2013-07-18
- Subjects: Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Songs of innocence and of experience -- Characters -- Orphans Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 -- Jane Eyre -- Characters -- Orphans Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855 -- Criticism and interpretation Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848 -- Wuthering Heights -- Characters -- Orphans Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848 -- Criticism and interpretation Orphans in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2267 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1005628
- Description: This thesis is a study of the presentation of the orphan child in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature, and focuses on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It is concerned with assessing the extent to which the orphan children in each of the works are liberated from familial and social constraints and structures and to what end. Chapter One examines the major thematic concern of the extent to which the motif of the orphan child represents a wronged innocent, and whether this symbol can also, or alternatively, be presented as a revolutionary force that challenges society's status quo in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Chapter Two considers the significance of the child "lost" and "found", which forms the explicit subject of six of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and explores the treatment of these conditions, and their differences and consequences for the children concerned. Chapter Three focuses on Charlotte Bronte's depiction of the orphan in Jane Eyre, which presents two models of the orphan child: the protagonist Jane, and Helen Burns. The chapter examines these two models and their responses to orphan-hood in a hostile world where orphans are mistreated by family and society alike. Chapter Four determines whether the orphan constitutes a subversive threat to the family in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and also explores the notion that, although orphan-hood often entails liberation from adult guardians, it also comprises vulnerability and exposure. The thesis concludes by considering the extent to which orphan-hood can involve a form of liberation from the confines of social structures, and what this liberation constitutes for each of the three authors.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
Unfallen women : negotiations of alternative feminine identities in selected writings by Olive Schreiner
- Authors: Snyman, Vicki
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Criticism and interpretation Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Story of an African farm Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 From man to man Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Undine Feminism in literature Women and literature -- South Africa -- History South African literature (English) -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2214 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002257
- Description: This study constitutes an inquiry into how Olive Schreiner‟s peripheral position as a colonial woman writer enabled her rewriting of feminine identity, specifically her subversion of Victorian feminine stereotypes. I focus particular attention on three novels: The Story of an African Farm (1890), and the posthumously published From Man to Man (1926) and Undine (1929). I employ a feminist literary approach to examine how Schreiner‟s hybrid identity as a British South African enabled her revisioning of femininity. If Schreiner is situated within the context of her time, it can be demonstrated that her negotiations of feminine identity are influenced by her dual intellectual and cultural heritage. On the one hand, she can be situated within a British tradition of women‟s writing – in particular, the New Woman fiction which emerged in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, she can be situated within a nascent South African literary tradition – and demonstrates prototypically post-colonial concerns. Schreiner‟s writing style develops out of her colonial heritage and her experiences as a woman living in a patriarchal society. The resultant voice subverts the narrative traditions of the metropolitan novel in an attempt to articulate an alternative view of femininity. I examine in detail how Schreiner undermines and subverts Victorian stereotypes, and focus particular attention on the „fallen woman‟ and the „mother-figure‟. She attempts to challenge conventional Victorian conceptions of femininity by erasing the binary between the „angel‟ and the „whore‟ in order to create a New Woman. In Undine and The Story of an African Farm the full realisation of this New Woman is deferred, since both protagonists die, but From Man to Man is more nuanced, particularly in its emphasis on economic empowerment for women. Schreiner also destabilises traditional notions of motherhood, in order to offer glimpses of an alternative maternal role. It is my contention that, in her depiction of mother-figures and (un)fallen women, Schreiner challenges stock Victorian notions of femininity and, in the process, creates a space in which new possibilities for women can be imagined and negotiated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Snyman, Vicki
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Criticism and interpretation Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Story of an African farm Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 From man to man Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Undine Feminism in literature Women and literature -- South Africa -- History South African literature (English) -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2214 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002257
- Description: This study constitutes an inquiry into how Olive Schreiner‟s peripheral position as a colonial woman writer enabled her rewriting of feminine identity, specifically her subversion of Victorian feminine stereotypes. I focus particular attention on three novels: The Story of an African Farm (1890), and the posthumously published From Man to Man (1926) and Undine (1929). I employ a feminist literary approach to examine how Schreiner‟s hybrid identity as a British South African enabled her revisioning of femininity. If Schreiner is situated within the context of her time, it can be demonstrated that her negotiations of feminine identity are influenced by her dual intellectual and cultural heritage. On the one hand, she can be situated within a British tradition of women‟s writing – in particular, the New Woman fiction which emerged in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, she can be situated within a nascent South African literary tradition – and demonstrates prototypically post-colonial concerns. Schreiner‟s writing style develops out of her colonial heritage and her experiences as a woman living in a patriarchal society. The resultant voice subverts the narrative traditions of the metropolitan novel in an attempt to articulate an alternative view of femininity. I examine in detail how Schreiner undermines and subverts Victorian stereotypes, and focus particular attention on the „fallen woman‟ and the „mother-figure‟. She attempts to challenge conventional Victorian conceptions of femininity by erasing the binary between the „angel‟ and the „whore‟ in order to create a New Woman. In Undine and The Story of an African Farm the full realisation of this New Woman is deferred, since both protagonists die, but From Man to Man is more nuanced, particularly in its emphasis on economic empowerment for women. Schreiner also destabilises traditional notions of motherhood, in order to offer glimpses of an alternative maternal role. It is my contention that, in her depiction of mother-figures and (un)fallen women, Schreiner challenges stock Victorian notions of femininity and, in the process, creates a space in which new possibilities for women can be imagined and negotiated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
A changing didacticism : the development of South African young adult fiction from 1985 to 2006
- Authors: Williams, Jenna Elizabeth
- Date: 2009 , 2013-07-16
- Subjects: Didactic fiction, English -- History and criticism Young adult fiction, South African -- History and criticism South Africa -- In literature South Africa -- Politics and government
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2255 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004293
- Description: This thesis endeavours to establish how political transformation in South Africa has impacted on the didactic function of locally produced young adult fiction between the years of 1985 and 2006. To this end, a selection of young adult novels and short stories are examined in relation to the time period during which they were written or are set, namely the final years of apartheid (from 1985 to the early 1990s), the period of transition from apartheid to democracy (approximately 1991 to 1997), and the early years of the twenty-first century (2000 to 2006). Chapter One provides a brief overview of publishing for the juvenile market in South Africa over the last century, noting how significant historical and political events affected both the publishing industry itself and the content of children's and young adult literature. This chapter also adumbrates the theoretical foundations of the study. The second chapter examines a selection of texts either written or set during the final years of the apartheid regime. This chapter establishes how authors during this period challenged notions of racial inequality and undermined the policies of the apartheid government, with varying degrees of success. The authors' methods in encouraging their (predominantly white) readers to question apartheid ideology are also interrogated. Those novels written after, but set during, the apartheid era are examined with the aim of determining their authors' didactic objectives in revisiting this period in their novels. Chapter Three explores how authors writing during the transition period aimed to encourage readers to participate in the building of a 'rainbow nation,' by portraying idealised modes of relating to the racial 'other.' While some of the authors examined in this chapter are optimistic, and even naïve, in their celebration of a newly established democracy, others are more cautious in suggesting that decades of oppression and separation can so easily be overcome. Chapter Four demonstrates how the freedoms afforded by a democratic society have prompted young adult authors to explore the possibilities of adapting the sub-genre of the teenage problem novel to suit a distinctly South African context. While some of these texts are not overtly didactic in nature, they confront the unique issues faced by a generation of South African teenagers raised in a democratic society, and in some cases challenge readers to reconsider their approach to such issues.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Williams, Jenna Elizabeth
- Date: 2009 , 2013-07-16
- Subjects: Didactic fiction, English -- History and criticism Young adult fiction, South African -- History and criticism South Africa -- In literature South Africa -- Politics and government
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2255 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004293
- Description: This thesis endeavours to establish how political transformation in South Africa has impacted on the didactic function of locally produced young adult fiction between the years of 1985 and 2006. To this end, a selection of young adult novels and short stories are examined in relation to the time period during which they were written or are set, namely the final years of apartheid (from 1985 to the early 1990s), the period of transition from apartheid to democracy (approximately 1991 to 1997), and the early years of the twenty-first century (2000 to 2006). Chapter One provides a brief overview of publishing for the juvenile market in South Africa over the last century, noting how significant historical and political events affected both the publishing industry itself and the content of children's and young adult literature. This chapter also adumbrates the theoretical foundations of the study. The second chapter examines a selection of texts either written or set during the final years of the apartheid regime. This chapter establishes how authors during this period challenged notions of racial inequality and undermined the policies of the apartheid government, with varying degrees of success. The authors' methods in encouraging their (predominantly white) readers to question apartheid ideology are also interrogated. Those novels written after, but set during, the apartheid era are examined with the aim of determining their authors' didactic objectives in revisiting this period in their novels. Chapter Three explores how authors writing during the transition period aimed to encourage readers to participate in the building of a 'rainbow nation,' by portraying idealised modes of relating to the racial 'other.' While some of the authors examined in this chapter are optimistic, and even naïve, in their celebration of a newly established democracy, others are more cautious in suggesting that decades of oppression and separation can so easily be overcome. Chapter Four demonstrates how the freedoms afforded by a democratic society have prompted young adult authors to explore the possibilities of adapting the sub-genre of the teenage problem novel to suit a distinctly South African context. While some of these texts are not overtly didactic in nature, they confront the unique issues faced by a generation of South African teenagers raised in a democratic society, and in some cases challenge readers to reconsider their approach to such issues.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
A difficult equilibrium: torture narratives and the ethics of reciprocity in apartheid South Africa and its aftermath
- Authors: Pett, Sarah
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Apartheid -- South Africa -- History Torture -- South Africa Post-apartheid era -- South Africa Apartheid in literature Torture in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2194 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002236
- Description: This thesis takes the form of an enquiry into the development of the ―generic contours (Bakhtin 4) for the narration of torture in South Africa during apartheid and its aftermath. The enquiry focusses on the ethical determinations that underlie the conventions of this genre. My theoretical framework uses Adam Zachary Newton‘s conceptualization of narrative ethics to supplement Paul Ricoeur‘s writings on narrative identity and the ethical intention, thus facilitating the transfer of Ricoeur‘s abstract philosophy to the realm of literary criticism. Part I presents torture as a disruption of narrative identity and a defamiliarization of the intersubjective encounter. The existence of torture narratives thus attests to the critical role of narration in the reconstruction of the tortured person‘s identity and the re-establishment of benign frameworks of intersubjective communication. Literature‘s potential to act as a laboratory for the testing of the limitations of narrative identity and the resilience of ethical mores suggests that the fictional representation of torture also has an important role to play in this attempt at rehabilitation. Part II takes the form of a comparative analysis of non-fictional and fictional accounts of torture originating from apartheid South Africa. This shows that the ethical determinations underlying the narration of torture in South Africa range from intersubjective estrangement to a ―solicitude of reciprocity (Bourgeois 109). However, because the majority of these texts used the presentation of human rights abuses to galvanize international opposition to apartheid, the scope for experimentation was limited by the political exigencies of the time. Part III examines the stylistic and generic shifts in the narration of torture that accompanied South Africa‘s transition to democracy. It suggests that the discursive dominance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission replaced the fruitful—in literary terms—dialogue between authoritarianism and resistance that characterized the apartheid era with a monologic grand narrative of emotional catharsis, reconciliation and nation building. It also suggests that the ―truth-and-reconciliation genre of writing (Quayson 754) that shaped the literary milieu of the post-TRC period be seen in terms of a resurgence of the apartheid–era paradigms for the narration of human rights abuses that were repressed during the initial phase of democratic transition. By framing the TRC as a catalyst for individual journeys of self-discovery, these novels raise important questions about what it means to be a part of the ―new South Africa. In contrast to the majority of apartheid era literature, the novels of the post-TRC period privilege the literary prerogative over the political, and thus bring to fruition the experimental potential of the previous paradigm. In doing so, they not only go beyond solicitude to achieve an ―authentic reciprocity in exchange (Ricoeur, Oneself 191), but also initiate a process of long-awaited literary expansion, in which authors look beyond the limits of apartheid and begin to critically engage with the region‘s pre-apartheid history and its post-apartheid present.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Pett, Sarah
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Apartheid -- South Africa -- History Torture -- South Africa Post-apartheid era -- South Africa Apartheid in literature Torture in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2194 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002236
- Description: This thesis takes the form of an enquiry into the development of the ―generic contours (Bakhtin 4) for the narration of torture in South Africa during apartheid and its aftermath. The enquiry focusses on the ethical determinations that underlie the conventions of this genre. My theoretical framework uses Adam Zachary Newton‘s conceptualization of narrative ethics to supplement Paul Ricoeur‘s writings on narrative identity and the ethical intention, thus facilitating the transfer of Ricoeur‘s abstract philosophy to the realm of literary criticism. Part I presents torture as a disruption of narrative identity and a defamiliarization of the intersubjective encounter. The existence of torture narratives thus attests to the critical role of narration in the reconstruction of the tortured person‘s identity and the re-establishment of benign frameworks of intersubjective communication. Literature‘s potential to act as a laboratory for the testing of the limitations of narrative identity and the resilience of ethical mores suggests that the fictional representation of torture also has an important role to play in this attempt at rehabilitation. Part II takes the form of a comparative analysis of non-fictional and fictional accounts of torture originating from apartheid South Africa. This shows that the ethical determinations underlying the narration of torture in South Africa range from intersubjective estrangement to a ―solicitude of reciprocity (Bourgeois 109). However, because the majority of these texts used the presentation of human rights abuses to galvanize international opposition to apartheid, the scope for experimentation was limited by the political exigencies of the time. Part III examines the stylistic and generic shifts in the narration of torture that accompanied South Africa‘s transition to democracy. It suggests that the discursive dominance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission replaced the fruitful—in literary terms—dialogue between authoritarianism and resistance that characterized the apartheid era with a monologic grand narrative of emotional catharsis, reconciliation and nation building. It also suggests that the ―truth-and-reconciliation genre of writing (Quayson 754) that shaped the literary milieu of the post-TRC period be seen in terms of a resurgence of the apartheid–era paradigms for the narration of human rights abuses that were repressed during the initial phase of democratic transition. By framing the TRC as a catalyst for individual journeys of self-discovery, these novels raise important questions about what it means to be a part of the ―new South Africa. In contrast to the majority of apartheid era literature, the novels of the post-TRC period privilege the literary prerogative over the political, and thus bring to fruition the experimental potential of the previous paradigm. In doing so, they not only go beyond solicitude to achieve an ―authentic reciprocity in exchange (Ricoeur, Oneself 191), but also initiate a process of long-awaited literary expansion, in which authors look beyond the limits of apartheid and begin to critically engage with the region‘s pre-apartheid history and its post-apartheid present.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
Imagined pasts, suspended presents : South African literature in the contemporary moment
- Authors: Mbao, Wamuwi
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Post-apartheid era -- South Africa South African literature (English) -- History and criticism Authors, South African -- 21st century -- Criticism and interpretation South African literature -- 21st century -- History and criticism South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism Xenophobia -- South Africa Apartheid in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2202 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244
- Description: Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Mbao, Wamuwi
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Post-apartheid era -- South Africa South African literature (English) -- History and criticism Authors, South African -- 21st century -- Criticism and interpretation South African literature -- 21st century -- History and criticism South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism Xenophobia -- South Africa Apartheid in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2202 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244
- Description: Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
The ambivalent engagement with Christianity in the writing of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africans in the Eastern Cape
- Authors: Nxasana, Thulani Litha
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Authors, African -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Authors, South African -- 19th century -- Criticism and interpretation Authors, South African -- 20th century -- Criticism and interpretation Soga, Tiyo, 1829-1871 -- Criticism and interpretation Mqhayi, S. E. K. -- Criticism and interpretation Mgqwetho, Nontsizi -- Criticism and interpretation South African literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism South African literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Christianity and literature Ambivalence in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2195 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002237
- Description: Until recently much of the literature recording the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Eastern Cape focused purely on frontier conflict and missionary activity, ignoring the evolving culture of the colonized people. But as Somande Fikeni declares, “[i]t is important when celebrating the country’s heritage to look beyond battle sites, monuments and wars and to pay attention to South Africa’s intellectuals and knowledge producers” (quoted in Hollands 4). This is indeed the central purpose of my research. This thesis seeks to examine the influence of Christianity on early South African writing by Africans and the ambivalence with which Christianity is often treated in their work. In South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, Christianity played a central role in the development of African literature through the influence of mission schools and printing presses. Thus from the outset the development of written literature was inseparable from the spread of Christianity. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing by Africans reflects this: Christian idioms, biblical stories and images colour their work and yet are not employed unthinkingly. Each of the writers whom I will explore has a complex and at times ambivalent relationship with Christianity, and they use religious discourse for a variety of ends, some of them clearly at odds with their origins in the “civilizing mission” of Europe. According to Yunus Momoniat, “Their works . . . are the beginnings of an engagement not only with the world of words on a page, but also with the politics of literacy itself” (1). The subject of this research is three Xhosa writers from the Eastern Cape: the Reverend Tiyo Soga (1829-1871), the renowned novelist and “National Poet” S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875-1945), and the little-known poet Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Dates uknown, writings 1920-1929), who is described by Mbeki as “the most prolific woman Xhosa poet of the twentieth century” (6). The reason for focusing on the Eastern Cape is because the Xhosa “were the first Bantu people to be exposed to Christian proselytising and to receive a literate education” (Gerard 24). As a result much of the early literature in isiXhosa consisted of translations of the Bible and other Christian tracts, and such “improving” texts as Pilgrim’s Progress. In other words, it is in this work that the first roots of the influence of Christianity in southern Africa can be traced.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Nxasana, Thulani Litha
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Authors, African -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Authors, South African -- 19th century -- Criticism and interpretation Authors, South African -- 20th century -- Criticism and interpretation Soga, Tiyo, 1829-1871 -- Criticism and interpretation Mqhayi, S. E. K. -- Criticism and interpretation Mgqwetho, Nontsizi -- Criticism and interpretation South African literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism South African literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Christianity and literature Ambivalence in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2195 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002237
- Description: Until recently much of the literature recording the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Eastern Cape focused purely on frontier conflict and missionary activity, ignoring the evolving culture of the colonized people. But as Somande Fikeni declares, “[i]t is important when celebrating the country’s heritage to look beyond battle sites, monuments and wars and to pay attention to South Africa’s intellectuals and knowledge producers” (quoted in Hollands 4). This is indeed the central purpose of my research. This thesis seeks to examine the influence of Christianity on early South African writing by Africans and the ambivalence with which Christianity is often treated in their work. In South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, Christianity played a central role in the development of African literature through the influence of mission schools and printing presses. Thus from the outset the development of written literature was inseparable from the spread of Christianity. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing by Africans reflects this: Christian idioms, biblical stories and images colour their work and yet are not employed unthinkingly. Each of the writers whom I will explore has a complex and at times ambivalent relationship with Christianity, and they use religious discourse for a variety of ends, some of them clearly at odds with their origins in the “civilizing mission” of Europe. According to Yunus Momoniat, “Their works . . . are the beginnings of an engagement not only with the world of words on a page, but also with the politics of literacy itself” (1). The subject of this research is three Xhosa writers from the Eastern Cape: the Reverend Tiyo Soga (1829-1871), the renowned novelist and “National Poet” S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875-1945), and the little-known poet Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Dates uknown, writings 1920-1929), who is described by Mbeki as “the most prolific woman Xhosa poet of the twentieth century” (6). The reason for focusing on the Eastern Cape is because the Xhosa “were the first Bantu people to be exposed to Christian proselytising and to receive a literate education” (Gerard 24). As a result much of the early literature in isiXhosa consisted of translations of the Bible and other Christian tracts, and such “improving” texts as Pilgrim’s Progress. In other words, it is in this work that the first roots of the influence of Christianity in southern Africa can be traced.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
Toni Morrison and the literary canon whiteness, blackness, and the construction of racial identity
- Authors: Phiri, Aretha
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Morrison, Toni -- Criticism and interpretation Morrison, Toni. Playing in the dark Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896. Uncle Tom's cabin Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Leaves of grass Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn African Americans in literature Race in literature Race relations in literature American literature -- White authors -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2212 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002255
- Description: Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
- Authors: Phiri, Aretha
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Morrison, Toni -- Criticism and interpretation Morrison, Toni. Playing in the dark Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896. Uncle Tom's cabin Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Leaves of grass Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn African Americans in literature Race in literature Race relations in literature American literature -- White authors -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2212 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002255
- Description: Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2009
"Form fading among fading forms" death, language and madness in the novels of Samuel Beckett
- Authors: Springer, Michael Leicester
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 -- Criticism and interpretation English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism Death in literature Mental illness in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2198 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002240
- Description: The primary thesis of this dissertation is that the development of narrative strategy and technique through the course of Samuel Beckett’s fictional oeuvre enacts a parody of the Cartesian method of doubt, in which the search for first principles, instead of providing grounds for certainty, is a hopeless, grotesque quest for a self which eludes any and every assertion. My chief concerns are thus, firstly, to explicate and elucidate the nature of such narrative strategies and techniques, and how these can be said to parody epistemological procedure; and secondly, to interrogate the implications of this parody for the epistemological and interpretative endeavour of which the human sciences are comprised. These two issues are explored by way of an examination of Beckett’s earliest novel, Murphy, and the narrative impasse that arises from the contradiction between this work’s largely realist form and quasi-postmodern content. I thereafter argue that the later fiction, most particularly the Trilogy, achieves formal and stylistic solutions to the aesthetic and epistemological challenges raised by the earlier work. Beckett’s fictional oeuvre, I contend, can best be construed as an attempt to attain that which exceeds and escapes narrative in and through narrative, namely madness or death. The achievement of either would entail the obliteration of the possibility of narrating at all, and the novels, engaging in a self-deconstructing endeavour, thus occupy a profoundly paradoxical position. Any attempt to interpret a body of work of this nature can only respond in an analogous manner, by trying to make meaning of the subversion of meaning, and deconstructing the assumptions that inform its procedures. This dissertation argues that it is precisely in the way in which it necessitates such selfreflexive discursive analysis that the import of Samuel Beckett’s fiction lies, and extrapolates the significance of this for an understanding of discourse, literary criticism, and epistemological procedure.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Springer, Michael Leicester
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 -- Criticism and interpretation English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism Death in literature Mental illness in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2198 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002240
- Description: The primary thesis of this dissertation is that the development of narrative strategy and technique through the course of Samuel Beckett’s fictional oeuvre enacts a parody of the Cartesian method of doubt, in which the search for first principles, instead of providing grounds for certainty, is a hopeless, grotesque quest for a self which eludes any and every assertion. My chief concerns are thus, firstly, to explicate and elucidate the nature of such narrative strategies and techniques, and how these can be said to parody epistemological procedure; and secondly, to interrogate the implications of this parody for the epistemological and interpretative endeavour of which the human sciences are comprised. These two issues are explored by way of an examination of Beckett’s earliest novel, Murphy, and the narrative impasse that arises from the contradiction between this work’s largely realist form and quasi-postmodern content. I thereafter argue that the later fiction, most particularly the Trilogy, achieves formal and stylistic solutions to the aesthetic and epistemological challenges raised by the earlier work. Beckett’s fictional oeuvre, I contend, can best be construed as an attempt to attain that which exceeds and escapes narrative in and through narrative, namely madness or death. The achievement of either would entail the obliteration of the possibility of narrating at all, and the novels, engaging in a self-deconstructing endeavour, thus occupy a profoundly paradoxical position. Any attempt to interpret a body of work of this nature can only respond in an analogous manner, by trying to make meaning of the subversion of meaning, and deconstructing the assumptions that inform its procedures. This dissertation argues that it is precisely in the way in which it necessitates such selfreflexive discursive analysis that the import of Samuel Beckett’s fiction lies, and extrapolates the significance of this for an understanding of discourse, literary criticism, and epistemological procedure.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
A book history study of Michael Radford's filmic production William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
- Green, Bryony Rose Humphries
- Authors: Green, Bryony Rose Humphries
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Film adaptations Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Merchant of Venice Merchant of Venice (Motion picture: 2004) English drama -- Film and video adaptations Film adaptations -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2197 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002239
- Description: Falling within the ambit of the Department of English Literature but with interdisciplinary scope and method, the research undertaken in this thesis examines Michael Radford’s 2004 film production William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice using the Book History approach to textual study. Previously applied almost exclusively to the study of books, Book History examines the text in terms of both its medium and its content, bringing together bibliographical, literary and historical approaches to the study of books within one theoretical paradigm. My research extends this interdisciplinary approach into the filmic medium by using a modified version of Robert Darnton’s “communication circuit” to examine the process of transmission of this Shakespearean film adaptation from creation to reception. The research is not intended as a complete Book History study and even less as a comprehensive investigation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Rather, it uses a Shakespearean case study to bring together the two previously discrete fields of Book History and filmic investigation. Drawing on film studies, literary concepts, cultural and media studies, modern management theory as well as reception theories and with the use of both quantitative and qualitative data, I show Book History to be an eminently useful and constructive approach to the study of film.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Green, Bryony Rose Humphries
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Film adaptations Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Merchant of Venice Merchant of Venice (Motion picture: 2004) English drama -- Film and video adaptations Film adaptations -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2197 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002239
- Description: Falling within the ambit of the Department of English Literature but with interdisciplinary scope and method, the research undertaken in this thesis examines Michael Radford’s 2004 film production William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice using the Book History approach to textual study. Previously applied almost exclusively to the study of books, Book History examines the text in terms of both its medium and its content, bringing together bibliographical, literary and historical approaches to the study of books within one theoretical paradigm. My research extends this interdisciplinary approach into the filmic medium by using a modified version of Robert Darnton’s “communication circuit” to examine the process of transmission of this Shakespearean film adaptation from creation to reception. The research is not intended as a complete Book History study and even less as a comprehensive investigation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Rather, it uses a Shakespearean case study to bring together the two previously discrete fields of Book History and filmic investigation. Drawing on film studies, literary concepts, cultural and media studies, modern management theory as well as reception theories and with the use of both quantitative and qualitative data, I show Book History to be an eminently useful and constructive approach to the study of film.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
A critical edition of the poems of Henry Vaux (c. 1559-1587) in MS. Folger Bd with STC 22957
- Hacksley, Timothy Christopher
- Authors: Hacksley, Timothy Christopher
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Vaux, Henry, ca. 1559-1587 -- Criticism and interpretation Vaux, Henry, ca. 1559-1587 Latin poetry, Medieval and modern -- History and criticism English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2200 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002242
- Description: This thesis offers an edition of the English and Latin poems found in MS. Folger bd with STC 22957, attributed to Henry Vaux (c. 1559—1587), a recusant, priest-smuggler, and child prodigy. THE TEXT of the edition is preceded by an introduction comprising three parts: a GENERAL INTRODUCTION describing Vaux‘s socio-historical and biographical context; a CRITICAL INTRODUCTION describing the Medieval and Early Modern literary contexts of Vaux‘s poems and the forms, traditions, topoi, and conventions adhered to in them; and a TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION describing the seventeenth-century manuscript copy of the poems used as the source text and explaining and justifying the editorial decisions made. Textual variants and instances of doubtful authorship are also discussed. THE TEXT itself is presented in the original spelling of the MS. and is a diplomatic edition: the scribe‘s use of characters that are now defunct (such as long ‗s‘ and ‗=‘ for ‗-‘) has not been modernised. A critical apparatus is provided with THE TEXT. THE TEXT is followed by an extensive COMMENTARY, which glosses un-usual or archaic words and phrases, points out allusions and their likely sources, discusses literary forms and conventions which inform the reading of the po-ems, and observes peculiarities in poetic metre. Translations and commentary are offered for Vaux‘s Latin poems. The five appendices following the COMMEN-TARY comprise a MODERNISED TEXT of the poems, a FACSIMILE OF THE FOLGER MS., a SUBSEQUENT HISTORY OF THE VAUX FAMILY after Henry Vaux‘s death, a text JOHN OF PECHAM‘S PHILOMENA PRAEVIA (a text which informs the reading of Vaux‘s ―A complaint to the Nightingale‖) along with a parallel translation by me, and transcriptions of TEXTUAL VARIANTS. A BIBLIOGRAPHY of works cited, re-ferred to or consulted follows the appendices. A comprehensive GENERAL INDEX of subjects, people, places, and literary works and forms follows this, and an IN-DEX OF FIRST LINES AND TITLES of Vaux‘s poems completes the edition.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Hacksley, Timothy Christopher
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Vaux, Henry, ca. 1559-1587 -- Criticism and interpretation Vaux, Henry, ca. 1559-1587 Latin poetry, Medieval and modern -- History and criticism English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2200 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002242
- Description: This thesis offers an edition of the English and Latin poems found in MS. Folger bd with STC 22957, attributed to Henry Vaux (c. 1559—1587), a recusant, priest-smuggler, and child prodigy. THE TEXT of the edition is preceded by an introduction comprising three parts: a GENERAL INTRODUCTION describing Vaux‘s socio-historical and biographical context; a CRITICAL INTRODUCTION describing the Medieval and Early Modern literary contexts of Vaux‘s poems and the forms, traditions, topoi, and conventions adhered to in them; and a TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION describing the seventeenth-century manuscript copy of the poems used as the source text and explaining and justifying the editorial decisions made. Textual variants and instances of doubtful authorship are also discussed. THE TEXT itself is presented in the original spelling of the MS. and is a diplomatic edition: the scribe‘s use of characters that are now defunct (such as long ‗s‘ and ‗=‘ for ‗-‘) has not been modernised. A critical apparatus is provided with THE TEXT. THE TEXT is followed by an extensive COMMENTARY, which glosses un-usual or archaic words and phrases, points out allusions and their likely sources, discusses literary forms and conventions which inform the reading of the po-ems, and observes peculiarities in poetic metre. Translations and commentary are offered for Vaux‘s Latin poems. The five appendices following the COMMEN-TARY comprise a MODERNISED TEXT of the poems, a FACSIMILE OF THE FOLGER MS., a SUBSEQUENT HISTORY OF THE VAUX FAMILY after Henry Vaux‘s death, a text JOHN OF PECHAM‘S PHILOMENA PRAEVIA (a text which informs the reading of Vaux‘s ―A complaint to the Nightingale‖) along with a parallel translation by me, and transcriptions of TEXTUAL VARIANTS. A BIBLIOGRAPHY of works cited, re-ferred to or consulted follows the appendices. A comprehensive GENERAL INDEX of subjects, people, places, and literary works and forms follows this, and an IN-DEX OF FIRST LINES AND TITLES of Vaux‘s poems completes the edition.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008