Ambiguous contagion the discourse of race in South African English writing, 1890-1930
- Authors: Cornwell, David Gareth Napier
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: South African literature -- History and criticism Race in literature Race relations in literature Social classes in literature Ethnicity in literature Sex role in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2226 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002269
- Description: This study explores representations of race and racial difference in the writing of white South Africans in English, between the years, approximately, of 1890 and 1930. The first chapter essays a theoretical and historical investigation of the concept of race and offers a narrative of the rise of Western racialism. Its conclusion, that race has functioned as a vehicle of displacement for other forms of difference in the competition for advantage among social groups, is qualified in Chapter Two by the postulate of an anthropologial absolute, the "ethnic imperative", to help account for the strategic emergence of racialism in specific historical circumstances. The role of the ethnic imperative in the moral economy of colonial South Africa in the years 1890-1930 is examined through the analysis of three representative texts. In Chapter Three, a wide range of primary material is canvassed for prevailing views on the "Native Question", the perceived social threat posed by the half-caste, and the "Black Peril", culminating in the detailed examination of a fictional text. A particular concern in both Chapters Two and Three is the imagery of disease and contagion in terms of which racial contact is typically represented. The following chapter situates the literary works discussed in the study in the context of the South African literary tradition, then uses the example of selected short stories to indicate some narratological problems encountered by the writer with a racialist agenda within the medium of realist fiction. Chapters Five and Six investigate, through the close reading of selected novels, thematic concerns rooted in the intersection of the discourse of race with those of gender and social class. The final chapter reveals how William Plomer's novel, Turbott Wolfe, represents a volatile synthesis of a standard discourse on social class, an acknowledgement of the ethnic imperative, the imagery of contagion, and a principled repudiation of racialism, in a multi-faceted, modernist, and partially self-aware fashion. The more salient conclusions reached by this study concern the inadequacy of purely materialist analysis to account for the phenomenon of racialism, the historically determined link between racial attitudes and sexuality, and the manifest incompatibility of racial ideology with the liberal humanism inscribed in the formal requirements of the realist work of fiction.
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- Date Issued: 1996
An examination of dreams and visions in the novels of Virginia Woolf
- Authors: Dale-Jones, Barbara
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 Criticism and interpretation Dreams in literature Visions in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2223 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002266
- Description: This thesis explores the importance of the visionary experience in five novels by Virginia Woolf. In her fiction, Woolf portrays the phenomenal world as constantly changing and she uses the cycles of nature and the passing of time as a terrifying backdrop against which the mutability and transience of human life are set. Faced with the inevitability of change and the fact of mortality, the individual seeks moments of permanence. These stand in opposition to flux and lead to the experience of a visionary intensity. Woolf's presentation of time as a qualitative phenomenon and her stress on the importance of memory as a function which allows for the intermingling of past and present make possible the narrative rendering of moments which contradict perpetual change and the rigours of sequential time. Moments of stillness 'occur in the midst of and in spite of process and allow for individual contact with an experience that defies the relentless progression of time. Necessary for this experience is not only memory but also the imagination, a faculty which has the power to perceive patterns of harmony in the midst of the chaos that characterises the phenomenal realm. Fundamental to Woolf's writing, however, is the acknowledgement that visions are fleeting, as are the glimpses of meaning that emerge from them. Therefore, while several of her novels describe the artistic effort to create a structured order as a defense against change, Woolf uses the artist's struggle as a metaphor for the difficulties attached to describing the enigma that is life. None of her artist figures is able to formulate a construction that either sums up life or provides a permanence of vision. This study presents a chronological examination of the novels in order to demonstrate that the changing forms of Woolf's fiction trace the evolution of a style that accurately portrays both the workings of the human mind and the insubstantial and fragmentary nature of life. The chronology also reveals that her novels develop in terms of their presentations of the visionary experience. Woolf's final novel incorporates into its central vision the paradoxical fact of the permanence of time's progression and acknowledges that, beyond the individually mutable life, is a continuum that links pre-history to the future. This notion, which is explored in part in the earlier novels, but developed completely in Between the Acts, suggests that consolation can be found in the greater cycles of existence despite the fact of individual mortality.
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- Date Issued: 1996
Asleep in a glass coffin: fairy tales as illuminating attitudes to women in the novels of Charles Dickens
- Authors: Daly, Robyn Anne
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Criticism and interpretation Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Folklore Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Characters Women Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Symbolism Fairy tales -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2227 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002270
- Description: The field of research of this thesis covers three main areas: the novels of Charles Dickens; fairy tales and storytelling; and notions of women as reflected in feminist literary theory. A reading of selected novels by Dickens provides the primary source. That he copiously drew on fairy tales has been explored in such notable works as Harry Stone's, but the thesis concentrates on Dickens 's propensity in his creation of female protagonists to give them a voice which is vivified through fairy tale. The analysis of fairy story through narrative theory and feminist literary theory functions as the basis of an exploration of the role female narrative voices play in a reading of the novels which reveals a more sympathetic vision of the feminine than has been observed hitherto. The context of this study is Victorian attitudes to women and that modem criticism has not sufficiently acknowledged Dickens's insight into of the condition of women; much of this is discovered through an examination of his use of fairy tale wherein the woman is bearer of imaginative and emotional capacities magically bestowed. The research aims to counter the view of Dickens's novels as being sexist, through the iIluminatory characteristics of fairy tale. Dickens activates his women characters by means of their often being tellers of tales replete with fairy tale imagery, and their tales are almost always seminal to the novelist's moral purpose.
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- Date Issued: 1996
Conrad's impressionism : the treatment of space and atmosphere in selected works
- Authors: De Lange, Adriaan Michiel
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Criticism and interpretation Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Heart of darkness Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Nigger of the Narcissus Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Nostromo Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Lord Jim
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2229 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002272
- Description: This thesis focuses on Conrad's representation of space and atmosphere in the "impressionistic" works published between 1897 and 1904, notably The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), "Heart of Darkness" (1899), Lord Jim (1900), and Nostromo (1904). The many conflicting statements regarding the nature of Conrad's impressionism lead one to ask two fundamental questions: What constitutes this strange and elusive phenomenon, and how does it bear upon interpretation? This thesis works towards defining the elusive quality of Conrad's writing by investigating and assessing the contribution of impressionist techniques in the creation of a pervasive space and atmosphere; secondly, it considers how the various constituent elements interact with, and complement one another to form a dominant mode of fictional space in each work; and, thirdly, it indicates the possible impact that these particular Conradian configurations of space and atmosphere might have upon the interpretation of his impressionist works. The thesis argues that the existential condition of isolatio~experienced by Conrad's heroes and narrators is a consequence of epistemological frustration and fragmentation, which, in turn, is a function of impressionist ontology. There is a definite and complementary relationship between each of these notions in Conrad's fiction. The mysterious atmosphere in his works results from the interplay between various configurations of theme, narration and description, and these novelistic elements correspond roughly with the notions of existential isolation (the dominant theme), epistemology (narrating, telling and (re)telling as a method of knowing and understanding the space in which the characters find themselves) and, lastly, the ontological dimensions of the various modes of fictional space (as realized in description). The evocation and invocation of cosmic space in The Nigger of the "Narcissus," the mapping of a dorriinant symbolic space in "Heart of Darkness," the (re)constructions of Jim's psychological space in Lord Jim, and, finally, the "transcription" and "inscription" of a mythical space in Nostromo, indicate a definite development from epistemological to ontological issues. Phrased in more theoretical terms, this development is a movement from asking predominantly epistemological questions like "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?" "What is there to be known?" "Who knows it ... and with what degree of certainty?", to asking predominantly ontological questions, such as "Which world is this?" "What kinds of worlds are there ... and how are they constituted?". Such questions, categorized by McHale as the dominant characteristics of Modernist and Postmodernist fiction respectively, are already present in Conrad's texts, thus undermining any clear-cut division between these broad categories. Indeed, this thesis suggests that these categories are at best tenuous, and that they should perhaps be used heuristically, rather than definitively
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- Date Issued: 1996
Technologies of the self in the writings of William S Burroughs
- Authors: Williams, Michael John
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Burroughs, William S., 1914- -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2225 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002268 , Burroughs, William S., 1914- -- Criticism and interpretation
- Description: William Burroughs's profane life has been an affront to conventional morality, and his transgressive works have strained against the thematic and formal boundaries of literature. Although he has remained a problematic figure, he is gradually gaining recognition as a literary innovator. This thesis argues that his writings may be understood as technologies of the self, that is, the texts are tools that the writer Oses to transform himself. The Introduction outlines the problems that his writings pose for criticism; provides an overview of critical responses to his work; and demonstrates the appropriateness of Michel Foucault's theory of the technologies of the self as an approach to his texts. Furthermore, it makes a comparison between Burroughs's concerns and similar concerns evident in Foucault. The most prominent of these is a fear of control, and a desire to escape from control. It is argued that this similarity arises from the writers' shared experience of homosexuality in the twentieth century. This experience provokes them to undertake a·work of homographesis, in which they attempt to undermine the construction of identity in text, whilst simultaneously reinscribing identity in problematized autobiographical writing. Chapter One provides a corrective to the critical neglect of Burroughs's homosexuality and focuses on his sexual problematic as a key factor in the development of his literary style. It argues that the writer has an abject imagination that was precipitated by three principal traumatic experiences: his homosexuality, his addiction to opiates, and the accidental shooting of his wife. The chapter examines the way that the writer develops his unique literary style, the routine, in an attempt to express his psychic disintegration. The routine becomes the basic building block of Naked Lunch, serving both as a cathartic release of psychic anguish and as an attempt to subvert repressive social and linguistic structures. The metaphor of the anal aesthetic is introduced to describe the intersection of linguistic, psychic and political strategies in the texts. Chapter Two addresses the period,subsequent to Naked Lunch, in which Burroughs experimented extensively with the cut-up technique to develop a form of aleatory collage. The chapter argues that the writer hoped that the technique would enable him to transform himself and to~discover a new way of thinking, but suggests that its extreme nature both isolated him from his audience and intensified his psychic abjection. Chapter Three follows on from this to argue that the writer responds to the limitations of the cut-up in The Wild Boys by returning to a more intelligible form of writing. This return corresponds with an attempt to inscribe homosexual themes into his work directly. However, the combination of a homosexual agenda and the writer's defence against the identity loss of abjection leads him to assert a radical masculine identity that causes him to perceive women as the chief perpetrators of control. As a result, he rejects women from his mythological system. Chapter Four suggests that in Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads the writer moves away from the radical queer agenda of The Wild Boys in the hope of discovering a form of ethics that avoids the traps of universalized humanism and the harsh "othering" of the queer agenda. The chapter draws a parallel between Burroughs's individualized ethics and Foucault's idea of an ethics grounded in aesthetic self-fashioning. Chapter Five examines The Western Lands, in which the writer confronts death in order to discover the nature of individual value in a normalized culture. Like Foucault, Burroughs believes that the most important task in a limited existence is the dandyistic creation of the self.
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- Date Issued: 1996
Trespassing beyond the borders Harriet Ward as writer and commentator on the Eastern Cape frontier
- Authors: Letcher, Valerie Helen
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Ward, Harriet, 1808-1872 Women authors, South African -- 19th century -- Biography -- History and criticism Frontier and pioneer life -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2240 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002283
- Description: The aim of this thesis is to provide an introduction to the work of writer and journalist Harriet Ward, resident in the Eastern Cape from 1842 to 1848. She was a prolific correspondent to various periodicals published both in South Africa and in London. It would be true to say, to judge from the evidence, that she fulfilled a need felt by the British public for information on life and events in South Africa, and that she became the trusted guide of the middle-class reader. Her range covers reports from the frontiers of war, journalistic articles, memoirs, short stories, novels, autobiography, and editions of other writers' work. After the publication of her articles on the Seventh Frontier War (1846-7), she was recognised and respected as a commentator on the situation at the Eastern Cape, an unusual role for a woman at this time. She was also amongst the foremost victorian women writers published from the early eighteen forties until the end of the eighteen-fifties. Harriet Ward has left a vivid historical and sociological account of the Cape frontier, and her observations and judgements provide a hitherto virtually unknown perspective on an important part of South African history and letters. What makes her even more interesting, as this study seeks to show, is that she was far from conventional in her response to her new environment, both as as a woman and as a representative of a colonialist power. The record she has left of her thoughts on the people, landscape and situations of the time has the capacity to surprise the post-colonial literary critic and historian. Her struggle to find a discursive mode in which to express her consciousness of the oppression, patriarchal and colonial, of the marginalised, whether woman, indigene, Afrikaner, or creole, reveals a significantly transgressive or subversive response to the issues of the day. In re-discovering Harriet Ward, we are forced to reassess our assumptions regarding the period of colonial history to which she was a witness.
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- Date Issued: 1996
White writers and Shaka Zulu
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
- Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
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- Date Issued: 1996