Browsing by Author "Clarkson, Carrol"

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    Bestiaries the animal and the human in Mila Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
    (2013) Bedini, Daniella Cadiz; Clarkson, Carrol
    In his book, The Open (2004), Giorgio Agamben suggests that the border between the human and the animal passes "first of all as a mobile border within living man". At stake in the construction of this border is a division of the human and the animal into separate and homogenous groups, and subsequently a denial of a multiplicity of life forms and experience. This relates to what Derrida (2004) has deemed "the self-interested misrecognition of what is called the Animal in general", and is something other critics working in the field of animal studies have discussed. In this thesis I read Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace in line with Agamben's notion of the fluidity of the human-animal border. The first chapter of this dissertation, 'Behaving like Animals', offers a reading of the biblical tale of Genesis and of the numerous sexual encounters in the novels that complicate the assumption of shame as being 'proper to man'. The second chapter, "Alternative lives, Alternative Deaths", challenges the idea of Driepoot's death in Disgrace as being "euthanasia" and, moreover, examines the complexities of mourning the death of what Jeff McMahan has deemed "beings on the margins of life", which includes both humans and animals. In my analysis of these novels, I have borrowed from different, seemingly disconnected, critical discourses. In some cases, this has meant "inserting" the animal into these theories in places where the animal was not explicitly named. This has meant putting pressure on existing lines of enquiry. My multi-disciplinary approach to theorising animals, and our relations to and with them, suggests different avenues for research in the growing field of animal studies.
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    Displaced romanticism: searching for the self in J.M.Coetzee's autobiographical fiction
    (2014) Smuts, Eckard; Clarkson, Carrol; Anderson, Peter
    This thesis is a literary critical investigation into the strategies of self-definition at work in the autobiographical fiction of J.M. Coetzee. My focus falls on those of his novels that have a more-or less explicit autobiographical resonance (Boyhood, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime), with supplementary forays into two additional books (Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus). My argument centres on the observation that Coetzee's work derives its affective force from the conflict he stages, time and again, between the desire for a transcendent sense of being, Romantic in origin, and the realization that being derives its co-ordinates from the discursive formations - ideological, socio-historical, philosophical, linguistic - that provide the structure of meaning for self-expression in writing. I introduce my argument by situating Coetzee's work according to a post-structuralist critical framework that emphasizes his strategies of subjective displacement. Our reading of his work, I then suggest, might benefit from a more considered evaluation of the persistent influence of a Romantic ideal concerning the primacy of subjective experience. In the first chapter I explore the conceptual tension that derives from these contrasting points of view by considering Coetzee's engagement with the tradition of confessional writing, arguing that he foregrounds the textual subject as the locus in which the truth of the self is to be sought. The second chapter examines the central role of the Karoo farm in the formation of the autobiographical subject in Coetzee's writing, and links it to a Romantic model of identification between the self and nature. In the third chapter I argue that Coetzee's awareness of socio-political realities inhibits the Romantic yearning for an authentic sense of self, even while he reformulates the idea of authentic voice as the expression of a politically and historically compromised subjectivity. Finally, in the last chapter I turn my attention to the authorial imprint that derives from the consistency of Coetzee's depiction of conflict between transcendent and contextual realities, and conclude by tracing the afterlife of this dynamic in his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus.
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    Emerging HIV communities and self : the representation of self and community in South African HIV/AIDS literature
    (2010) Cumpsty, Rebekah; Clarkson, Carrol; Chirambo, Reuben
    HIV/AIDS is a prominent part of contemporary South African experience that has found expression in many forms, one of which is literature. This thesis analyses the relation between self and community as it is represented in South African HIV/AIDS literature. The argument of the thesis is underpinned by a dual theoretical strand.
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    Emigration, literary celebrity, and the autobiographical turn in J.M. Coetzee's later fiction
    (2011) Powers, Donald; Clarkson, Carrol
    Whereas commentary on autobiography in Coetzee tends to focus on the dynamics of secular confession and the idea of self-writing as 'autre-biography,' this thesis, taking the experience of emigration and literary celebrity as thematic pivots, argues that the protagonists of Coetzee's later fiction (Youth through Summertime) occasion a form of authorial self-disclosure that is not an end in itself but, with a nominal anchorage on Coetzee himself, a means of localising questions about literary genre, political complicity, the relation between author and character, the intersection of personal and collective history, and the social responsibility of the acclaimed writer. It is argued that the slippage of focus from the authorial personas in these fictions to the questions and critical voices they provoke nonetheless conspires to reaffirm the authority of the name and literary oeuvre' Coetzee. 'The thesis begins by examining the link in Youth between the protagonist's crisis of ethnic and literary identity and Coetzee's narrative strategy of subjective displacement (Chapter 1). It is shown that the refractive zone of questions in that fiction constitutes the self-qualifying reflex that becomes increasingly pronounced in the authorial surrogates and fictions that follow. Coetzee's representation of the acclaimed writer as a doubting, fallible, unheroic figure becomes in the case of Elizabeth Costello a rejection of the idea of the writer as a spokesperson for a group or cause and instead an opening for the pressures and responsibilities of living among others to be embodied and negotiated (Chapter 2). It is argued that Coetzee's Nobel Lecture provides a further example of this reserve about the reach of the writer's authority in the public realm: the deferral of authority in this text highlights by indirection an inconsistency in the Swedish Academy's invitation to Coetzee to speak for his work on the occasion of an award that celebrates its universal interpretability, its resistance to authorial meta-interpretation (Chapter 3). It is shown that in Slow Man, where the familiar metafictional interplay between the one who writes and the one who is written is framed on an emigrant history that is implicitly Coetzee's, the characters' contest of interpretation over photographs highlights the instability of the historical record - a point that holds for the text of Coetzee's personal history (Chapter 4). Emphasis on the nominal alignment of the author Coetzee and his authorial surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year governs a consideration of how the author's name- his proper name and reputation - focuses the condition of complicity with others as a reader and citizen; the question of whether the character JC speaks for Coetzee is revealed to be secondary to what it means to be held accountable for actions committed in the name of a group to which one belongs or set of interests to which one subscribes (Chapter 5). The thesis tracks the qualified textualisation of Coetzee 's authorial personas and history to Summertime, where' John Coetzee' is written out of an entanglement of acts of emigration and recollection in voices inflected with other histories than his own (Chapter 6).
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    Frankenstein: a monstrous romanticism
    (2010) Königkrämer, Lobke; Tiffin, Jessica; Clarkson, Carrol
    The purpose of this thesis is to examine the relationship between Mary Shelley's first novel Frankenstein and her own understanding of Romanticism. The overarching theme is to illustrate how Mary Shelley navigates her criticism of Romanticism through the medium of Victor Frankenstein as a character. With the inspection of Victor Frankenstein some autobiographical similarities are drawn between the protagonist and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Another aim and extension of this autobiographical project is to examine how Percy Shelley's editing of the original manuscript of Frankenstein added or detracted from the plot. Finally, the genre implications of Frankenstein are examined in this thesis. In the first chapter, Romanticism is examined in relation to how the Romantics themselves envisioned their ideology so as to ascertain which aspects Mary Shelley draws particular attention to. The Romantic theorists used in this section specifically, Abercrombie and Schueller, are used to highlight the fact that Romanticism can be defined as a unified system of belief. Certain tenets of this ideology are then shown to be the main points that Mary Shelley criticises. In the second chapter, the autobiographical element of Mary Shelley's relationship with Percy Shelley is examined. The parallels between Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are made apparent through the use of biographers Hoobler and Seymour. From that, the precise changes that Percy Shelley made to the original manuscript of Frankenstein are scrutinised with Mellor's insightful explication of the original that exists in the Bodleian Library. The conclusion of this chapter solidifies the argument of the first chapter, and as close attention is paid throughout both chapters to the novel as a primary source of confirmation, the complex navigations and articulations of Romanticism throughout Frankenstein are made apparent. In the third chapter, attention is given specifically to the genre implications of Frankenstein, and the relationship and consistent oscillation between Romanticism and the Gothic is traced. The theorists used in this part of the thesis vary widely and include Botting, Golinski and Alwes. It is argued that in her destabilisation of Romanticism, Mary Shelley invariably incorporates the Gothic into her text. It is this complex weaving of genres which is particularly interesting in relation to how Mary Shelley's disillusionment with Romanticism produces a text that has such a vast array of genre possibilities. Finally, this thesis looks at the negative interpretation of Romanticism specifically in relation to Mary Shelley's critical expressions of its ideology in Frankenstein. As a cautionary tale, the consequences of Romantic principles unchecked by a societal conscience, Mary Shelley seems to have used Frankenstein as a way of expressing her disillusionment. The repercussions of what ultimately is an original story of a scientist who unleashes his creation without concern for its welfare are still present in the common consciousness of modern society.
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    History lives in these streets: reading place and urban disorder in three post-apartheid Johannesburg novels
    (2012) O'Shaughnessy, Emma Vivian; Clarkson, Carrol
    In the following thesis I use three post-apartheid South African novels, namely Ivan Vladislavi's The Exploded View, Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf and Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207, to argue for the persistence of geopathic disorders in post-apartheid Johannesburg. I use the protagonists in the novels and their intertwined relationships with setting as nodes through which to examine the complex and disordered place of this contemporary urban environment and to show how the city’s apartheid history informs the present. I suggest that these narratives portray conflicted instances of integration, inhabitation and navigation within this city because of the presences of historical forms and patterns which continue to colour the experience of life within the changing city. I argue that the past is still present within the built structures of the city and in people’s perceptions of space.
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    Invisible landscapes : landscape, memory and time in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
    (2007) Cawood, Megan; Clarkson, Carrol
    The eponymous protagonist of Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald's final prose novel, is haunted by landscapes of loss. Both Austerlitz and the narrator are acutely aware of the signs of destruction and of the invisible histories of loss in the landscapes through which they travel. Through the gaze of both these characters Sebald exposes the haunted wasteland of post -war Europe and describes the sites of many of the atrocities of the Holocaust. While much has been written about Sebald's use of landscape and his emphasis on memory, there is very little research to date that has taken a phenomenological approach to Sebald's texts. There are specific affinities, for example, between the musings of the protagonist and the narrator of Sebald's Austerlitz and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception. This dissertation explores the implications of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology as an approach to Sebald's Austerlitz, by showing that while phenomenology provides a valuable conceptual framework through which to engage the novel, there are aspects of this phenomenological approach which Sebald's work, in its narrative form, is able to extend beyond the boundaries of philosophical discourse. The central argument is that Austerlitz's perception of architectural sites is inextricably linked to aspects of memory and narrative. This dissertation first explores the thematic concerns of the outworking of traumatic memory in the spaces of architecture, in the subjective experience of time, and in the act of perception; after which it examines how Sebald's narrative technique creates a text-scape which implicates its reader's gaze.
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    Passing on: "The Weight of Memory" and the Second Generation Fiction of Anne Michaels, W. G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink
    (2014) Cawood, Megan Jane; Clarkson, Carrol; Young, Sandra
    The value of second generation fiction for Holocaust studies can be found in its self-conscious examination of what might constitute an ethical response to the testimony of another. I bring together the fictional texts of three authors of the generation after, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, in order to investigate the textual strategies each text employs to bear witness on behalf of another and pass on what Sebald has called "the weight of memory" . While Sebald uses the phrase to describe the burden of memory experienced by survivors, I use his phrase as a point of departure to consider how the second generation responds to the burden of memory. Rather than portraying fictional examples of "vicarious witnessing" (Zeitlin) or "witness by adoption"(Hartman), these texts present a form of structural witnessing that models how one storyteller can carry and pass on the story of another as a kind of caretaker. I argue that such forms of witnessing on behalf of or for another comprise ethical acts in which the other’s story is accepted as distinct from one’s own. Rather than simply examining "the weight of memory" thematically, each text develops strategies for passing on this weight, and its resultant sense of responsibility, to the reader. I examine the structural and aesthetic strategies employed in these four texts to show how these devices set up the terms by which the text becomes the site of response. I pay particular attention to narrative structures that both model and perform instances of literary address and which create layered structures of "proxy­witnessing"(Gubar) within the space of the text. I consider how fragmentation and failure inform the aesthetics of these authors whose representational strategies may be considered productively "barbaric," to appropriate Adorno’s misunderstood aphorism, as the texts present narratives that are unsettling and yet engaging. The work of the gene ration after is that of carrying memory, but not so as to appropriate it or unduly over -identify with it, but rather to respond and demonstrate response in a gesture which then provokes alternative and continued responses.
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    The poetics of reciprocity in selected fictions by J. M. Coetzee
    (2007) Rose, Arthur James; Clarkson, Carrol
    David Attwell, in the interview that prefaces "The Poetics of Reciprocity" section of Doubling the Point, identifies a recurrent concern with the function of reciprocity in the work of J. M Coetzee. 1 "The I-You relation ... connects with larger things in the whole of [Coetzee's] work, what I would like to call broadly the poetics of reciprocity." (Attwell 1992: 58) This dissertation seeks to examine the poetics of reciprocity as an aesthetic-ethical concern of Coetzee' s fiction. By establishing Coetzee's works as an extended critique of reciprocity in their thematic and structural elements, this dissertation presents a notion of reciprocity that acknowledges both an ethical imperative to engage with others and the aesthetic problems of depicting that ethical engagement in art. The aim of the dissertation is therefore to show the use of a poetics of reciprocity in raising and examining particular ethical and aesthetic issues in Coetzee' s work.
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    Responsible responding: the ethics of a literary criticism of the Other
    (2013) Maserow, Joshua; Clarkson, Carrol
    Derek Attridge’s insight that, ‘Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility towards the Other?’ (Attridge 2005: JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, xii), is conceptually rooted in Attridge’s tour de force on the theory of literary invention, The Singularity of Literature. In it he spins a complex, nuanced and powerful idea about the nature of literature as event in which the notion of otherness, or alterity, plays a primordial part in the advent of the literary. In this thesis, I develop a critique of the way in which a particular strand of literary criticism, which has blossomed in the field of Coetzee Studies, appropriates the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in its creation of an ethics-based, theme-reliant interpretive framework. While Derek Attridge, Mike Marais and Stefan Helgesson have each contributed greatly to this critical outlook, which I abbreviate as the ‘Levinasian Approach’, I choose to focus my research on the work produced by Attridge. My argument unfolds across two main sections. Section 1 contains a disquisition on pertinent aspects of Levinas’s ethical philosophy to literary aesthetics (Chapter 1). Section 2 consists of two chapters where the first (Chapter 2) is a study of the interface of Levinasian ethics with Attridge’s theory of literature in the event. There, I begin with an exposition of Attridge’s theory of literature, exploring its conceptual bearing on Levinas’s ethics. I make apparent the extent of his indebtedness to Levinas’s ethics by closely examining how and where, in the gestation of his theory, he borrows from Levinas’s ethical writings to develop a discourse on the nature of literature. This I follow up with a look at the nodes of divergence, unveiling the ways in which Attridge departs from Levinasian conceptions in his deployment of Levinasian terms. In conscripting the pseudo-phenomenological and transcendental ethics developed by Levinas into a hermeneutics of aesthetic evaluation and literary judgment, Attridge’s position diverges with undesirable consequence from Levinasian ethics. In the second chapter of Section 2 (Chapter 3) I reveal how Attridge’s method of textual analysis in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading goes against the grain of the theory of literary invention he elucidates in The Singularity of Literature. Furthermore, I argue that, in converting ethics into an applicative analytic for the audit of texts, with a view to exploring their literariness, he responds irresponsibly in Levinasian terms to Levinasian ethics. If his position is regarded as Levinasian, certain conceptual problems arise for his critical method. Should Levinas’s ethics be regarded as the source of Attridges’s notion of otherness and alterity, then Attridge’s selective appropriation is methodologically at odds with the source of its possibility, with Levinasian ethics.
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    Samuels Beckett's The Trilogy and the affirmation of reading
    (2013) Strombeck, Claire-Marie; Parsons, C; Clarkson, Carrol
    This minor dissertation explores the reader's reception of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy. Often considered obscure and even unintelligible, I argue that to read the Trilogy is to affirm Beckett's slippery style of writing. Through a close reading of the three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, I examine how Beckett's narratives deny the reader any sense of finality in the act of reading, while also affirming the reader's freedom in each unique reading of the literary text. In addition to other key Beckett critics such as Hugh Kenner, H. Porter Abbott and Simon Critchley, I use Maurice Blanchot's critical writing on literature, especially those essays contained in The Sirens' Song, as a framework through which to engage with the three novels. Blanchot underscores the necessity of the reader to let the literary text be and not to attempt to subsume the narrative within his/ her hermeneutic expectations. To read the Trilogy and interpret it with any sense of finality is to misread the novels. Instead, my argument calls for a reading that affirms the singularity of the literary text and the elusive nature of Beckett's narrative voices.
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    Secular séance: Post-Victorian embodiment in contemporary South African art
    (2014) Dodd, Alexandra Jane; Hamilton, Carolyn; Clarkson, Carrol;
    In this thesis I explore selected bodies of work by five contemporary South African artists that resuscitate nineteenth - century aesthetic tropes in ways that productively reimagine South Africa’s traumatic colonial inheritance. I investigate the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns employed by Mary Sibande, Nicholas Hlobo, Mwenya Kabwe, Kathryn Smith and Santu Mofokeng, and argue that the common tactic of engagement is a focus on the body as the prime site of cognition and "the aesthetic as a form of embodiment, mode of being-in-the-world" (Merleau - Ponty). It is by means of the body that the divisive colonial fictions around race and gender were intimately inscribed and it is by means of the body, in all its performative and sensual capacities, that they are currently being symbolically undone and re-scripted. In my introduction, I develop a syncretic, interdisciplinary discourse to enable my close critical readings of these post - Victorian artworks. My question concerns the mode with which these artists have reached into the past to resurrect the nineteenth - century aesthetic trope or fragment, and what their acts of symbolic retrieval achieve in the public realm of the present. What is specific to these artists mode of "counter - archival" (Merewether ) engagement with the colonial past? I argue that these works perform a similar function to the nineteenth - century séance and to African ancestral rites and dialogue, putting viewers in touch with the most haunting aspects of our shared and separate histories as South Africans and as humans. In this sense, they might be understood both as recuperations of currently repressed forms of cultural hybridity and embodied visual conversations with the unfinished identity struggles of the artists’ ancestors. The excessive, uncanny or burlesque formal qualities of these works insist on the incapacity of mimetic, social documentary forms to contain the sustained ferocious absurdity of subjective experience in a "post - traumatic", "post - colonial", "post - apartheid" culture. The "post" in these terms does not denote a concession to sequential logic or linear temporality, but rather what Achille Mbembe terms an "interlocking of presents, pasts and futures". This "interlocking" is made manifest by the current transmission of these works, which visually, physically embody a sense of subjectivity as temporality. If the body and the senses are the means though which we not only apprehend the world in the present, but through which the past is objectively an d subjectively enshrined, then it is by means of the ossified archive of that same sensory body that the damage of the past can be released and knowledge/history re - imagined. Without erasing or denying South Africa’s well - documented history of violent categorisation, the hypothetical tenor of these works instantiates an alternate culture of love , intimacy, desire and inter - connectedness that once was and still can be.
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    Towards a ‘‘living connection with the past’’ : Ludwig Wittgenstein and the representation of history in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
    (2009) Germeshuys, Carlo; Clarkson, Carrol; Schalkwyk, David
    This dissertation utilises certain aspects of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to explore W.G. Sebald's representation of history in his novel Austerlitz (2001). Wittgenstein is explicitly mentioned in the text of the novel; this dissertation argues that his philosophy can help us to understand Sebald's project of restoring the past through literary engagement.
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    Towards an Aesthetics of Law
    (2008) Clarkson, Carrol
    In this seminal discussion of the relationship between law and literature, between the philosophers and the poets, Socrates and his interlocutors decide to banish the artists from their own intricately worked-out—if ironically imagined—just state. The main trouble is that ‘‘all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of truth but merely produce a superficial likeness of any subject they treat;’’ to the extent that ‘‘the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and that the art of representation is something that has no serious value.’’
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    A universal key : utopias and universals in JM Coetzee's The childhood of Jesus
    (2014) Straeuli, Christiaan Emile; Clarkson, Carrol
    In this investigation, the idea of a universal key, as denoting the unifying forces of language, will be analysed in The Childhood of Jesus using a framework inspired by the theory of forms, as described by Plato in The Republic. In The Republic, Plato structures his argument so that the soul and the state are compared in a way that perceives them as parallel and reciprocal entities. In this analogy, the character of Socrates imagines the creation of a just state with the aims of illuminating the characteristics of a just individual as part of the state. In this sense, as the primary inquiry of The Republic, Socrates reasons that if justice can be imagined in the structure of the state, it will be mirrored in the individual. To discover the structure of the just state, the rules of this state must be laid out in a manner which would facilitate such justice. The task of designating these rules is chiefly left to the voice of Socrates, as he and his fellows discuss the creation of a state and its citizens ex nihilo. In the same manner, although not as overtly stated, it will be shown that JM Coetzee in The Childhood of Jesus replicates to some extent the style and structure of Plato’s The Republic. In light of these similarities, a comparison between these two works acts as the primary structural framework to this investigation. Therefore, the various aspects of Coetzee’s novel will be shown to reflect, although often in a reverse manner, the ideal notions of Plato’s great work. Furthermore, it is argued that the shared elements of style and structure in The Childhood of Jesus and The Republic attract intertextual comparisons to various traditional utopian works, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and George Orwell’s dystopia in 1984. The aim of these comparisons is to show that Coetzee, although playing on the styles and structures of the utopian tradition in The Childhood of Jesus, does so ultimately to reject the idea of a universal key.
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    Writing and reading: boundaries of identity
    (2013) Clarkson, Carrol