Browsing by Author "Coetzee, John M"
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- ItemOpen AccessAspects of style in the novels of Henry Fielding(1990) Bock, Mary Stewart; Coetzee, John MThe prefatory essays in Fielding's two major novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones foreground his interest in the problems and challenges of the writing of fiction. In the narrative, he experiments with answers to the questions raised in these discursive sections. Analysis of style in these novels also shows a gradual development from the pervasive and self-reflexive irony and the interplay of stylistic modes that characterise the earlier novel to the more confident and increasingly serious authorial voice of the latter. Both Fielding's theoretical concerns and the development in his narrative style help to situate him in relation to eighteenth-century debates about language and the nature of fiction. This thesis attempts to show that appropriate stylistic analysis can reveal connections between the syntactic patterns in the text and the underlying assumptions and broader concerns of the writer. As the first chapter will indicate, the term 'stylistic analysis' covers widely divergent practices proceeding from equally divergent assumptions about the proper scope of stylistics. My a priori assumption is that the literary text is an instance of discourse, of language in use in a communicative situation. Since no single model of discourse analysis is adequate to describe all aspects of literary style, I have drawn from different analytical approaches to illuminate different aspects of Fielding's prose. For the analysis of the rhetorical and expressive values of his syntax, the most productive approach has been the 'functionalist' stylistics of by M.A.K. Halliday, complemented by Roman Jakobson's theory of the poetic function of language. But neither of these approaches is adequate to deal with the specific challenge to the analyst of language in the novel: the diversity of styles and registers that are available to the novelist. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of novelistic style as 'dialogical' or multi-voiced accommodates the diversity in Fielding's prose and affords insights into both the social-ideological resonances and the artistic function of the language of the texts.
- ItemOpen AccessBinarism and indeterminacy in the novels of Thomas Pynchor(1984) Irlam, Shaun; Coetzee, John MI attempt in this thesis, to graft together a close critical, and predominantly thematic, reading of Thomas Pynchon's novels with selected issues treated in the work of Jacques Derrida on philosophy and textuality, illustrating how this work demands the revision and interrogation of several major critical issues, concepts, dualisms and presuppositions. The thesis consists of an Introduction which sets forth a brief rationale for the graft described above, followed by a short and unavoidably inadequate synopsis of Derrida's work with a brief review and explication of those of his 'concepts' which play an important role in my reading of Pynchon's texts. The Introduction is succeeded by three lengthy chapters in which I discuss, more or less separately, each of Pynchon's three novels to date. These are V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49, (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and I discuss them in the order of their appearance, devoting a chapter to each. I attempt to treat different but related issues, preoccupations, themes and tropes in each of the novels to avoid repeating myself, engaging the apparatuses derived from Derrida's writing where deemed strategic and instructive. I suggest moreover, that several of the issues examined apropos the novel under consideration in any one chapter apply mutandis rnutandi to the other novels. Each chapter therefore to some extent conducts a reading of the novels which it does not treat directly. Finally, supervising these separate chapters is a sustained focus on the epistemology of binarism and digitalism, and the conceptual dualisms which structure and inform major portions of the thematic and rhetorical dimensions The thesis concludes with a Bibliography and a summary Epilogue which seeks to assess briefly the 'achievement' of Pynchon's writing.
- ItemOpen AccessCaptivity is consciousness: an exposition of Julia Kristeva's thought and its application to selected literary texts(1990) Fotheringham, Patricia Anne; Coetzee, John M
- ItemOpen AccessJohn Barth's later fiction : intertextual readings, with emphasis on Letters (1979)(1994) Nas, Aloysia Antonia Sophia Maria; Coetzee, John MThis dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter I serves as an introduction to intertextuality; it focuses on John Barth's narrative crisis and discusses structuralist and poststructuralist theories of intertextuality. Chapters II, III and IV discuss the agencies of reader, author and text respectively. Chapter II looks at structuralist and poststructuralist notions of reading and John Barth's parodic play with these notions; it also provides an in-depth analysis of the external and internal readers of LETTERS. Chapter III concentrates on the roles of the reader as re-writer and the author as re-arranger and looks closely at the roles of the different narratorial agents in LETTERS. Chapter IV starts off with a discussion of the discourse of the copy in postmodern culture and moves, via poststructuralist and narrativisit mimesis, to different forms of repetition as developed by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Chapter V focuses on John Barth's rethinking of notions of authorship and authority. It first gives an historical introduction to authorship, starting off in the Middle Ages, and then moves, via eighteenth-century Samuel Richard, son and nineteenth-century Edgar Allan Poe and Soren Kierkegaard, to twentieth-century· notions of authorship as developed by Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Culler,to end with Jacques Derrida's signature theory. Bibliography: p. 340-356.
- ItemOpen AccessMetaphors of vision and blindness in contemporary critical thought(1989) Popplestone, Catherina Aletta; Coetzee, John M
- ItemOpen AccessNiiwam, followed by Taaw(1990) Ousmane,Sembène; Scholtz, Lynn; Coetzee, John M
- ItemOpen AccessA prisoner's tale : a novella(1996) Irwin, Ron; Coetzee, John M
- ItemOpen AccessRaceball : African Americans and myths of America in baseball literature(1997) Austen, Benjamin; Coetzee, John MThis paper will examine moments in literature where the narratives of baseball as American myth and those involving African Americans converge, moments where authors confront (either consciously or not) the implications of both narratives within the same shared space. It is at these moments of convergence that the mythic language surrounding the game and its interaction with African Americans are thrown into dramatic relief. A myth, says Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, is a kind of "metalanguage," a narrative which refers to and talks about another narrative; it is at least twice removed from any referent which exists in reality. "What is invested in the concept," writes Barthes, "is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality." Examining this space will reveal how myths operate and continue to affect an understanding of personal and national identities, especially since this space involves the intersection of the emblematic discourse of baseball with a black presence that appears to question the very tenets of established national memory.
- ItemOpen AccessThe reader's quest : reading and the constitution of meaning in five novels(1984) Saville, Julia; Coetzee, John MIn this thesis, I attempt to show how the concept of reading as literary interpretation has been influenced by the insights of the psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Broadly speaking, I call for a revised view of the role of the reader and the act of reading in the light of arguments such as the following: firstly, that the linguistic subject is "split" rather than "autonomous"; secondly, that since language is a representational rather than transparent medium, "truth" can only ever be regarded as partial and irreducibly open to revision; and thirdly, that reading as an interpretive activity arises from the unconscious Desire to resolve the sense of incompleteness which language acquisition produces in the linguistic subject. Following the lead of various interpreters of Lacan's theory and psychoanalytic procedure, I offer an introductory outline of his thought and its relevance to literary theory and criticism. Then in the four chapters which follow, I attempt to demonstrate this relevance through readings of a selection of novels. In the first chapter, I come to the conclusion that reading should be viewed less as a quest after "the truth" of the text, than a quest to discover what "the truth" must disregard in order to be "the truth." In the second chapter, I conclude that narration is an effect of reading, that the relationship of the narrator and the reader is therefore supplementary, and that the notion of literary "truth" is established by consensus. In the third chapter, I conclude that the attempt to satisfy Desire by an attainment of a "full disclosure" of "truth" or "meaning" must result in a loss of meaning per se. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I attempt to synthesize the conclusions of the earlier chapters in the argument that the reader is potentially both the unveiler of the authorial unconscious and the unwitting performer of the conflict of meaning dramatized in the discourse of narrative.
- ItemOpen AccessSea creatures of the Southern deep : a novel(1999) Rose-Innes, Henrietta; Coetzee, John MThis dissertation consists of a short novel, Sea Creatures of the Southern Deep, accompanied by a preface. In the preface, I discuss some aspects of my own experience that have influenced the text. I also outline the development of the manuscript, illustrating the process of revision with excerpts from drafts of the novel. The novel itself is an account of a woman's loss and eventual recovery of a childhood vitality and sense of self. The story follows a protagonist, Anna (initially Joanna), from fearless childhood through troubled youth to adulthood. Through this narrative, I examine themes of loss, desire and identity within sexual and non-sexual relationships. After an opening passage describing an episode in childhood, the story finds Joanna at high school. Her ambivalent friendship with a classmate, Leah, and infatuation with a teenage boy, Robbie, are described. This section culminates in Robbie's drowning and Leah's disappearance. Subsequently, Joanna / Anna attends art school, where she starts an intense relationship with an older man, Alan. Her almost voyeuristic fascination with Alan is mirrored by her job photographing animals at the aquarium. Throughout, the sea and sea creatures signify those things that Anna both desires and fears. Leah returns, moves in with Anna, and eventually seduces Alan. Anna takes revenge by creating a photographic collage; through this act she symbolically "kills" her lover. In doing so, she frees herself from a damaging relationship, and is able to re- enter her life rejuvenated.
- ItemOpen AccessViolence and writing : the work of Andre Brink(1996) Wiesner, André; Coetzee, John MThis dissertation is a study of the relationship between violence and writing, and it takes as its focus the post-1976 novels of Andre Brink, ranging from Rumours of Rain to An Act of Terror. Its chief argument is that Brink's work undoes the opposition between·violence and writing, both in its thematic content and in the self-reflexively foregrounded dynamics of its utterance. While Brink's novels suggest that violence impedes writing inasmuch as it traumatises the speaking subject, it is no less the case that they present the subsequent resurgence of writing as an act of violence directed against forces constraining the subject to silence. For Brink, violence negates writing, yet it also informs it.
- ItemOpen AccessThe works of Ford Maddox Ford with particular reference to the novels(1963) Coetzee, John M; Howarth, R GThe present study is not biographical. It does, however, attempt to suggest the main lines of Ford's life and their immediate effect on his writing. Concentrating principally on his fiction, to which he gave himself most wholly, it examines his novels in chronological order and attempts to trace a course of development in them. This seems particularly necessary to do in the light of the legend Ford himself, with some excuse, spread that The Good Soldier, in fact his seventeenth independent novel, sprang from him unheralded in his forty-first year. The conclusion of this study is that The Good Soldier, probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English, is, as Ford considered it, his best achievement; but it attempts to trace in earlier novels experiments without which The Good Soldier would have been impossible.