Browsing by Author "Fincham, Gail"
Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemOpen AccessExploring the novels of Zakes Mda(2012) Fincham, GailLecture series presented by Associate Professor Gail Fincham, Department of English, University of Cape Town. This lecture series, focusing on the novels of famous South African author Zakes Mda, will be of interest to students of African literature and lovers of literature more generally.
- ItemOpen AccessJoseph Conrad and the ideology of fiction : a study of four works(2004) Eyeington, Mark; Fincham, GailThis dissertation argues the priority of politics in the interpretation of Conrad's fiction. It does so by establishing a critical dialogue with, and around, Fredric Jameson's Marxist classic, The Political Unconscious (1981). Jameson's proposition that Conrad's fiction is to be understood as a """"Political Unconscious"""" - that is, that Conrad's works produce political meanings in the same way that Freud suggested thwarted human instincts produce neuroses or psychopathologies - is put to the test here. This dissertaion seeks to extend the application of Jameson's hypothesis into some of the areas of Conrad's oeuvre that Jameson himself did not treat, or treated only briefly.
- ItemOpen AccessMotifs of transformation in four novels of Margaret Atwood(2000) Gribble, Jill; Fincham, GailThe dominant theme that Margaret Atwood foregrounds in her writing is that of victimisation, whether she is writing of the victimisation of a country, of a minority group, of animals or of an individual. She adopts the position that through acknowledgement of that victimisation, and a refusal to accept the role of victim, it is possible to become a creative non-victim. It soon becomes evident from Atwood's writing that victimisation of one kind or another is what underpins the powerful patriarchal constructions of society. In each of the four novels discussed in this thesis Atwood's female protagonists, all victims of patriarchy, transform themselves, through accessing their creativity, using it transgressively, and overcoming the strictures of patriarchy upon their lives.
- ItemOpen AccessNarrating space : historiographical representations of body and landscape in Waterland by Graham Swift and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels(2003) Wood, Graham Patrick; Fincham, Gail; Speary, Susan
- ItemOpen AccessNarrative strategies in selected novels of Henry James(1993) Marshall, Adré; Fincham, GailIn the course of Henry James's novelistic career, his works reveal an increasing emphasis on the representation of consciousness. This is reflected in a modulation from the authorial to the figural mode of narration as the novels are more consistently focalized through the consciousness of one or more central reflectors. This thesis attempts to explore the narrative strategies through which the shift is implemented. It will be seen that aspects such as ambiguity, imagistic representation and the deployment of analeptic excursions through the consciousness of the reflector as opposed to the narrator assume new significance. Although James formulated his own conception of his narrative strategies in his Prefaces, discrepancies can often be found between his theoretical perspective and his novelistic practice. Such disparities are indicated where relevant. In the dissertation I endeavour to explore these and other aspects of James's narrative technique in the light of Dorrit Cohn's model as set out in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978). The study also moves beyond Cohn's theoretical framework, demonstrating that certain adjustments or further refinements of terminology are necessary in applying Cohn's paradigm to the novels of Henry James.
- ItemOpen AccessNarrative techniques in the novels of Iris Murdoch(1989) Sulcas, Roslyn Lee; Fincham, GailIn this thesis I have departed from the prevalent critical concentration on the affiliations between Murdoch's fiction and philosophy, and have attempted to explore the relationship between her narrative techniques and the conventions of realism. In doing so, I use the narrative theory of Dorrit Cohn, who proposes that novelists concerned to render a sense of "reality" are also those who construct the most elaborate and artificial fictive worlds and characters. I propose that Murdoch's "real-isation" of her fictional world incorporates the problems of access to, and representation of the real. This links her to two ostensibly antithetical traditions: that of British realism (within which she would place herself), and also a fictional mode consonant with the poststructuralist writing that focuses on such problems. An examination of the early novels in terms of the correlation between "realism" and technical sophistication implied by Cohn reveals a division of narrative purpose that Murdoch has herself described in the early part of her career as an alternation between "open" and "closed" novels. I suggest in the thesis that these two fictional modes are deliberate choices of style on Murdoch's part, rather than a "failed" realism, and that their different readerly rewards are compounded by the successful merging of these competing .views of the real in the later novels. My narratological emphasis in this dissertation indicates also the ways in which Murdoch's fiction incorporates the comedic, the romantic and the gothic into a framework of orthodox verisimilitude, utilising the clashes between these genres to foreground the difficulties of a unified view. This is particularly successful in the first-person novels, where the overt problematising of self-representation paradoxically feeds into our sense of their "realism".
- ItemOpen AccessThe narrative thematics of the late style of Henry James : incorporating an analysis of The wings of the dove(1989) Pappas, Paul Alexander; Fincham, GailThis paper represents a study of contemporary narrative theory in relation to the late style of Henry James. Using the work of various narrative theorists it examines the concepts of the Narrator, Speech Representation, Focalization and Figural Narration. This is the main emphasis of part I. The work of the different theorists is examined selectively in order to give a concise but comprehensive summary of the chosen narrative concepts. Part II of the dissertation deals with the relationship of Henry James to the ideology of modernism. The modernist notions of 'showing' and 'telling' are discussed in relation to the narrative theory of part I. This section also deals with James's notions of dramatization, foreshortening and impersonal narration. The narrative style of Henry James's later novels is discussed in relation to the concepts of narrative theory examined in part I. Furthermore, part II examines the difficulties James faced m constructing his narratives and how they are manifested as discrepancies in his novelistic project. The specific facets discussed are those of the effacement of the authorial narrator and the representation of consciousness; this discussion also deals with James's approach to these facets of narrative representation. Part III consists of an examination of selected 'Prefaces' to James's novels, and discusses these as a reflection of James's ideas of narrative. It combines parts 1 and II in a discussion of James's notions of narrative, and utilizes the contemporary narrative theory to order to illuminate some of these notions. In order to show how James utilized certain narrative techniques an analysis of extracts from The Wings of the Dove is undertaken. This section examines James's use of the Narrator, Speech Representation, Focalization and Figural Narration. Part III also deals with the extent to which James succeeds in his project and furthermore, shows that certain narrative devices James employed contradict his notions of dramatization and objectivity.
- ItemOpen AccessProblems of representation and representativeness in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction(1997) Nicholls, Brendon Lindley; Fincham, GailUsing a nexus of discourse theory, the French Feminism of Helene Cixous and the deconstructive Marxist Feminism of Gayatri Spivak, this work examines the production of the sign 'woman' in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. I locate Ngugi's semiotics of the feminine in the conflicting discursive formations of two historical junctures of Kenyan resistance to colonial rule (the female circumcision debate and the Mau Mau insurgency) , in which 'woman' is mobilized as a metaphor for the Kenyan social matrix by Gikuyu nationalist/traditionalist discourses. Following Spivak, I find in female circumcision a metonym of the silencing of the subaltern woman as an agency in insurgency. Ngugi's silencing of the historical struggles of Kenyan women obtains in his association of the female characters (or 'mothers') with the land throughout his fiction. The women in Ngugi's narratives are thus located outside of an historical present, inasmuch as they represent either an idyllic past (prior to the colonial incursion) or an harmonious future utopia. Further, Ngugi' s gender representations enable the political vision of his novels and contradict the socio-political convictions which he has elaborated outside of his fiction. By refusing to engage the vestiges of the Gikuyu patriarchy, Ngugi consolidates his privileged position within the Kenyan elite and proclaims to represent worker/peasant constituency transparently. Reading 'against the grain' of the later novels, I iocate in the prostitute or 'fallen woman' a figure which unsettles the economy of gender difference constituted by Ngugi's patriarchal master-narrative, and which therefore disrupts Ngugi' s androcentric historiography. Bibliography: pages 208-213.
- ItemOpen AccessRe-constructing identity through language and vision in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Cat's Eye(2009) Fortuin, Sariska; Fincham, GailMargaret Atwood's work examines the individual's struggle for identity within a prescriptive Western society that tends to divide the world into binary categories. One side of the binary is considered powerful, while the other side is less powerful. Often, those on the weaker end of the spectrum are victimised. Because the fundamental principles for these binary categories are based on patriarchal ideologies, women are the victims. The rules that govern men's and women's actions within this patriarchal system are conveyed through language and vision. Women learn social rules through communication, and these rules are reinforced through vision.
- ItemOpen AccessSpaces and places in Zakes Mda : two novesl(2009) Lazley, Christopher Paul; Fincham, GailThe notion of place as something at once geographic, socio-cultural and psychological is a ubiquitous concern in the novels of Zakes Mda. It is surely not by chance that Mda's interest in the novelistic form, which materialised in the publication of Ways of Dying in 1995, was roughly coincident with South Africa's fledgling democracy a year earlier. The end of apartheid meant the opportunity of exploring new forms of cultural discourse untrammeled by the intense politicisation of art that had tended to collapse the literary with the didactic in rather one-dimensional ways. Mda's consideration of place, this thesis argues, is one instance of such an exploration. More specifically, it examines the intersection of the social and the spatial in two of his novels: Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness. Starting at the junction of race, politics and literature, it moves into how the country's changing physical and political boundary lines have effected new ways of relating to its spaces. The focus of the Ways of Dying chapter is on urban space, where migrants and settled urbanites must reconcile the rather fragmented and cosmopolitan character of the city.
- ItemOpen AccessTelling realities : the story of Winnie Verloc in Joseph Conrad's The secret agent(2011) Burling, Kathryn; Fincham, GailThis dissertation will investigate how Conrad's "purely artistic purpose" comes under ethical review as reader, character and author renegotiate the terms of the story's telling - specifically (to pursue the novel's haunting reference to Othello) with regard to "the pity of it".
- ItemOpen AccessTelling stories not to die of life : myth, responsibility and reinvention in The smell of apples and Country of my skull(2002) Lubbe, Frances; Fincham, GailIt is part of the human condition to continually develop and redevelop narrative structures through which identities are portrayed. As Daniel Schwarz explains: "we make sense of our lives by ordering [them] and giving [them] shape. [ ... J Each of us is continually writing and rewriting the text of our life [ ... ] To the degree that we are self-conscious, we live in our narratives – our discourse - about our actions, thoughts and feelings"(Schwarz, 1991, 108). Narrative and the identity created and maintained through it does not exist exclusively in the space of the individual, but is influenced by the cultural and socio-political context in which the individual operates as part of a group, be it a community, society or nation. There is therefore a complex relation between individual and collective identities, where each should ideally shape and reshape the other. Myths are defined as collective narratives of identity that give a group a sense of coherence and unity of origin. It is easy for myths to become fixed and oppressive, so that the reciprocal relation between the formation of individual and collective identity is broken down and individual senses of identity become, to a large extent, determined by the collective narrative. An example of a such an oppressive narrative is the myth of the Afrikaner group in South Africa. This paper aims to examine the contrasts between entrapment within this Afrikaner myth and escape from it, between the dictatorial nature of the old Afrikaner myth and possibilities for new and more dynamic myths to appear, as explored in contemporary South African literature. Specifically it looks at two Afrikaans writers whose texts explore the nature of Afrikaans myths of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples evokes the silence and shame of those inextricably tied to the Afrikaner myth. Behr indicates, through his novel and through a personal confession, that he is unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to break free of the Afrikaner myth. In contrast, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull indicates a desire to reconstruct the Afrikaner myth. While Behr exhibits a sense of shame, Krog experiences a sense of guilt and responsibility as an Afrikaner that ties her to the actions committed by others in her group. This sense of guilt is known as metaphysical guilt, which "is not based on a narrow construal of what one does, but rather on the wider concept of who one chooses to be" (May, 1991, 241, my emphasis). Krog chooses to be integrated into post-apartheid South Africa, but this does not mean that she leaves her sense of being Afrikaans behind. Instead, she individually reinvents herself as an Afrikaner in the 'new' South Africa. Her individual reinvention also has implications for the collectivity: "[by individuals reshaping themselves], they might be reshaping what it means for others to consider themselves as members of that group" (May, 1991,252).
- ItemOpen AccessTowards a modernist aesthetic : dialectical modes of representation in the early modern novel(1993) Dodson, Sandra; Fincham, GailThis thesis contests the widely-held view that literary modernism is a late manifestation of the romantic-symbolist tradition, arguing that the modern novel's self-reflexive preoccupation with the materiality of language is incompatible with the essentialist premises of romantic-symbolist aesthetics. It also takes issue with the critical argument that modernism is the product of a conflict between the logocentric modes of symbolism and literary realism. Its central contention is that in its early stages modernism is defined by a deconstructive dialectic between a logocentric symbolist mode which gestures to a realm of meaning beyond language, and an ex-centric allegorical mode, which has its home in differential structures of representation. Chapter one discusses the origin of the symbol-allegory dialectic in the domain of romantic aesthetics; distinguishes modernist allegory from romantic and pre-romantic allegorical modes; and transposes the symbol-allegory dialectic into a post- structuralist theoretical framework. It demonstrates the affinity of symbol with the philosophical paradigms of Hegelian Erinnerung, the Lacanian Imaginary, and the presencing mode of the sign in Western metaphysics; and the affinity of allegory with the paradigms of Hegelian Gedachtnis (de Man's disjunctive "thinking memory"), the Lacanian Symbolic, and Derridean archi-ecriture. Building upon this theoretical ground, the next three chapters examine the representational features of three seminal early modern novels: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, demonstrating in each case how a discursive allegorical mode implicitly demystifies a symbolist rhetoric of "pure figuration" supposedly divested of referential function. Each chapter also represents a variation on the symbol- allegory problematic. Chapter two explores the relation of Conrad's early work to the aesthetic tradition of the sublime, arguing that in Lord Jim Conrad moves beyond a traditional literary sublime predicated on an elusive realm of meaning beyond language to an infinitely textual modernist sublime which exposes the discursive status of meaning and subjectivity. Chapter three demonstrates the affinity of Proustian voluntary and involuntary memory with the Hegelian categories of Gedachtnis and Erinnerung, and further, with the Lacanian concepts of Eros (Imaginary) and Law (Symbolic). It shows that involuntary memory is always already inhabited by the differential structures of voluntary memory, always already caught in the temporal predicament that is for Lacan and Derrida the definitive condition of desire and writing. Chapter four focuses on the relation between allegory, irony and authorial subjectivity in A Portrait. It demonstrates that the allegorisation of the· autobiographical subject in A Portrait crucially affects the modality of irony in the text, rendering obsolete conventional rhetoric of irony predicated on a coherent, non-discursive authorial subjectivity. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the representational issues involved in the shift from early to high modernist aesthetics. It cites Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake as exemplary high modernist texts, and demonstrates that in both novels the dialectic between symbol and allegory falls away, and the sublime, intertextual form of allegory predominates.
- ItemOpen AccessTruth, history and representation in Margaret Atwoods' Alias Grace(2002) Woudstra, Ruth.; Fincham, GailIn the Introduction of this minor dissertation, Margaret Atwood as a post-modern writer and her interest in fictional autobiographies are considered, particularly with regard to memory, the formation of self-identity and amnesia. Parallels are drawn between Surfacing and Cat's Eye as fictional works. and Alias Grace, which is based on the life of a historical person. The novel Alias Grace alternates between first- and third-person accounts, and reflects Atwood's preoccupation with narrative techniques. The definition of post-modernism is regarded, as well as Atwood's own acknowledgements in her ""Author's Afterword"" on how she proceeds to write this fictional autobiography. Her focus on mental illnesses is given perspective in a brief discussion on different sorts of memory loss. These manifestations affect the concept of truth, which is explored in the first section of the dissertation. This section draws on the unreliability of Grace's first-person accounts and the question of whether she is fabricating the truth or has simply forgotten crucial moments of her past. The reader is also constantly made aware that Grace attempts to ensure better conditions for herself in the penitentiary, and she will therefore not disclose any information that might be damaging to her character. That which she discloses partly depends on her relationship in terms of trust with Doctor Jordan. A few episodes where Grace loses consciousness are reviewed, as well as instances where she exposes her literary background and her ability to change words or ideas in texts that she has read. It is concluded at the end of the first section that the truth eludes the reader. With this in mind, it is examined in the second section that the issue of truth is complicated, and even undermined, by the gender and class inequity of the patriarchal society in which Grace, Mary and Nancy are instrumentalised and exploited. The relationship between Grace and Mary is explored in order to demonstrate the happy memories that are relevant in Grace's present, where her past remains illusive. The reader is also drawn into these cheerful experiences, and takes Mary's presence for granted until the neuro-hypnotic seance, during which Grace's double consciousness is revealed. Her 'friend' Mary is exposed as a facet of Grace's own personality. Class oppression is explored further through the characters of Nancy and Mrs Humphrey, who are trapped in a vicious circle that Grace escapes by engaging in the creative activity of quilt-making. In this way she is able to express her solidarity with Mary and Nancy as victims of patriarchal injustice. In the Conclusion an overview of the question of truth is given and it is demonstrated how truth is inseparable from the issues of class and gender relations. The lack of traditional closure in Alias Grace is explored briefly. Grace's camaraderie and solidarity with her two friends, as well as her retelling of the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden through her tapestry work, is shown to be a transgressive agency that marks the greater significance of the novel.