Browsing by Author "Haresnape, Geoffrey"
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- ItemOpen AccessAthol Fugard : his dramatic work with special reference to his later plays(1987) Sarzin, Anne; Haresnape, GeoffreyIn the introduction, the writer highlights Fugard's regional artistry, his authentic reflection and recreation of a nation's tormented soul. The first chapter deals with Fugard's early plays, revealing the embryonic playwright and those characteristics of imagery, construction, language and content to be developed and refined in later plays. Briefly examined within this context are No-Good Friday, Nongogo and Tsotsi, the playwright's only novel. A chapter on the Port Elizabeth plays written in Fugard's apprenticeship years, The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena, focuses on his growing skill as a dramatist, his involvement in his milieu both geographically and emotionally, as well as providing detailed analysis of the plays in terms of major features such as national politics, universal values, existentialism and Calvinism. The period of collaboration in which Fugard responded to the suggestions, imaginative projections and creative stimulus of his actors, forms the content of a chapter devoted to detailed study of the improvised plays: The Coat, Orestes, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and The Island. The later Port Elizabeth plays, A Lesson from Aloes and "Master Harold ' ... and the boys, are explored from political and personal perspectives respectively, with attention paid to the intensely human dramas that dominate even the overtly ideological considerations. A chapter on the television and film scripts - The Occupation, Mille Miglia, The Guest, Marigolds in August - traces Fugard's involvement in these media, his economy of verbal descriptions and his taut control of his material generally. A chapter is devoted to Fugard' s women, the characters who present affirmative points of view, whose courage, compassion and determination infuse a hostile world with a range of possibilities beyond survival and existence. Milly in People are Living There, Frieda in Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act and Miss Helen in The Road to Mecca form a Fugardian sorority of survivors. The final chapter of the thesis is devoted to Dimetos, regarded as an intensely personal artistic statement, an examination of the dramatist's alterego, the playwright's persona.
- ItemOpen AccessBeyond Bounds(1998) Combrinck, Lisa; Haresnape, GeoffreyLike a slug, leaving a trail of mucus behind, I leave this long secretion of words. Stained pages, soiled underwear, spilled dreams. Life is not beautiful. It is the accumulation of scars, the imposition of cuts, the kniving of the womb, the stabbing of the soul, and the mind learning to lie and to live with the lies of its own making. Somewhere in this struggle, there appear glimpses of consummated desire, but they remain tiny, miniscule chinks oflight viewed from the bottom of the prison cell. Break open the bars. Walk in my womb. Bathe yourself in the presence of these words, the soapsuds of now. The lather of this page. But do not grow drunk. Do not water the future with these words. These words are too acidic, too acerbic, too alcoholic. They will burn and scar the future, rip and strip the body of its skin. Rather wipe out the residue that remains around this bowl. Douse the lava. Pull out the plug on these words. Let them seep down to the bottom of the drain. Let only echoes remain of the words whispering, gurgling into the underworld. Black-out everything. The dregs of my cup must not remain. No future must carve its route from these words. Every utterance must have its deathbed. And the dying must be able to choose whether their last words should be forgotten and die with them or whether they should be remembered and abused. I choose the former, euthanasia for the author, and plead with the reader not to be an informer, not to use these words for future seductions, mindless mutations of life. Now drive carefully. You have been forewarned. This is a cul-de-sac. Any attempts to press forward will be made in vain. Do not jump over the precipice of reality. You will find yourself back in the black hole of my womb. Frozen in time. Spiralling towards your end. In infinite cycles of erection and ejaculation. Pleasure which suddenly sours. The unending pain of permanent orgasm. Without pauses. Without breathing spaces. You do not have the stamina for this journey. Let me not whet your appetite for this kind of death. Do not lose your wits. Turn your back on this book. Go now. Before its brutal teeth make their presence felt. Run now. Every word is beyond repair. A song gone wrong. Every word is simply a swipe at your freedom, a fatal bite that sharpens your skin to the permanent perversions inherent in words. While I persist in playing pussy and pissing on the future. While I stroke your skin and suck the gaping hole in your soul. Escape now when you have the chance. Pull your naked self from under the covers of this book. Dress yourself in your own dreams, tmtouched by my hands. Forget the magnetic pull on your body parts, the throbbing longing in your loins. Walk away from this whoring of words, this story that is diseased in its spine. In the decalcifying of its bones. The petrifying of desire. The putrefying of privacy. This story that gets a kick out of selling itself, out of ripping its own knickers. This story that lingers interminably like stretch marks. Leave now. Wean yourself off these words. Weave your own song and go with the flow. Cleanse the world with your warm words. Let the future find its own form from your stream.
- ItemOpen AccessThe drop out(2002) Heiss, Silke; Haresnape, GeoffreyThe Drop Out is a Bildungsroman in three parts. The reader follows a young European woman's quest for self-discovery. Manja Levsky's journey commences amid the South African white Left during the late 1980s. Manja has two aims: to discover what it means to be a woman; and to create personal independence from the status quo.
- ItemOpen AccessThe explorer in English fiction(1985) Knox-Shaw, Peter; Haresnape, GeoffreyAlthough there have been a number of critical works on the novel given over to topics such as adventure, colonization or the politics of the frontier, a comparative study of novels in which an encounter with unknown territory holds central importance has till now been lacking. My aim in this thesis is to analyse and relate a variety of texts which show representatives of a home culture in confrontation with terra incognita or unfamiliar peoples. There is, as it turns out, a strong family resemblance between the novels that fall into this category whether they belong, like Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island or Lord of the Flies, to the "desert island" tradition where castaways have exploration thrust upon them or present, as in the case of Moby Dick, The Lost World or Voss, ventures deliberately undertaken. There are frequent indications, too, that many of the novelists in question are aware of working within a particular, subsidiary genre. This means, in sum, even when it comes to texts as culturally remote as, say, Captain Singleton and Heart of Darkness that there is firm ground for comparison. The emphasis of this study is, in consequence, historical as well as critical. In order to show that many conventions which are recurrent in the fiction inhere in the actual business of coming to grips with the unknown, I begin with a theoretical introduction illustrated chiefly from the writings of explorers. Travelogues reveal how large a part projection plays in every rendering of unvisited places. So much is imported that one might hypothesize, for the sake of a model, a single locality returning a stream of widely divergent images over the lapse of years. In effect it is possible to demonstrate a shift of cultural assumptions by juxtaposing, for example, a passage that tricks out a primeval forest in all the iconography of Eden with one written three centuries later in which - from essentially the same scene - the author paints a picture of Malthusian struggle and survival of the fittest. And since the explorer is not only inclined to embody his image of the natural man in the people he meets beyond the frontiers of his own culture, but is likely also to read his own emancipation from the constraints of polity in terms of a return to an underlying nature, the concern with genesis is one that recurs with particular persistence in texts dealing with exploration. With varying degrees of awareness novelists have responded, ever since Defoe, to the idea that the encounter with the unfamiliar mirrors the identity of the explorer. Their presentations of terra incognita register the crucial phases of social history - the institution of mercantilism, the rise and fall of empire - but generally in relation to psychological and metaphysical questions of a perennial kind. The nature of man is a theme that proves, indeed, remarkably tenacious in these works, for a reason Lawrence notes in Kangaroo: "There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul".
- ItemOpen AccessFifty three poems(2001) Williams, Brian; Haresnape, GeoffreyThis collection is the result of an exciting approach to the study of creative writing by an academic institution. The opportunity to obtain a Masters Degree for the writing of poetry helped to energise my efforts to put together fifty-three new and unpublished poems. The poems are universal in their outreach, despite the fact that I have a particular life experience as a Black person in South Africa and the world of oppression and exploitation. Love in its various forms is a dominant theme in the writing: love for life, love for humanity, love for beauty, love as an expression of the need to oppose injustice and to strive for human freedom. Love at an intimate and personal level is also given a place of honour in the writing. Issues of political intrigue and concerns about the emergence of new strands of oppression form the sub-text of many of the poems. The need for democratic expression finds a voice in the writing and there is also support for a regenerative energy to strengthen the pillars of human freedom. This diverse collection mirrors the beauty of nature and the personal anguish of the poet. It also seeks to pose questions, about the nature of life and living and our presence, in the cosmos of a greater universe of meaning. I hope the poems succeed in their intention to inspire others.
- ItemOpen AccessKhaki Olives(2008) Stewart, Dianne; Haresnape, Geoffrey
- ItemOpen AccessThe mire of womanhood(2002) Tsehlana, Halejoetse; Nyamende, Abner; Haresnape, Geoffrey
- ItemOpen AccessA sense of place in selected African works by Doris Lessing read in conjunction with novels of education by contemporary white South African women writers(1990) Hunter, Eva Shireen; Haresnape, GeoffreyThis study provides a more intensive reading of certain works by Doris Lessing set in Southern Africa than has yet been attempted, and reads them,• for the first time, in conjunction with a particular literary lineage within Southern African letters, the novel of education by white women. The works by Lessing chosen for discussion are: two short stories, "The Old Chief Mshlanga" (1951) and "Sunrise on the Veld" (1951), the first two volumes of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), and Lessing's autobiographical account of a return visit to Rhodesia in 1956, Going Home (1957). Those by the other Southern African women writers--all of which, with the exception of Gordimer's The Lying Days have received virtually no critical attention to date--are: Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953)', Jillian Becker's The Virgins• (1976), Carolyn Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), E.M. / MacPhail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Menan du Plessis's A State of Fear (1983).
- ItemOpen AccessSettling(2006) Mervis, Jenna; Haresnape, GeoffreySettling is a collection of poems that interrogates the location of self in the physical, personal and metaphorical worls. There are thirty poems that explore different aspects of 'settling' from a woman's perspective.
- ItemOpen AccessA study of the development of the structures and themes in the short stories of Nadine Gordimer(1984) King, Michael; Haresnape, GeoffreyMost current studies of Gordimer concern themselves with her novels, and her short stories have not received significant critical attention as stories in their own right, worthy of study both for their structural and formal qualities, and for the contribution they make as social, political and historical comment on their time. This study begins with a general discussion of the artistic demands of the modern short story, and then proceeds to a close study of all Gordimer's published short stories, concentrating on the developments that occur in the characteristic structures and themes of her stories. Each of her collections is dealt with, chronologically, in a separate chapter. In the course of the study, it became clear that two critical approaches were needed in order to explain satisfactorily developments of structure on the one hand, and theme on the other. The basic approach has been close textual reading, which has been enhanced especially after her fifth collection by consideration of the stories' socio-historical dimensions as well. Gordimer's early stories deal with what are later seen to be characteristic themes, race and racial differences, self-deception, illusion, or the stripping away of illusions, turning points in childhood and marriage. Later stories show the developments in these thematic areas, most notably in the field of race. Other stories reveal a growing interest in the role and position of women, and also a preoccupation with betrayal. Gordimer's stories are seen as occupying a position firmly within the tradition of the modern short story. Her characteristic treatment of her material results in what this study sees as a typical Gordimer short story structure. The story starts with an introductory passage which presents the necessary background and characterisation, or sets the atmosphere. It then moves into a high focus during which a number of insights or revelations occur, which interact with each other to produce, at a higher level of abstraction, the central or unifying revelation which is the essence of the story. In these early stories, she shows a self-aware and self-regarding concern for questions of form. After Friday's Footprint, she devotes less attention to the formal qualities of stories, and gives more attention to questions of social and political comment. However, she does attempt some stories that could be labelled experimental short fiction, and she constantly explores the limits of the traditional artistic demands of the modern short story. After Not For Publication, she seems to turn her attention more towards longer works in order to find a suitable genre for her material. Her consistent use of critical realism, her special ability to capture the nuances and minutiae of experience and character are well suited to the short story form. This study shows the extent to which the short story serves as a vehicle for the expression of her perceptions of and interaction with her society as she develops from the pre-liberal to the committed radical writer and commentator on her society and its people.
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- ItemOpen AccessThrough the eye of a needle : a collection of 50 poems(2003) Nawa, Lebogang Lancelot; Haresnape, GeoffreyThrough the eye of a needle is a collection of fifty poems, reflecting a highly eclectic mix of styles with idiomatic interplay of English and African languages. Eight of the poems have been previously published in literary journals and anthologies such as Southern African Review of Books, New Coin, and Essential Things.
- ItemOpen AccessThe tin church(2001) Haden, Rosamund; Haresnape, GeoffreyHuman bones are discovered on the farm Hebron near Swaziland where two old women, Catherine and Maria, live. Their memories are stirred and disturbed by the discovery. Two young girls weave a close bond of friendship on the farm. Their childhood promises made in the tin church on the hill above Hebron are to have lasting repercussions on the shape of their lives. The church becomes their haven where they know they can always find each other. When Catherine's parents split up, and Catherine is taken to England, Maria still goes to the church, for there she is close to Catherine, and can see visions of her far away.
- ItemOpen AccessTurning compost : a collection of 40 poems(2001) Harrison, James A; Haresnape, GeoffreyTurning Compost is a collection of forty poems, two of which, Seven Kakhaiku and Tres Troubled Triolets, are multiple poems intended to be read as units. The poems have been ordered so that there is a flow of connected or contrasting ideas from poem to poem, therefore it is recommended that they be read in the order presented. The themes covered by the poems are varied, but principal amongst them are memory, nature, dreams and symbols, family and friends, and the search for meaning; they appear in roughly that order. Death, and its challenges to meaning, is a theme which recurs throughout the collection, something which is reflected in the collection's title which is borrowed from one of the poems. Included is one poem, Pig People, which was written specifically for children. The poems are written in a variety of forms, evincing the poet's conscious rejection of stylistic consistency as a goal in developing his voice.
- ItemOpen AccessUnsound minds: a short novel(2005) Mwakanandi, Ruth; Haresnape, GeoffreyUnsound Minds is a short novel about a young girl, Clara, who has suffered emotional trauma. She arrived in Hindpark Township from a place that she never discloses. She has been living in the loft of a block of flats for a while, isolated from the community, only corning out at night to scrounge for food in the rubbish bins belonging to a restaurant situated opposite the flats. The community believes her to be mentally disturbed and want nothing to do with her. One night, while looking through her window, she witnesses the murder of the restaurateur, Samson. A young police officer, Wanda, is assigned the duty of protecting her from the murderers before they find out that she is a witness. He places her under the care of Matrida, a formidable spinster, who lives a short distance away from the scene of the crime. It is, however, this precautionary act that actually exposes Clara to the killers as a witness. As part of the novel's tapestry, the story explores the workings of the township's corrupt and incompetent police force which is headed by an authoritarian bully, Inspector Bedson. Hindpark's social dynamics, beliefs and superstitions, and sense of community, despite some conflict between residents, play an integral role in creating the sort of environment that Clara finds herself in. Wanda, the only policeman with any notable integrity, starts off as her reluctant protector; Matrida assumes the role of a reluctant mother figure; Anabel is the obnoxious neighbour; and limbo is the neighbourhood's aggressive hell-raiser. Like Clara, they have each experienced some form of trauma in their lives. They become a more dependable unit of protection to Clara than the entire Hindpark police force. Without being scientific or philosophical, Unsound Minds looks at the question of sanity. It is a story about how no one human being is exempt from some form of madness and how that madness drives each individual differently. The supposedly insane Clara is placed in the care of Matrida whom the community believes is herself not completely sane. But even in her madness, she is instrumental in bringing back some stability into Clara's life. At the other extreme, Bedson's madness is destructive. Because of his inept leadership skills, he drives the entire police force into disrepute. Given this human dynamic. the story seeks to reveal how everyone uses their madness in the way that suits them best - for good or for bad. The theme of madness was not planned at the time of beginning this short novel, but developed as the narrative progressed. However, just as writing is subjective, so is reading. I expect each reader to read into Unsound Minds what s/he sees in it. The story is entirely my own, influenced partly by my perceptions of the different environments that I have lived in throughout my life, although it is purely imaginative. Pointers which I received from my supervisor, Professor Geoffrey Haresnape, helped in moulding it into a narrative that will hopefully be a worthwhile read.