Browsing by Author "Moji, Polo"
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- ItemOpen AccessBecoming “so terribly altered”: Reading transformations of the self in “The Fall of the House of Usher”(2021) Rawoot, Bilqis; Anderson, Peter; Moji, PoloIn this thesis, I try to situate the effects of the text, specifically on the reader, by looking at ideas of transformation. My primary investigation is to determine the extent of the effect on the reader and the reader's reality, and if it is possible to alter the reader by inducing a transformation. I argue that transformation is possible as a “becoming”. Transformation depends on the text's reflection and verisimilitude to reality, which aids introspection and the consequent transitioning toward a new identity. I confront these concerns via close analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Whereas critics have read Poe while considering authorial intent and biography, and while limiting effect to emotion, I argue that the reader determines meaning and effect which can impose on identity. This inquiry deals directly with the interaction between the text and the reader, while acknowledging language as the common ground and means of communicating meaning and effect between them. Arnold van Gennep's theory of liminality provides a framework for transition, which I apply to character and reader becoming. And, it explains the interstitial space between the textual realm and the reader's reality. My close analysis of Poe's characters elucidates these tasks as I engage the text as a reflection of the reader's development, and as the narrator's interactions with the Usher siblings mimics the reader's relation to the text. Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphonic theory depicts the text as life-like and appropriate for this exchange. I consider metafiction for its ability to dissemble illusory distinctions between the text and reality, and as it induces consciousness in the reader. I have also placed Poe in conversation with Julia Kristeva for her insights into the psychoanalytic process of abjection, and as she illustrates the revision of identity. Much of this project deals with finding unity and reconciling the inherently contradictory elements of human existence. Ultimately, I consider how the process of textual interaction contributes to potential reader “becoming”. And, I argue that becoming and identity are intimately dependent on selfconsciousness of the vastness of human potential, as well as the dissolution of the very borders designed to limit and make sense of that vastness.
- ItemOpen AccessFilm adaptation of the post-apartheid South African novel: re-examining the aesthetics of creation of disgrace(2022) Sawadogo, Denis; Moji, Polo; Ouma, ChristopherWhile many scholarships of the film adaptation of Disgrace have championed the fidelity rhetoric of the film with respect to J.M. Coetzee's novel, and in so doing, have advocated the axiomatic hierarchy of literature over cinema, this dissertation challenges the fidelity discourse about the film and proposes new tropes for adaptation criticism beyond the classical paradigm. Central to the thesis is the argument that a re-examination of Steve Jacobs's feature film Disgrace unveils the inconsistency and inadequacy of the fidelity rhetoric as a language for adaptation criticism, positions the film as an independent genre with its specificity and poeticity, and allows for an intertextual dialogue with other post-apartheid South African and postcolonial African cinematic productions as a means of promoting adaptation criticism beyond the fidelity model. While cementing the film's independent status vis-à-vis the novel, the intertextual critique also allows for a rewriting of Jacobs's Disgrace that addresses its shortcomings and controversies. Hence, drawing upon structural narratologists such as Gerard Genette, postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Frantz Fanon, and adaptation critics including Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam, Alexie Tcheuyap, and Lindiwe Dovey, the dissertation explores at a time formal and thematic aesthetics of the film adaptation to diversify its critical avenues not only but also to bridge epistemological gaps left by previous studies which are limited to thematic hermeneutics.
- ItemOpen Access'The end of the world as we know it': imagining new possibilities for the Anthropocene through a study of Nigerian Africanfuturism(2023) Young, Lisbeth; Moji, PoloThe imaginary of the Anthropocene as an environmental apocalypse facing the planet and calls for ecological literature from the perspective of the Global North masks the current environmental crisis in parts of the world that are “already living the apocalypse”. Likewise, science fiction has been historically centred in the West in its interrogation of apocalyptic scenarios. This thesis examines how Africanfuturism, a term coined by Nnedi Okorafor in 2019 to define a new African-focussed science fiction, reframes the imaginaries of the Anthropocene as a global environmental apocalypse from the perspective of the Global South. This study combines an analysis of Africanfuturist science fiction tropes and narrative strategies with an ecocritical reading informed by Rob Nixon's notion of “slow violence” to re-frame the urgency of climate change within the context of postcolonial Nigeria. Reading beyond representations of the current environmental crisis through genres such as petro-fiction, I concentrate on Tade Thompson's Wormwood trilogy (2018–2019), in conversation with other contemporary Africanfuturist novels set in Nigeria, namely Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014), After the Flare (2017) by Deji Bryce Olukotun and Suyi Davies Okungbowa's David Mogo, Godhunter (2019). I argue that Africanfuturism allows for the re-imagination of the ecological crisis through depictions of the entanglement of the posthuman and nonhuman and the setting of a post-apocalyptic world providing a mechanism through which the extent of the crisis can be realised.
- ItemOpen Access(Un)Homely in Cape Town: contested space and the post-apartheid urban narrative(2021) Mahatey, Ayesha; Moji, PoloNegotiation of urban space is particularly pertinent to South African history as a site of social and spatial conflict resulting from the legislative practices and social engineering of the apartheid government in the form of the Group Areas Act (1950). As a postcolonial and post-apartheid city, Cape Town has the distinction of evolving from pre-apartheid's least segregated city to apartheid's most segregated city, with many of the injustices of the past perpetuated in the post-apartheid era by its current neoliberal order. Yet, in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991), South African writer Njabulo Ndebele asserts that Johannesburg has always been, the centre of South African resistance and “spectacle” – and the object of studies such as Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008). Located at the intersection of urban and postcolonial studies, this study is grounded by the framework of ‘critical urban theory' (Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefevre, Neil Brenner), which frames urban space as a “site, medium and outcome” of histories of social power. It therefore reads the post-apartheid narratives of The Woman Next Door (2016) by Yewande Omotoso, Thirteen Cents (2001) by Sello Duiker and Living Coloured: Because Black and White Were Taken (2019) by Yusuf Daniels, as representations of the city as “politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable” space, by drawing on Sarah Nuttall's assumption of place – specifically the city – as a constitutive subject of certain narratives as well as Homi Bhabha's notion of the “unhomely”. The concepts of home, unhoming and homelessness are therefore used to establish how history and space collide to create a palimpsestic reading of Cape Town. Thus, the study maps spatial contestation in central and peripheral locations of the city and raises questions of racialised and class-based (un)belonging as representative of the post-apartheid South African city.