Browsing by Author "Young, Sandra"
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- ItemOpen AccessA history of apartheid censorship through the archive(2018) Lyster, Rosa Frances; Twidle, Hedley; Young, SandraOver the course of 26 years, and using 97 different definitions of what the system considered to be “undesirable,” South Africa's apartheid-era censors prevented a vast array of literature from being freely circulated in South Africa. The official and symbolic power that they wielded as the gatekeepers of literature seemed almost unmatched, and the system is still discussed today as one of the most comprehensive the world has seen. The history of apartheid censorship has been told using a variety of approaches, focusing on prominent, legislature-defining cases, on experiences of writers or readers affected, or by discussing it as part of a wider system of suppression. This thesis offers another way to understand the system and its corrosive, ongoing effects: a history which foregrounds the censorship archive itself. The archive is inconvenient, banal, strange, and challenging, containing an extraordinary profusion of documents which seem to serve no clear administrative purpose. The censors left behind a vast body of material relating to their activities, amounting to over a hundred linear metres'' worth of documents: dense reports on “subversive” novels; equally detailed reports on throwaway pulp detective thrillers, erotic mysteries, apparently forgettable works of mass-market fiction; letters from members of the public; letters between censors arguing fiercely over the literary merits of a novel; letters from state officials; newspaper reports, book jackets, and other archival ephemera. Histories of the system tend to centre on spectacular cases or moments, which means overlooking the vast majority of what the archive contains, and thus perhaps misrepresenting the nature of the censors' daily activities. For every report justifying the banning (or passing) of a significant protest novel, there are a hundred reports on works of no literary or political significance whatsoever. An analysis of the paperwork produced by the system reveals fascinating contradictions, conflicts, clashes between high-minded notions of the literary and base ideas of the function of art in apartheid South Africa. We can understand the excess and profound waste of intellectual energy that the archive represents if we view it as the product of a system's struggle to politicise literature while stripping it of all references to contemporary politics, to conflate taste with morality, to define without consensus what literature meant. This thesis will show how these codes and reading strategies developed, examining the complicated connections between censorship, canonisation, validation, and criticism that the censors created. It is reassuring to think that censorship in South Africa ended with the banning of The Satanic Verses in 1989, but immersion in the archive shows how far-reaching and long lasting its effects are. The literary infrastructure the censors helped to create has not been erased out of existence; their definitions of the literary and the laws of what can be said are repeated in official and unofficial ways. Questions over who “owns” the space of the literary, over who should own it, over who has the ability (or even the right) to critique it, continue to reverberate today Finally, by exploring the ways in which the system was embedded within wider public and bureaucratic culture, this thesis offers a means of viewing contemporary debates around freedom of speech in South Africa. The recent furore provoked by the state's attempts to suppress Jacques Pauw's The President's Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison reveals how fraught these debates continue to be, and this thesis shows how we may understand them in the context of what has come before. Immersion in the archive – a commitment to analysis of that which is unwieldy and apparently irrelevant – yields insight of great contemporary value, enriching our understanding of apartheid censorship and its poisonous legacy.
- ItemOpen AccessBehind the desk : encountering Shakespeare in South African education(2014) Jonas, Siphokazi; Young, SandraWhile the place of Shakespeare in South Africa has never seriously seemed under threat, particularly outside of academia, the high school syllabus over the last two decades has told a different story. Where the teaching of Shakespeare’s plays has been compulsory in the past, this has changed to such an extent that many schools, where English is taught as a First Additional Language, no longer offer Shakespeare to their learners. Of the plethora of reasons given why this is the case, this thesis is more interested in the role that certain encounters have played in such a shift. The two encounters under question are between the text and the learner, and the text and the contemporary South African context. The reason for this focus is because of the way in which the curriculum is used to articulate ideas about the nation and the subject. The process of constitution is then facilitated through the learner’s encounter with the text in the classroom. This investigation stretches as far back as the inception of English studies in South Africa to education under apartheid, and concludes by analysing examinations emerging out of the post apartheid curriculum. By considering some of the contentious voices that have appropriated Shakespeare to their own end, the project considers how such spaces may be opened up within the current school curriculum. Such an undertaking would require a shift in approaches to teaching Shakespeare, allowing post apartheid learners to engage with a Shakespeare who engages with their context.
- ItemOpen AccessBeyond the "Baartman Trope": representations of black women's bodies from early South African proto-nationalisms to postapartheid nationalisms(2018) Van der Schyff, Karlien; Young, Sandra; Distiller, NatashaIn this thesis, I interrogate the discourses through which colonial stereotypes of race, gender and sexuality are uncritically invoked to serve new purposes, particularly in the service of postapartheid nationalist narratives. I argue not only that contemporary South African nationalism is imagined through gendered tropes, but also that the intersecting tropes of gender, race and sexuality which underlie postapartheid nation-building discourses propagate many of the same stereotypes about black women’s sexuality first entrenched through colonial representations. More specifically, I argue that these tropes are repeatedly invoked through an uncritical deployment of what I term the “Baartman trope”. With this term, I aim to signal the problematic discourses and systems of representation that have reduced Sara Baartman’s embodied specificity to that of a generalised, stereotypical symbol, either as the archetypal hypersexualised victim of colonial exploitation and humiliation, or as the symbolic mother of the “new” South African nation. Throughout this thesis, I not only offer a critique of the “Baartman trope” itself, but also aim to disrupt the decidedly reductive mode of representation which makes an essentialist stereotype such as the “Baartman trope” possible. To this end, I draw on performativity theory and the representational category of intimacy as ethical scholarly approaches to the politics of representation. I interrogate a wide range of literary texts, as well as a number of different scenes of representation that simultaneously challenge, perpetuate, refute and complicate essentialist and stereotypical representations of the black female body. Ranging from early South African proto-nationalist narratives to current postapartheid nationalist discourses, these different scenes of representation show that the same problematic tropes underlying colonial representations of gendered, racialised and sexualised black female bodies are more often than not re-imagined and reconstituted in the postcolonial imaginary. Furthermore, the fact that colonial systems of signification still underpin and influence postcolonial representations, albeit in new ways and to different purposes, highlights the inevitably ambiguous, unstable and hybridised nature of representing race, gender and sexuality in the South African postcolony.
- ItemOpen Access“Brightly Colored Magic and Weird Worlds”: Sylvia Plath’s Creation of Personae Through Her Visual Poetics(2019) Sholto-Douglas, Alice; Young, Sandra; Twidle, HedleyIn this dissertation, I extend existing acknowledgments of the impact of Sylvia Plath’s visual arts training on her writing in order to argue that her painterly sensibilities are central to her character construction. Specifically, I contend that Plath draws upon a set of visual techniques, which I categorise as hallucinations, mental images, dreams, blurriness, and visual-to-verbal re-inscription. The ability to control subjective experience through the imagination, a philosophy Plath discusses in her journals, acts as a framework for her narratives, and visual techniques become, for Plath’s personae, a method of manipulating their experiences through a blurring of the divide between individual imagination and subjective reality. Plath’s visual techniques further function to represent her personae’s psychic interiority in ways that not only illustrate the limits to expression of the traditionally literary but also offer a means of overcoming these limits through an alternative system of meaning-making. Thus, her personae’s agency exists at the level of form, through self representation that is not stymied by the limitations of the written word, as well as at the level of narrative, through her personae’s control of experience. Moreover, because these visual techniques appear frequently in narratives that are preoccupied with a gendered power dynamic, I contend that we should understand Plath’s moments of resistance to textual tradition as enabling her personae’s escape from patriarchal limitations to freedom and selfexpression. While this recognition of the significance of Plath’s visual techniques should not necessarily constitute a panacea to the constraints of traditional language, it does offer a new way of reading Plath which acknowledges her painterly sensibilities as crucial to the way in which she gives her personae agency and writes back to her literary forefathers.
- ItemOpen AccessEducating the other : the politics of somatic difference in Frankenstein(2013) Melvill, Oliver; Young, Sandra; Sofianos, KonstantinThe dissertation engages in a postcolonial reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It argues that Frankenstein and the education of Frankenstein's creature are both deeply rooted in colonial discourse, the nature of the colonial other and the place of this other within Western society. By charting how this discourse functions in the construction of physical alterity, this paper argues that through his exposure to language and society Frankenstein's creature becomes complicit in this process of imposition in which he is placed as the object of a discourse which construes him as other.
- ItemOpen AccessThe influence of African folktales on Sylvia Path's 'Ariel voice'(2014) Earl, Jennifer; Young, SandraIn this study I trace the influence of Paul Radin’s collection of African folktales on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems. Elements from these tales have been identified by various critics in Plath’s “Poem for a Birthday” sequence which, according to Hughes, she wrote around the same time as she was reading the African tales. However, the importance of the tales to her later poetry has not yet been fully explored in Plath criticism. “Poem for a Birthday” marks an important stage in the emergence of what has become known as Plath’s “Ariel voice” and it is my contention that the influence of the African tales is significantly present even in this later work. The Ariel poems manifest a preoccupation with motherhood which merges thematically with creative fruitfulness. I examine how Plath adopts and uses the concept of “the African” in Ariel to represent repressed aspects of the human psyche which must emerge into consciousness in order for creative expression to attain a level of deep resonance. This engagement is repeatedly presented as a vital “primitive” force emerging from beneath a stony silent reality. The Africanfolktales provided Plath with a novel set of imagery and resources with which to portray this explorative process. I therefore explore Plath’s interest in “primitivism”. I also argue that the orality of the African tales inspired Plath to focus on the oral nature of her later writing. I hope in this study to free Plath’s Ariel voice from the shadow of her suicide. More importantly, I hope to show that her own collection of Ariel poems represented an important moment in her creative development that envisaged a vital spirit of possibility, activated dramatically by an engagement with Radin’s African tales.
- ItemOpen AccessLiterature and the littoral in South Africa: reading the tides of history(2022) Geustyn, Maria Elizabeth; Davids, Nadia; Young, Sandra; Samuelson, MegThis thesis explores representations of the littoral in South African literature. It analyses literature published in three broad historical periods with the specific focus on the littoral as a setting from which authors imagine histories differently, often as a corrective, to challenge and wrestle with the racialized categorization of bodies in space. Littoral settings are present throughout the history of South African literature and, when placed on a linear, progressive timeline, feature as a place of first encounters, a site of segregation, and the unmaking of these boundaries. This thesis argues, however, that sequencing representations of the littoral according to this model would subsume histories by those without the power to control official narratives, or whose histories are not well represented in official archives, under rigid nation-based paradigms of typical western historiography. By employing Kamau Brathwaite's theory of “tidalectics” as a method, metaphor and model, I conduct a recursive reading of the littoral's presence in South African literature to show that littoral moments resonate with each other across different historical moments. As such, tidalectics attend to multiple temporalities in a more open, fluid way. I argue that this manner of attending to history surfaces from and sits alongside formal historiography, gently disrupting its premises by offering alternative models for recognising and recording marginal narratives. The primary texts for this thesis include Portuguese expansionist texts, novels by prominent South African authors such as Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, Zoë Wicomb, Lewis Nkosi, and Yvette Christiansë, and a poetry collection by Douglas Livingstone. In these texts, the littoral is presented as a space which is governed by the spatial politics of that era, but also challenges them, playing a valuable part in constructing spatial politics, and in turn racial politics, in South Africa. A tidalectic reading of these literatures therefore demonstrates that the littoral allows for a different spatio-temporal approach to the long history of social injustice in South Africa.
- ItemOpen AccessMadmen and mad money: psychological disability and economics in medieval and early modern literature(2018) Leverton, Tara Juliette Corinna; Young, Sandra; Higginbotham, DerrickIn medieval and early modern literature, people with psychological disabilities are commonly represented as nuisances, monsters, and pitiable wretches. This ableist paradigm is partly attributable to the fact that ‘mad’ characters evoke economic anxieties rooted in the socioeconomic climate of the societies in which the respective texts are created. Fictional ‘madmen’ are used as symbols of or scapegoats for economic problems such as rising poverty, price fluctuations, wealth inequality, and evolving inheritance systems. This exacerbates a prevailing belief that the psychologically disabled are undeserving of respect and care, or even that they are less than human. My goal in this dissertation is to document occurrences of this paradigm and analyse how they contribute to the cultural degradation and dehumanisation of people with psychological disabilities. Applying analytical frameworks provided by disability theorists regarding neurodiversity and sanism to medieval and early modern literature, this dissertation will attempt to expand and invigorate the conversation around disabled people’s cultural history. Each chapter finds the seed of its primary focus in scripture – for example, I examine Herod when discussing madness’s effect on the domestic realm and Noah when discussing madness in old age – and each proceeds in a generally chronologically fashion from scripture to medieval literature and finally early modern literature. The medieval texts I analyse are diverse and range from religious poems such as John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 14th century) to the chivalric romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Likewise, the early modern texts under scrutiny include Ben Jonson’s city comedies and Shakespeare’s tragic Timon of Athens (1607). The wide-ranging nature of the texts I examine is intended to indicate that the ableist notions being unpacked are not limited by genre or period
- ItemOpen AccessNarrating Colonial Violence and Representing New-World Difference: The Possibilities of Form in Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report(2010) Young, SandraIn tracing the stories—or ‘‘histories,’’ as sixteenth-century exploration narratives were called—with which expansionist Europe came to know its colonial Other, we see outlines of the habits of thought and the systems of identification with which imperialist Europe constructed its world.1 Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia has been read as a key text in the development not only of knowledge specifically of America, but of sixteenth-century natural history and early scientific methodology more generally. The Report itself does not claim to be compendious and is driven by Harriot’s openly acknowledged agenda of promoting support for the English colonization of America. But the interesting feature about the Harriot text, the thing that is given scant critical attention, is that it is really two distinct texts, published only two years apart but each strikingly different in its treatment of the alarming effects of the colonial encounter.
- ItemOpen AccessPassing 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, SandraThe 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.
- ItemOpen AccessThe politics of visuality in Beloved and The Colour Purple(2017) Roberts, Abby; Young, SandraThe brutal history of slavery in America makes literary engagement with slave experience a potent exercise. Contemporary writers seeking to engage with this history face many difficulties, writing in the wake of the traditional slave narrative which was characterised by limited perspective and reliance on externally verifiable factors. This dissertation considers two works, Beloved and The Color Purple, by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker respectively, authors who write against the template of slave narratives by offering intimate and subjective points of view to inform the story-making process. Drawing on visual theory, I consider the politics of visibility, that is to say, the privilege and disempowerment manifest in visual relations. I examine the ways in which visuality extends the efficacy of Morrison and Walker's fictional project, by contributing to a narrative form which privileges the interior life of its characters. Through their story-making process, the novels of my study offer the opportunity both to challenge and to extend an understanding of the politics of visuality. I examine how the novels encourage alternative lines of sight which, by means of their investment in an interior perspective, unsettle a disempowering visual binary and suggest a way for contemporary authors to write into the narrative gaps of history. An alternative perspective offers insight into the imagined lives of obscured or marginalised people and, ultimately, brings a fraught history into view in a way that is life-affirming and empowering.
- ItemOpen AccessReturn to the scene of the crime: The returnee detective and postcolonial crime fiction(2017) Naicker, Kamil; Samuelson, Meg; Young, SandraThis thesis investigates the ways in which the crime novel genre has been taken up and adapted in order to depict and grapple with ideas of justice in selected postcolonial contexts. It approaches this investigation through the figure of the 'returnee detective' in these texts and determines how this recurring figure is used to mediate the reader's understanding of civil conflict in the postcolonial world. What makes this trope so noteworthy, and merits investigation, is the way in which guilt and innocence (and their attendant associations of self and other) are forced into realignment by the end of colonial rule and the rise of civil conflict. In the context of civil war, crime becomes more insidious and intimate than the traditional mystery motif will allow. The returnee detective furthers this breakdown by performing the role of hybrid mediator within the text. The returnee figure is at once strange and familiar, lacking both the staunch sense of identity that is necessary in order to maintain the mystery of the 'other' and the objectivity to comfortably apportion blame to one side. Postcolonial fictions of crime set in the context of civil conflict thus emerge as belonging to a distinct category requiring a distinct critical approach. The primary texts are When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman, Red Dust by Gillian Slovo and Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah. My theoretical framework combines genre theory and postcolonial theory. By combining two critical strands I demonstrate that the intimacy of civil war and the returnees' ambivalent attitudes to home and away unsettle crime genre conventions, producing a new form that challenges notions of morality, legitimacy and culpability.
- ItemOpen AccessRuth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity(2012) Warner, Sarah Jane; Driver, Dorothy; Young, Sandra; Distiller, NatashaRuth Miller's poetry was written between 1940 and the year of her death in 1969, and is published in three volumes, Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968), and Ruth Miller: Poems Prose Plays (1990). In this thesis, I modify the concept of literary maternity suggested by Joan Metelerkamp in her article, “Ruth Miller: Father's Law or Mother's Lore?” (1992). My approach is informed by a model of literary maternity that is not defined in terms of a female figure but in terms of a relation between the earliest parent and the child, or what is referred to in psychoanalytic terms as the preoedipal relation. My thesis is concerned to show how Miller's poetry and a theory on the maternal function of literature reinterpret each other; it includes a consideration of Miller's literary legacy, the critical literature describing her oeuvre, and the issues of continuity and authority that arise in the context of literary publication.
- ItemOpen AccessShakespeare and the cinema of excess(2012) Van Heerden, Jacques; Young, SandraThis dissertation examines the notion of excess in film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. It takes its critical approach from the work of Georges Bataille, who used "eroticism" to describe a confrontation with excess that destabilises the individual’s sense of identity. Bataille suggests that art can allow audiences to experience a measure of eroticism by presenting subjects that transgress established taboos and by undermining the formal conventions that allow the audience to interpret the text. This dissertation examines these ideas through an analysis of Julie Taymor's Titus and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth from the perspective of Bataille’s writing on transgression, taboos, and excess. By doing a comparative reading of each play and film, I will examine the meaning of excess in these plays and how this has translated to screen...
- ItemOpen AccessThe Language of Love and Desire: Convention, Affect, and Intimacy in the Contemporary Romance(2021) Hoffman, Alexandra; Young, SandraContemporary romance is a genre which is often denigrated to the realm of popular fiction or “chick-lit”. However, contemporary romance is in dialogue with a much older tradition, and it serves a purpose beyond mere entertainment. In this dissertation, I analyse four works of contemporary romance which demonstrate a keen awareness of the conventions that precede them and offer a range of new imaginative, romantic possibilities. Narratives of love and desire play a crucial role in societal perceptions of love as it relates to gender, marriage, sexuality, autonomy, and belonging. In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the banality of ideas of fate and soulmates is revealed in a world of falseness informed by the communist state in Czechoslovakia. While in Possession: A Romance (1990), A.S. Byatt self-reflexively questions traditional romantic assumptions of love as belonging as well as more feminist, postmodern concerns of desire. Byatt also reappropriates the mythical figure of Melusine to recentre feminine desire. Furthermore, Sally Rooney's Normal People (2018) addresses recent romantic tropes such as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, along with the problems with the social pressure to appear “normal”. Lastly, I consider Nthikeng Mohlele's Illumination (2019), a novel that is at once a love story and a story of fractured existence in post-apartheid Johannesburg. Using a mixture of feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, I examine the ways in which these authors redefine love relations. These novels demonstrate that the language of love and desire is one of nuance and complexity which cannot be reduced to clichéd expressions or neatly wrapped in conventions of marriage or tragedy. Lovers are situated in space and time, and in language. By reappropriating, subverting, and questioning various romantic tropes, these four contemporary novels offer new and productive ways of thinking about love and desire. All these works of fiction challenge dominant, normative notions of romance and prompt a critical reconceptualization of love and desire.