OpenUCT :: Browsing by Department "Department of English Language and Literature"

Browsing by Department "Department of English Language and Literature"

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Open Access
A history of apartheid censorship through the archive
(2018) Lyster, Rosa Frances; Twidle, Hedley; Young, Sandra
Over 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.
Open Access
A Journey through trauma: a memoir about grief, healing, memory, trauma, spiritual quest and social justice
(2019) Gwala, Dela; Bennett, Jane
I am finally getting used to being home. Two weeks into 2013, I have the kind of routine reserved for unemployed recent graduates. I wake up and try to convince myself to run. On the days where the tedium of being in Centurion wins out, I lace up, push the gate open and put my earphones in. I take a breath whilst Florence Welch's vibrato nudges me to get going. My feet slowly shuffle up the cul-de sac that winds around the corner and ends at the security gate. The best time to jog midweek in the suburbs is after the school run.
Open Access
A soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency
(2022) Smith, Robert Alex; Higgins, John
This thesis has the principle aim of providing a critical reading of the work of Lionel Abrahams, intending to provide the first serious scholarly interpretation of his thought. The argument that it purses is that what is at stake in his work is a thinking through the state of emergency. The state of emergency, however, is not approached as the formal legal periods in South African history under apartheid. Instead, following the insights of the Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it treats the legal state of emergency as the singular apparatus of the governing metaphysical paradigm that underpins modernity and its colonial instantiations. It adopts Agamben's notion of the ban as the paradigm for this metaphysic, using this as an entry point to understand Abrahams' participation in the debates of literature and the status of art in South Africa under apartheid. Throughout this study, the status of art is extended as an allegory for the status of life more generally. The movement is always the same: something is divided, with one element being excluded as illegitimate, and precisely through this exclusion is included in the other as its foundation. In sphere of art, the separation is between prose and poetry, commitment and autonomy, black and white art, with each working as the negative foundation of the latter. This too holds for notions of citizenship, where a line of distinction is drawn between the Bantu and the European, with the former's exclusion from the metropole serving as the foundation of the rights of the latter. So too for humanity, which is split into the distinct races, each of whose identity is the negation and the distorted image of the other. Having established the ban as the operative structure that defines the state of emergency, the study then turns to Abrahams first novel, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1976), as well as several collections of poetry with a specific task: interrogating strategies of its overcoming. By taking the ban as being primarily a structure of relation (between language and things, the subject and the other, as well as the subject's relation to their own capacity for action), the study concludes with an examination of two principle and interrelated themes in Abrahams' work: community and the literary act; or, put differently, what is the principle that founds and sustains both literature and community? Through a close reading of his fictional and poetic work, this thesis will argue that it is Agamben's notion of inoperativity, which is elaborated on most notably in the essay “What Is the Act of Creation?”, which resides at the heart of and is the key to understanding Abrahams' thought.
Open Access
Access to academic practices in an engineering curriculum : drawing on students' representational resources through a multimodal pedagogy
(2004) Archer, Arlene Hillary; Thesen, Lucia; McCormick, Kay; Kress, Gunther
Open Access
Action and activism in selected novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
(1994) Deetlefs, Dorothea Maria; Cartwright, John
This thesis examines individual and societal action and activism in five science fiction and utopian novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, namely, The left hand of darkness, The word for world is forest, The lathe of heaven, The dispossessed, and Always coming home. Le Guin is a politically committed author whose ideological perspective is informed by feminism, Taoism, and anarchism, as well as a strong ecological awareness. These determine the structure of her fictional societies and the actions of her characters. Each novel is approached on its own terms, with the commentary adhering closely to the text. Individuals and their societies are conceived of as embodying different and conflicting ways of being and doing. The author is seen as an activist by virtue of her political commitment, especially in the case of the self-reflexive, self-critical Always coming home. Included in the Introduction are sections on: Tom Moylan's concept of the critical utopia, which tailors the utopian genre to fit modern views; Le Guin's concept of the yin utopia, one possible form of the critical utopia; and a short section on Taoism, familiarising the reader with concepts and terminology used in the thesis.
Open Access
Adapting Henry James to the screen: Washington Square & The portrait of a lady
(2004) Mowlana, Yasmin; Marx, Lesley
This dissertation explores the film adaptations of two of the novels of Herny James, namely Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The Introduction discusses issues relating broadly to the problems and attractions of film adaptation. I draw especially on the work of James Naremorc, Brian Mcfarlane and George Bluestone. Naremore surveys the history of film adaptation, pervasive in many countries with a film industry. Mcfarlane looks at the reasons for this interest in adapting novels to film as well as the issue of authenticity with regard to film adaptation. Bluestone looks at what film and literature have in common. In Chapter One, I discuss the novel Washington Square and two adaptations, William Wyler's 1949 version and Agnieszka Holland's 1997 version. The chapter opens with a discussion of the novel, focussing on themes such as marriage, money and status in society. I then examine selected aspects of the two films. In The Heiress, I look at the inclusion of scenes that don't appear in the novel, and how these scenes drive the narrative in the film. I also look at how the characters are portrayed in the film and how they bring their own uniqueness to the screen. In Holland's Washington Square, I examine both the characters and the sets, while also looking at Holland's feminist interpretation of the story. In Chapter Two, I examine the novel The Portrait of a Lady and Jane Campion's film version of this story. The discussion of the novel looks at themes like tragedy, the European experience, marriage, and the displaced American. I also discuss the various characters in the novel and the role that each of them plays. With regard to Campion's film, I look at unusual filmic devices that have been used as well as the way in which the characters from the novel have been translated to the screen. I conclude by noting how films have inspired people to read classic works once again.
Open Access
The aesthetics of radical critique : Kant or the dialectic and revolution
(2004) Malcomess, Bettina
This dissertation attempts to account for the paralysis of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and thus of radical critique in relation to practice in general. It begins by demonstrating that there is a methodological problem in the connection of the dialectical method to Adorno and Horkheimer's philosophy of history, which posits Enlightenment both as break with the history of reason, and as ahistorical concept of that history. The dissertation takes as its point of departure their discussion of Kant, as exemplary Enlightenment thinker. I will use Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination and Axel Honneth's Critique of Power- Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory here. The strategy of the next section is to rehistoricise Kant's thought and thus the Enlightenment within its historical moment. This follows a close reading of Kant's political philosophy in his' An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' and 'Contest of the Faculties' to show that Kant poses the problem of the morality versus politics in terms inseparable from his historical context: the emergence of the Modem state, and the French revolution. Two solutions to this problem present themselves within Kant's separation of public and private uses of reason. Public and private anticipates the Modem separation of state and civil society: 'moral-political' problem is thus solved by 'publicity', which plays a mediating role. A subtextual reading however, proposes that the public/private split refers to an internalisation of the political principle in what Etienne Balibar calls the 'citizen subject'. We will use Balibar's paper, ""Citizen Subject"", to show that the 'citizen subject' of Modernity emerges with the French revolution. Finally, these two possible solutions to the Kantian moral-political problem will be mapped to the political philosophical models of power of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault respectively. Foucault's model of 'disciplinary' power will be connected to the 'citizen subject' while Habermas and Arendt's normative conceptions of publicness in their juridico-political models of power will be mapped to the first solution based on the dualism state/civil society. I will make use of Cohen and Arato's Civil Society and Political Theory, as well as various other secondary texts on political philosophy here. The last section will work out more clearly the relationship between Foucault's genealogical critique, the 'citizen subject' and the French revolution. It will show the similarity between Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical method in relation to Kant's historical reflection on his own present. To work out the conditions of this mode of what we will call radical critique of the present by Kant, and its basis on a Modern philosophy of history we will turn to Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant's political philosophy from his Aesthetics. Here Reinhart Koselleck' s Futures Past - On the Semantics of Historical Time will prove instructive on the link between Kant's philosophy of history, based on the metahistorical concept of revolution and Kant's judgement of the French revolution as historical event. The main thesis of this dissertation is that the radical critique of the present, in this case that of Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical philosophy of history of Adorno and Horkheimer are caught up in the same contradictions as Kant's radical judgement of the French revolution; and that this problem takes on an aesthetic form .
Open Access
African writing in English in Southern Africa : an interpretation of the contribution to world literature of Black Africans within the confines of the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia and the former British protectorates in Southern Africa
(1971) Barnett, Ursula A; Howarth, R G; Westphal, E O J
It is my purpose to show that in Southern Africa African English literature as defined above has absorbed the culture of the West and has begun to reciprocate by adding its own distinctive features. My contention will be based on an investigation of the trends and ideas which appear in the novels, short stories, poetry, drama, autobiographical and critical writing of Africans.
Open Access
After Jameson : Scottish fiction and the ambiguities of postmodern identity
(1994) Slack, Justin
badly scanned
Open Access
After the poem : the poetry of Sydney Clouts
(1989) Joubert, Susan Ruth; Glenn, Ian E
Open Access
Afterlives: resurrecting the South African border war
(2012) Lazenby, Nicola
[W]hile the image of the SADF as a heinous perpetrator of Apartheid violence is undeniable, it is being complicated by the emergence of a range of recent cultural productions. Using Jacqui Thompson’s collection of SADF memoirs, An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok (2006), and the revival of Anthony Akerman’s play, Somewhere on the Border (2012), this thesis explores how these cultural productions assert an alternative, individual, and humanised rendering of the SADF soldiers who experienced the Border War. The attempt to render these soldiers in an alternative light signals an anxiety regarding the way the SADF is remembered in contemporary South Africa. This anxiety resonates with broader issues of the role of “victimhood” in South Africa’s national identity in the aftermath of Apartheid.
Open Access
Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie : three moments in the problematics of magic realism
(1994) Pooley, Simon Preston; Brink, Andre P; Watson, Stephen
Chapter One begins by outlining the space magic occupies in Western culture, clarifying what I mean by the term "magic". I examine aspects of indigenous American sacred traditions which have influenced and which prefigure magic realism. I review the development of the aesthetic in its Latin American context, touching on the Chronicles, the role of nationalism and erotic rhetoric, the influence of European modernism and the role of the intellectual in Latin American society. Chapter Two examines the development of a realist aesthetic in Europe since the Enlightenment. This review of its manifestations and counter-traditions in European culture is founded upon a discussion of aspects of the philosophy of Kant. I focus on the influence of Surrealism which is particularly illuminating of Latin American magic realism. The impacts of anthropology and psychoanalysis on Latin American writers are also reviewed. Chapter Two includes a review of formulations of magic realism influential in the field of English studies and concludes with a working definition which is used as a basis for the discussions of the three novels analysed in this study. Chapter Three is a study of the development of Alejo Carpentier's version of magic realism culminating in the writing of The Kingdom of this World in 1949. Through using both European and indigenous American techniques and perspectives he hoped to create a literature which could represent the complex realities of Latin American life and establish a mythology for the founding of a unified Latin American identity.
Open Access
Alexander the Great and the English novel
(2012) Howell, Patrick; Anderson, Peter
This work focuses on the manner in which Alexander the Great is received and reconfigured within the confines of the contemporary English-language novel. The Macedonian king has held the attention of writers and artists throughout the centuries; this dissertation seeks to investigate how modern authors, working at a remove of centuries, with limited evidence, have contrived to fashion coherent literary narratives from his life, and how this process is influenced by the authors and the society for which they write. The theoretical backbone of this approach is provided by reception theory, which provides a useful technical vocabulary and outlook by which to approach the phenomena which affect the comprehension of, and subsequent re-appropriation, of cultural artifacts.
Open Access
Algeria's way
(2005) Smith, Alexandra
Open Access
All life converges to some centre: alienation and modernity in the early Ayi Kwei Armah
(2015) Chetty, Kavish; Sofianos, K; Ouma, C
This paper examines representations of existential alienation in two early novels by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah. The introductory chapter extrapolates an account of how the representational strategies of existential alienation produce specific effects on the act of self - writing. From there, the paper explores these effects in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), arguing that alienation is a valuable heuristic in unlocking the novel’s complex meditation on how abstract, macrohistorical forces like neo - colonialism come to be registered in the most intimate aspects of the subject’s experience of the world. As such, if one restores the historical details of Ghana’s “post-colonial” moment, the novel is redeemed from Chinua Achebe’s assertion that the novel is “sick [...] not with the sickness of Ghana, but the sickness of the human condition”. Representations of alienation have a diagnostic function in The Beautyful Ones . The second chapter examines alienation under the new imaginative terrains of Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973), and articulates the experiments in formal representation in that novel with Armah’s inaugural concern with the possibility of a prognostic appraisal of the alienation so widely thematised in his earlier trilogy. Both studies are undertaken, finally, to explore the ways in which modernity has been received in African literature, and to demonstrate the analytic value of existential alienation in understanding the crises of a specifically African modernity.
Open Access
Allegories of drought and of gardens in the novels of J.M. Coetzee and Dambudzo Marechera
(1996) Lilford, Charles Grant; Brink, Andre P
This thesis examines the trope of Allegory in the work of two Southern African writers, JM Coetzee and Dambudzo Marechera. It discusses the trope's use in redefining the dominant theme of the dialectic between scarcity and plenty. In much of Southern African literature, this dialectic is expressed allegorically. Drought represents a physical and spiritual lack while gardens represent human attempts to respond to that lack by creating fertility and meaning. The thesis is based on the premise that Southern African literature is best understood from as wide a perspective as possible. Coetzee and Marechera redefine the form and the content of a variety of texts, both African and non-African. In order to study this process of redefinition more closely, I have placed the work of each writer within the context of other genres of writing. Many critics view Marechera's writing as modernistic and European. I attempt to establish his unconscious reliance upon African traditional narrative, particularly the Shona rungano. Marechera uses Shona orature as a mythic pre-text for the more explicitly allegorical sections of his House of Hunger. Similarly, several of Coetzee's novels allegorise concerns around drought found in novels of settlement in Southern Africa. Both writers work within a more global tradition of writing about scarcity and plenty. The garden also appears in Homer, Milton, Rousseau, Voltaire, Dickens and Rushdie, among others, as a site of refuge from poverty and oppression. Contextual chapters examine other texts handling these related themes as background for those chapters which deal with Marechera and Coetzee's work in depth. The thesis makes use of the twentieth-century theory of allegory, particularly as presented by Edwin Honig, Angus Fletcher and Maureen Quilligan. It examines the relationship between consciously allegorical texts, like those written by Coetzee and Marechera, and the unconscious and ubiquitous . use of allegory as an instrument of rhetoric in ostensibly realistic or philosophical texts. Coetzee and Marechera use allegory in critiquing dominant forms of discourse and this thesis uses close critical reading to expose the links between their allegory and its pre-texts.
Open Access
Aloe and honey : tales from town and country
(1998) Mxakwe, Mzamadoda Theophilus; Coetzee, JM; Galgut D
The Black South African literary oeuvre has as its dominant background township life. There has been a considerable neglect of village or rural setting. Even the proliferation of writing that has been regarded as depicting genuine African experience has fallen short of remedying this malady. There is a paucity of writings that endeavour to depict rural communities, and even where South African writers attempted to depict rural community, theirs has been an indolent attempt, as evinced by a lack of insight in such writings. One example is Matshoba's Call Me Not A Man. which is merely a glimpse into the rural setting. This shortcoming, coupled with a travesty of the rural setting, suggests a non-existence of the rural community. Whether South African writers, especially, Black writers, eschew rural setting deliberately or not is open to debate. Hence my project has as its paramount aim an endeavour to expose authentic rural realities. This collection, therefore, portrays rural life against the backdrop of city life. This paradoxical juxtapositioning is a deliberate attempt to enable the reader to extricate real-life happenings from both scenarios, and have a sound judgement about his/her observation.
Open Access
The ambiguous female voice : recovering female subjectivity in Elizabeth Cary's The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
(2008) Broumels, Monique Juliette; Distiller, Natasha
The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (circ) 1604 deals with the difficulties of a woman to express herself in a society that enjoins women to silence and to the private realm of the home. In the play Cary debates the actions of several female characters, presenting the reader with the understanding that they are wilful subjects who act to push the boundaries of the patriarchal confines of the royal household in which they find themselves. But Cary does not unequivocally endorse these women's actions. The main protagonist of the play is Mariam whose public voice and failure to comply with her husband forms the central drama of the play. Drawing on the ambiguity that is evident in Cary's play, I explore female subjectivity in the play with regards to two of the most influential ideologies in early modern England: those of marriage and religion. Every woman in early modern England, as with all the women in Cary's play, were either married, to be married or had been married. Protestant ideology became the ambiguous space where women were for the first time considered as spiritually equal. But the family and marriage were social and gendered constructions that drew on Christian discourse in order to reinstate the notions of gender difference and ensure the submission of women in the home and in the family.
Open Access
"Among the civilized" : a consideration of family, power, morality and technique in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett
(1976) Novis, Carol; Whittock, T G
The purpose of this thesis is to attempt to penetrate beyond these mystifying eccentricities of style to Ivy Compton-Burnett's world view, in order to show that, rather than being limited and inflexible, they are limited only to the extent that they establish the bounds within which a rich and varied world exists. If these novels can be said to be "about" anything, they are about the difficulties of living as a civilized being in a savage world, and about the depths of human motives and reactions. To illustrate this, my approach is thematic, rather than chronological.
Open Access
An exploration of major existential elements in the principal novels of Joseph Conrad
(1989) Bohlmann, Otto