Browsing by Subject "Arts"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Keeping up with the Queers: White gay and bisexual men's experiences of relationship intimacy and conflict in Cape Town, 1966-2008
    (2021) Kleinschmidt, Adam Elliot; Mbali, Mandisa; Field, Sean
    Between 1966 and 2008, the social, political and cultural landscape of South Africa changed considerably for queer people living in Cape Town. This thesis intends to explore white gay and bisexual men's experiences of intimacies and conflict in their close relationships during the latter half of apartheid and early democratisation. Interviews and correspondence with eleven men that probed their personal developmental histories, their interactions with social institutions like education and the army, and their intimate relationship histories all revealed information that contributes towards three bodies of literature: firstly, that intersectional histories of race, class and sexuality can be found in social groups that have both privilege and oppression; secondly, that queer identity development is affected by families of origin and social institutions; and thirdly, the queer spaces in Cape Town are reflections of both the queer community and of mainstream heterosexist society. As a result of these findings, it can be stated with conviction that conflict and intimacy in close relationships is an amalgamation of social and personal developments, and that race, class and sexuality have informed the ways in which white queer men perceive themselves and their community. While this research was limited by the small case study size and by minimal archival work, the merits of this case study can be expanded by further oral history projects.
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    Literature's Blind Spot: Event and Remainder in Tom McCarthy's Fiction
    (2017) Triebel, Yannick; Stables, Wayne
    Tom McCarthy writes against a mode of humanist realism that dominates contemporary fiction, which he calls “as laden with artifice as any other literary convention” (Typewriters 59). He rejects realism's claim to “objectively reflect, capture or report on historical events and mental activity” (McCarthy, Typewriters 59). This thesis explores the question of the blind spot in his work, the way in which his fiction, in contrast to this mode of realism, focuses not on content or narrative but on what cannot be represented. McCarthy's novels obsessively attempt to write the impossible—a facet of his work that critics consistently neglect. What is most compelling in literature, he maintains, is what “does not happen” (Typewriters 178). His fictional work is an endeavour to rethink the relation between literature and the event. The thesis demonstrates that McCarthy's novels C, Remainder, and Satin Island undermine realist narrative techniques by reimagining the notion of the event. In C, language is linked to death and disaster through the way in which the novel enacts language's contingency and dispersal. Remainder shows disaster, and thus trauma, as a fundamental ontological condition and marks the impossibility of any authentic event, such as death. The novel decentres the human subject and instead privileges brute materiality— much like the nouveau roman, it constitutes an “encounter with structure” (McCarthy, Typewriters 185). Matter, which the novel posits as a force of originary inauthenticity and links to disaster, is both unavoidable and impossible to understand. Satin Island, in its fragmentary meditations, approaches the question of the nature of the literary work: the work as such is always in abeyance; the novel probes the idea that literature necessarily requires reference to an unreachable outside that defines it. McCarthy's thinking of the event is read alongside thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Remainder, for instance, enacts Blanchot's idea of the disaster, as well as Derridean concepts such as the trace, and the analysis of Satin Island draws on the aesthetics of Blanchot and Stéphane Mallarmé. McCarthy's fiction reveals that at the core of literature is a kind of disaster, an aesthetic and representational failure. His writings for the International Necronautical Society suggest that contending with this disaster is an aesthetic imperative: art, the group writes, is “the consequence and experience of failed transcendence” (McCarthy, Critchley et al., “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” 223). Hence, art emerges as the remainder of catastrophe.
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    Urbanizing the North-eastern Frontier: the frontier intelligentsia and the making of colonial Queenstown, c.1859-1857
    (2012) Voss, Megan; Mager, Anne
    The rich and varied literature on the eastern Cape frontier has not yet reached the north-eastern frontier of the mid-nineteenth century. Urban centres and towns have also been largely ignored. Moreover, the perspective of the Anglophone intellectuals in these towns has rarely been analysed, and has instead been subsumed within a uniform ‘frontier voice’.