Browsing by Subject "English Language"
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- ItemOpen AccessA soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency(2022) Smith, Robert Alex; Higgins, JohnThis 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.
- ItemOpen AccessHow to build a home for the end of the World(2020) Shinners, Keely; Coovadia, ImraanHow To Build a Home for the End of the World is a magical realist dystopian road trip novel by Keely Shinners. Donny is a carpenter who renovates houses nobody lives in. His daughter, Mary-Beth, is hell-bent on donating her organs to her chronically ill ex-girlfriend, Aida. Together, they go on a road trip across a waterless American wasteland, populated by a peculiar cast of angels and ghosts, revolutionaries and academics, performance artists and desert hippies. Formulated as a case history of post apocalyptic times, How To Build a Home for the End of the World investigates the ways in which people understand memory, healing, and redemption in the throes of of ever-unraveling crisis.
- ItemOpen AccessA study of consolation poetry of the fourteenth century, with particular reference to The book of the Duchess, Pearl, The parlement of the thre ages and sundry minor poems on death(1987) Peddie, Mary Elizabeth; Lee, B SFourteenth-century man saw around him constantly the immediate prospect of death. Not only the high mortality rate and the universally public death-bed scene which had always been present, but pestilence and war emphasized the proximity of the dread messenger. Around him he saw sculpture and painting, in churches chiefly but not confined to them, depicting the horrors of death and judgement and he was accustomed to hearing sermons and verse which dwelt on the subject in lurid detail. Death to fourteenth-century man was not so much fear of the unknown since the whole process was, up to a point, readily observable and thereafter authoritatively mapped out by the church. Although the departed soul may be destined for the joys of the Beatific Vision, nevertheless those left behind experience loss, uncertainty of the loved one's fate, the often traumatic physical sight of the death-bed and the unwelcome reminder that this is the fate that overtakes everyone. However joyous may be the wished-for reunion with God, one cannot help viewing reality. The cherished body becomes loathsome. In the face of this terror, some form of consolation is required, leading to resignation to the inevitable. The way fourteenth-century man looked at death is well illustrated in the enormous body of literature on the subject. From this plenty has been selected Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, a gentle work which keeps Death at a distance; Pearl, an anonymous work depicting the handling of grief at the loss of a child; The Parlement of the Thre Ages which deals harshly with its audience in order to teach its lesson and contains most of the themes which recur in the final chapter, where a small selection of didactic and homiletic poems is considered. All the writers are English but attitudes in Western Christendom show, at a cursory glance, the similarities one might expect from cultural and religious homogeneity. The selection was made to demonstrate both this unity of outlook and the various treatments of the theme of death. The conclusion is a summary of the evidence from Chapters I to IV for the fourteenth-century attitude to death and a brief comparison with a modern work on the subject.
- ItemOpen AccessThe ship in the sky(2019) Evans, Tracey Ellen; Irwin, RonaldThe sky’s grumbling. Layers of gray grinding above me the way teeth grind, angry and wanting, all nap long. Two boom-clap bangs and my eyes snap open to clouds thick as clay, metal-sheet lightening and thunder thumping close and heavy as fists. I grab the stone floor and I’m watching and listening, listening and watching and I’m hearing yelling and it’s my own heart yelling, and I realize this ain’t dreaming. This ain’t dreaming. I ease myself near the rock ledge, hanging there like a loose tooth when the ground rips apart, it clear splits thirty feet in front of me right through the Joneses' veggie patch. My gut leaps to my throat. Would be an awesome sight if it weren’t so terrifying. Air and water and fire and earth dancing into one, blasting the ground inches from the Joneses’ farmhouse splitting their flagpole, my eardrums just about splitting in the roar. I clasp on tight. Next thing, my legs are falling from my body, or my body’s falling from the rock and we’re sinking together, sliding down. Then silence. Earth shattering silence. A venomous pause. Nothing moves, not even my lungs. I grab at the ledge hanging, waiting, watching. Come on Bill. Get out of the house. Get the Missus and get the fuck out. The elements are hovering, brewing a soup so thick and dark a rich thick and dark soup. Triple decker boom and I’m rolling to the spine of the rock as it tilts and digs its feet in, crushing or protecting, as the sky breaks open with rain belting down. I crank my head towards the farmhouse and it’s sinking. Come on Bill and Betty. As the sky belts the earth belts my skull belts on the back of that blasted crushing protecting rock, the ground sinking further under the weight from above and rock falling, consciousness too, and then I’m dreaming of everything.
- ItemOpen AccessThe unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs(2022) Scott, Skye; Boswell, Barbara; Haarhoff, MandisaAlexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, through the portrayal of unexamined colonial discourse, Fuller continues to perpetuate a constructed notion of Africa. The publication of her first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, coincided with international media coverage of President Robert Mugabe's contested land redistribution programme and told a similar story of the loss of their family farm. Written from her home in Wyoming in the United States, Fuller's work forms part of a white expatriate culture that writes home to Africa from a different continent. Previous works have failed to address the theme of settler colonialism in literature specifically pertaining to the field of Southern African literature. This dissertation makes use of a postcolonial framework to examine Alexandra Fuller's work; Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Fuller's memoirs are used to explore the function of innocence, nostalgia and memory in postcolonial white writing, the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Africa and the tragedy of discourse that is still pervasive in the portrayal of colonial notions of Africa as a playground for disaffected Westerners. Fuller's writing forms part of a Zimbabwean post-independence body of work that absolves whiteness of complicity and a history of colonial violence. Fuller's memoirs ultimately do not settle on a definitive point about Zimbabwe and its history of colonial dispossession or herself and settler colonial family.
- ItemOpen AccessUNCAGING CICADAS: Lover, Beloved, and Reader in Contemporary Love Poetry(2022) Murie, Alexander; Anderson, PeterIn this thesis, I read a selection of North American contemporary poets – namely John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Robert Duncan, Craig Dworkin, Robert Kendall, Jackson Mac Low, Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback – in the context of the tradition of love poetry and the overarching critical discourses offered by Erik Gray's. The Art of Love Poetry, Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, and Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. I argue that the lover-poets, in these poems, attempt to overcome what Anne Carson calls the “inevitable […] boundary of flesh and self between [the beloved] and [the lover]” by placing the lover – ontologically and at times physically – in the beloved, then in turn placing the beloved in the lover, each internalizing their other. Additionally, I argue that the lover-poet integrates the reader into the circuit of desire, as subtly as the variable pronoun ‘you' and as brazenly as overt gestures that construe her as an actor in the text and in the affair between the lover and the beloved of the text. The lover-poet draws the reader into his amorous geometry – a triangle of lover, beloved and reader – and into a “dance in which everyone moves” (as Carson writes).