OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "English Language and Literature"

Browsing by Subject "English Language and Literature"

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"And everych cried 'What thing is that?'" : a reading of Chaucer's House of fame
(1992) Lamond, Murray
The thesis attempts to show the complexity of the literary challenge which Chaucer undertook in the House of Fame. Firstly, I establish a sense of the tradition of criticism inspired by the poem, and then show the ramifications of the choice of medium. The poem is a "dream vision", a genre which took the contentious truth-claims and unsettled status of dreams, and used it as the foundation for a poetics which concentrated on the relation of the conscious subject to truth. This is investigated in an extended metaphor, where the experience of the unconscious subject in a purely linguistic world is tested, and from the experiment, conclusions may be drawn concerning the human condition with regard to all knowledge. I briefly examine the divergent positions of the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose, situating Chaucer in the debt of both, but philosophically in the French camp. The House of Fame I see as a "deconstruction" of any position of certainty in rational or mystical epistemology, which marks out a secular sphere of influence for literature in the manner of Ovid. The second half of the thesis is largely a close reading of the poem itself, which attempts to trace the development of these "skeptical" ideas in literary form, showing how, by appealing to the whole European literary inheritance, the force of the argument is enhanced in subtlety, range and wit. Love, Nature, and Fame, the three topoi of the three books, are each in turn unsettled, as too are the three "ways of knowing" - perception, reason, and memory. The poem does not "end" in the traditional mode of closure largely because it has made such a notion an impossible ideal, beyond the reach of the unaided human mind.
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Archipelagic thinking in the Indian Ocean world : the story of 'Sindbad the Sailor' and Alan Villiers's Sons of Sindbad
(2016) Hofmeyr, Andrew James; Samuelson, M A
This project focuses on the travel literature produced through the Indian Ocean world of the dhow trade. It examines the medieval story of "Sindbad the Sailor and Sindbad the Porter" alongside the 20th century travel narrative Sons of Sindbad (1940) written by mariner and author Alan Villiers. Both texts engage with the ocean and the ways in which immersion in the watery world result in an uneasy sense of hybridization. In "Sindbad", the sailor's world is represented as a place of deep encounter that renders him indelibly changed and so sets up a paradox between home and away. His voyages and adventures, while often explored purely in terms of their fantastic value, depict an Indian Ocean world that is densely connected through trade and travel. Alan Villiers' narrative uses "Sindbad" as a trope and signifier for this world and through him seeks to rekindle the romance of the free sea and pure-sail that is encroached upon by maritime modernity. Villiers constructs himself as a citizen of the sea and so straddles an uneasy line between the Arab sailors and his own colonial affiliations. It is a position that means he is constantly narrating from a perspective that is simultaneously inside and out. This minor dissertation will look at the way in which travel narratives located in the Indian Ocean render the subjects foreign to themselves and how the sense of identity flux engendered through the tales shed light on and open new paths for enquiry, what I have called archipelagic thinking, focusing not on constructed borders but connectivity across time and between disparate locations.
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Art as craft in the writings of AS Byatt: a study of Byatt's use of devices of metafiction (intertext and autotext) to examine how women transgress the conventions of male-ordered society in their efforts to exercise their creativity and converse with the world
(2002) Rogers, Susan
This examination of how AS Byatt has used the central female characters of Possession (LaMotte) and Babel Tower (Frederica Potter) to explore the stifling effects of the institutions and conventions of male-ordered society on creative women, is undertaken in two parts. The first chapter considers the intertextual creation of Possession's LaMotte from the biography and canon of the American Victorian poet Emily Dickinson. Both the fictive and the real-life poets, possessed by a creative talent, frustrated by its lukewarm reception and disempowered by their inferior status, withdrew from society. The second chapter considers the commentary offered by autotext (extracts from the fantasy tales Babbletower and Flight North) on the emotional and intellectual development of Babel Tower's Frederica, who seeks to live by what she learns from reading and analysing literature. (Autotextual writing comments on LaMotte's story too, for the fairy tale 'The Glass Coffin' resonates within its framing text, Possession.) Elements of fairy tale in Frederica's story self-consciously highlight the novel's status as fiction, reminding readers that they, like Frederica, are a construction of what they read and experience. Nineteenth-century LaMotte withdraws from society with the financial co-operation and emotional support of a female companion, defying social pressure exerted on her to marry and produce children rather than poetry. This withdrawal grants her dignity and independence. However, a brief liaison with a married poet triggers a second withdrawal for patriarchal conditioning has taught her to regard her actions as transgression and she colludes with this judgement. This second withdrawal is destructive for it leaves her embittered and condemned to obscurity. Twentieth-century Frederica is enraged by the limitations against which she chafes as wife and mother. She abandons her husband and his home and establishes her emotional and financial independence. Frederica successfully defies convention because in her century restrictions have been eased on women's movements, actions and occupations. Byatt represents in both LaMotte and Frederica her view of her own art as craft diligently practised and essential to the emotional well-being of the artist. In her characters' lives and experience she explores her own fear that her gender might thwart her ambition, no matter how great her talent. An examination of Byatt's essays and interviews on the subject of her craft reveals her private imagery of the construction of a novel. She compares her art to the precise and exquisite craft of tapestry-weaving or of a spider spinning: it is pleasing and intricate. Images of spinning and sewing/weaving are evident in the work of both fictitious LaMotte and real-life Dickinson. In twentieth-century Frederica's life these images are given a new spin: with maturity and experience, Frederica perceives how her reading has led her to seek connection which she abhors. She subsequently learns to record her experiences, whether in memory or in writing, in self-contained layers so that they are ordered and preserved but not interwoven; this gives her a sense of freedom. She adopts a personal metaphor to describe this process: laminations. Thus these two novels are pervaded by Byatt's personal vision: art as craft.
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Articulating class : language and conflict in English literature from Gaskell to Tressell
(1992) James, Timothy John; Visser, Nick
Concentrating on English literary texts written between the 1830s and 1914 and which have the working class as their central focus, the thesis examines various ways in which class conflict inheres within the textual language, particularly as far as the representation of working-class speech is concerned. The study is made largely within V. N. Voloshinov's understanding of language.
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Aspects of style in the novels of Henry Fielding
(1990) Bock, Mary Stewart; Coetzee, John M
The prefatory essays in Fielding's two major novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones foreground his interest in the problems and challenges of the writing of fiction. In the narrative, he experiments with answers to the questions raised in these discursive sections. Analysis of style in these novels also shows a gradual development from the pervasive and self-reflexive irony and the interplay of stylistic modes that characterise the earlier novel to the more confident and increasingly serious authorial voice of the latter. Both Fielding's theoretical concerns and the development in his narrative style help to situate him in relation to eighteenth-century debates about language and the nature of fiction. This thesis attempts to show that appropriate stylistic analysis can reveal connections between the syntactic patterns in the text and the underlying assumptions and broader concerns of the writer. As the first chapter will indicate, the term 'stylistic analysis' covers widely divergent practices proceeding from equally divergent assumptions about the proper scope of stylistics. My a priori assumption is that the literary text is an instance of discourse, of language in use in a communicative situation. Since no single model of discourse analysis is adequate to describe all aspects of literary style, I have drawn from different analytical approaches to illuminate different aspects of Fielding's prose. For the analysis of the rhetorical and expressive values of his syntax, the most productive approach has been the 'functionalist' stylistics of by M.A.K. Halliday, complemented by Roman Jakobson's theory of the poetic function of language. But neither of these approaches is adequate to deal with the specific challenge to the analyst of language in the novel: the diversity of styles and registers that are available to the novelist. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of novelistic style as 'dialogical' or multi-voiced accommodates the diversity in Fielding's prose and affords insights into both the social-ideological resonances and the artistic function of the language of the texts.
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Aspects of time and narrative in the novels of J.M. Coetzee
(1997) Bruce, Alastair; Watson, Stephen
Building on the approaches of critics such as David Attwell, and starting from the premise that the concepts of time and narrative are inextricably linked, this thesis aims to show how J.M. Coetzee's fictional narratives are concerned with the effects of historical time on both the characters of the novels and on the novels themselves; that is, more generally ,speaking, on literature. The study analyses the novels paying attention to their juxtaposition of literature and history and the tension between these two discourses. Coetzee tries to establish the legitimacy of a fictional, artistic time and space opposed to the violence of historical time and space. In so doing, he reveals the ironic dependence of literature on history as well as the metaphysical and ethical need for the continuing presence of literature in history. The novels are examined in sequence, allowing for illumination of trends and developments in Coetzee' s fiction. The first chapter shows how Dusklands is concerned with breaking down, mainly through parody, the oppressive structures that Coetzee finds in historical time. The second and third, on In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians respectively, discuss how the novels oppose history thematically and formatically. The chapters on Life and Times of Michael K and Foe show characters escaping the restrictive terms of history, and how the novels establish a "fictional realm". The Age of Iron chapter examines more closely the authority of this realm, and notes that the novel issues a plea for the continuation of fictional time and its potential for liberation. The previous five novels all express, ironically enough, reservations about the possible dependence of art or literature on history. The Master of Petersburg, so the chapter argues, takes the trend to its logical conclusion and offers a somewhat ironic look at the ethics of fiction writing.
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Assuming the female part : a critique of discourses of bodily normalcy
(2006) Lever, Carla; Distiller, Natasha
In this thesis, I examine the concept that discourses which utilise a stable notion of womanhood inevitably exclude some by the very boundedness of their definitions. Such definitions are premised by a notion of gendered normativity, and are often implicit and unconsciously evoked. Principally, I addess the reductive conflation of womanhood with specific biological parts, a common rhetorical strategy I identify as a particularly problematic form of synecdoche. Although feminisms are often highly attuned to questions of social difference amongst women, I argue that, too often, this awareness is not extended to deconstructing notions of 'natural' physical female identity. This can, in part, be traced to an historical feminist need to argue a distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, in the face of partiarchal oppression. This separation has done much to forge a space for the legitimation of women's rights, as it diminished the centrality of the body to the issue of identity construction. However, is associating the acquired effects of culture solely with gendered identity, the concept of 'the female body' has unavoidably become regulative, singular and naturalised. I use poststructuralist theory to demonstrate that, even when authors explicitly seek to address feminist issues of women's exclusion and marginalisation within patriarchal discourse, their recouse to an identifiable 'woman' paradoxically ends up re-inscribing these very issues for some women. Indeed, this is because the notion of a universally identifiable, stable 'woman' is a fiction.
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At home in Fanon: Queer romance and mixed solidarities in contemporary African fiction
(2016) Smit, Sarah Johanna; Ouma, Christopher
Throughout the recent iterations of student activism that have gripped South African universities, Frantz Fanon has been continuously disinterred. But the figure of Fanon often remains both abstract and plural within its articulations - interpretations of his body of work performing sometimes only partial allegiances to the whole. This means that centralising a Fanon within political discourse stands to reproduce the losses implicated in his mythification, rather than to recover new critical imports in his work. In other words, the simplification of Fanonist rhetoric fails to deal with the "un-political" dimensions of Fanon. As such the more troubling of Fanon's work, namely Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is often left un-interrogated, while The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is read like a manifesto for purposive change. Black Skin, White Masks it seems is deemed "not radical enough" because of what appears to be a problematic preoccupation with 'love and understanding.' In the following intervention, I argue that what makes this centrality of 'love and understanding' so unpalatable to radical activists is a misappropriation of Fanon's formulation of desire. This is in part, I believe, one of the flaws of Fanon setting up the dynamic of racialised desire within cisgender, heteronormative models for potential interracial relationships - "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and "The Man of Colour and the White Woman." Hence, I consider what queering these relationships does to the way in which we read the political dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks, and whether or not this allays the allegory of revolutionary solidarity of the generic teleology of the heteronormative romance. The object of this thesis is to elucidate what possibilities for political solidarity are generated through the queered dynamic of interracial love, explored in the literature of the contemporary African diaspora. New African writers take seriously what Fanon recognised as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," by emptying out the category of the nation and engaging with the intersections of a trans-national, trans-gender and trans-racial politics. To demonstrate the ways in which a queer analysis of interracial romance might reimagine a raced identity politics, I analyse novels produced by members of the contemporary African diaspora, whose works deal with mixed race identity. Through my reading of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Yewande Omotoso's Bom Boy (2011), and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), I hope to demonstrate that contemporary African literature is concerned with the formation of an identity that estranges the category of blackness from itself through its entanglement with a queer identity politics.
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Behind the desk : encountering Shakespeare in South African education
(2014) Jonas, Siphokazi; Young, Sandra
While 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.
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Between life and death : HIV and AIDS and representation in South Africa
(2007) Thomas, Kylie; Higgins, John
This dissertation examines the relation between political and semiotic representation and takes as its focus the marginalized social position of people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa. It argues that this position can best be understood as a space between life and death. It engages with Michel Foucault's concept of "bio-power" to interrogate what kinds of subjects are produced when power seizes hold of life and, in particular, what becomes of subjectivity when the body is abandoned by power; and also draws on the work of cultural theorists Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler to consider how conditions of life in South Africa in the time of HIV and AIDS both articulate with and exceed the bio-political. The dissertation first presents a brief account of the history of the epidemic and government responses to it, and then goes on to analyse a series of visual and textual representations of people living with HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa.
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Beyond the inferno : literary representations of New York City before and after 9/11
(2010) Smith, Jared; Marx, Lesley
From its founding, New York City has served as the gateway to the New World and, as such, has been the impetus behind the American Dream. As the city grew in size and importance, though, so the levels of antagonism rose among its inhabitants, for, like any large-scale urban environment, it was filled with what Georg Simmel labels 'overwhelming social forces' (1950:410). These forces became even more relevant within the context of what Fredric Jameson calls the 'postmodern hyperspace' (1984:83) of urban society which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Thus, by focusing on the real-world example of New York, this dissertation examines how the dialectical negotiation between a postmodern city's form and its function has a profound impact on the identities of that city's inhabitants, producing alienating and antagonistic experiences of city life which, in turn, places increasing pressure on both the conception and perception of an individual's status within the boundaries of that cityscape. The terrorist attacks that occurred on 11 September 2001 functioned as yet another overwhelming force that greatly affected New York's inhabitants. The dedicated media coverage of the event effectively burned the image of a 'wounded' New York into people minds. This emotional imprinting occurred not only because of the horrifying destruction wrought upon the city, leading to the loss of the spectacle that was the World Trade Centre, but also because of the change that this destruction brought about in the mindset of everyone who watched those buildings fall, leading to the establishment of a 'before' and 'after' dialectic. Two literary texts that highlight this dialectic were chosen to provide the basis of this dissertation's analysis. These are Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). Written and set in 2000, Fury provides an insightful and provocative account of life in New York at the turn of the twenty-first century and, through a retrospective reading of this novel, one can identify its prescience in depicting a New York in which the escalating antagonism, both within and without the city, seems to herald impending disaster. Indeed, that disaster was the 9/11 attacks, which Falling Man takes as its subject, providing individualised, albeit 3 fictional, accounts of the trauma that was experienced by those who were in the towers and their families, as well as those who witnessed it. By offering an analysis of Rushdie and DeLillo's narrative strategies in these novels, specifically in light of Michel Foucault's theory of the heterotopia, Italo Calvino's conception of the 'infernal city' in his Invisible Cities (1974), and the work of key 9/11 theorists this dissertation will plot the trajectory of the 'before' and 'after' dialectic in order to ascertain how effectively these novels function as (re)presentations of the real-world city of New York.
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Bildung and the metaphor of growth in the novels of T. Hardy and D.H. Lawrence
(1987) Kerbel, Sorrel; Bertelsen, Eve
This dissertation explores aspects of the German Bildungsroman, several nineteenth century English versions, and Lawrence's revitalisation of a genre which had become unfashionable and almost moribund. It examines Jude the Obscure (1896) and three of Lawrence's novels in the light of a distinction between a Bildungsroman and an Entwicklungsroman, showing where Hardy and Lawrence merge generic tradition and individual predilection to modify the forms. Hardy is chosen for comparison and contrast with Lawrence, partly because of Lawrence's own critical interest as evidenced in "The Study of Thomas Hardy" (written concurrently with the Brangwen saga), and because Jude the Obscure represents the state of the Bildungsroman at the turn of the century. Chapter One describes specific narrative features of the Bildungsroman to arrive at a "schema" of Bildung, and differentiates between Bildung and Entwicklung. Though its scope is necessarily restricted, its aim is an awareness of the grid of conventions upon which and against which the individual work operates. Chapter Two offers Jude the Obscure as Bildungsroman. It argues that Hardy, with his "radical", "Meliorist" approach, deliberately questions and frustrates the tradition. Hardy refuses the socially acceptable reconciliation of the paradigm, and has lost the Romantic vision of Nature as recourse, a vision Lawrence abundantly retains. The metaphor of organic growth, a legacy of the English Romantics, is central to Lawrence's modification of the paradigm in Sons and Lovers, The .Rainbow and Women in Love. His fidelity to a sequential chronology is justified in terms of Entwicklung, a pattern of continuous growth, so that "form is content". Lawrentian questers belong to a Romantic elite of unique individuals who grow to fulfilment naturally, breaking out of their enclosures. Entwicklung is socially subversive, rejecting conventional social integration, questioning its assumption of the individual's helpless passivity, and transcending the limitations of class and birth. Though the phases of Bildung and choice of imagery are traditional, Lawrence's metamorphosis is highly original and Modernist in terms of sheer narrative experimentation and sensibility. And the traditionally "closed" ending of the paradigm is exchanged for open-ended ambivalence, not only a reflection of Lawrence's philosophy that art should never be contained, but itself echoing the instability and insecurity of the new age.
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Binarism and indeterminacy in the novels of Thomas Pynchor
(1984) Irlam, Shaun; Coetzee, John M
I attempt in this thesis, to graft together a close critical, and predominantly thematic, reading of Thomas Pynchon's novels with selected issues treated in the work of Jacques Derrida on philosophy and textuality, illustrating how this work demands the revision and interrogation of several major critical issues, concepts, dualisms and presuppositions. The thesis consists of an Introduction which sets forth a brief rationale for the graft described above, followed by a short and unavoidably inadequate synopsis of Derrida's work with a brief review and explication of those of his 'concepts' which play an important role in my reading of Pynchon's texts. The Introduction is succeeded by three lengthy chapters in which I discuss, more or less separately, each of Pynchon's three novels to date. These are V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49, (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and I discuss them in the order of their appearance, devoting a chapter to each. I attempt to treat different but related issues, preoccupations, themes and tropes in each of the novels to avoid repeating myself, engaging the apparatuses derived from Derrida's writing where deemed strategic and instructive. I suggest moreover, that several of the issues examined apropos the novel under consideration in any one chapter apply mutandis rnutandi to the other novels. Each chapter therefore to some extent conducts a reading of the novels which it does not treat directly. Finally, supervising these separate chapters is a sustained focus on the epistemology of binarism and digitalism, and the conceptual dualisms which structure and inform major portions of the thematic and rhetorical dimensions The thesis concludes with a Bibliography and a summary Epilogue which seeks to assess briefly the 'achievement' of Pynchon's writing.
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Black woman, you are on your own : images of black women in Staffrider short stories, 1978-1982
(1999) Gqola, Pumla Dineo; Sole, Kelwyn
This dissertation examines the dominant images of Black women presented in the first five years of Staffrider magazine. It limits itself mainly to the analysis of short stories written in the English language. Since most of the contributors were men, many of the stories analysed here are by male Writers. A few poems by Black women have been analysed in addition to the short stories. The thesis focuses on and answers the question of whether 'positive' characterisation of Black people, seen as central to Black Consciousness writing, includes women or not. The analyses take into account race, class and gender and are informed by the theories of womanism and Black feminism(s). As much of the literature shows an overt bias in favour of the ideology of Black Consciousness, the first chapter serves an introductory function. It concentrates on an examination of the ideology of Black Consciousness and an interrogation of the literature to which it gave rise. Briefly sketching the development of BC, it examines the nature of BC literature. This entails both an study of the characteristics of the literature as well as an examination of the place of Black women in Black Consciousness discourse and literature.

Browsing by Subject "English Language and Literature"

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