Browsing by Subject "English in Literature and Modernity"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Bestiaries the animal and the human in Mila Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
    (2013) Bedini, Daniella Cadiz; Clarkson, Carrol
    In his book, The Open (2004), Giorgio Agamben suggests that the border between the human and the animal passes "first of all as a mobile border within living man". At stake in the construction of this border is a division of the human and the animal into separate and homogenous groups, and subsequently a denial of a multiplicity of life forms and experience. This relates to what Derrida (2004) has deemed "the self-interested misrecognition of what is called the Animal in general", and is something other critics working in the field of animal studies have discussed. In this thesis I read Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace in line with Agamben's notion of the fluidity of the human-animal border. The first chapter of this dissertation, 'Behaving like Animals', offers a reading of the biblical tale of Genesis and of the numerous sexual encounters in the novels that complicate the assumption of shame as being 'proper to man'. The second chapter, "Alternative lives, Alternative Deaths", challenges the idea of Driepoot's death in Disgrace as being "euthanasia" and, moreover, examines the complexities of mourning the death of what Jeff McMahan has deemed "beings on the margins of life", which includes both humans and animals. In my analysis of these novels, I have borrowed from different, seemingly disconnected, critical discourses. In some cases, this has meant "inserting" the animal into these theories in places where the animal was not explicitly named. This has meant putting pressure on existing lines of enquiry. My multi-disciplinary approach to theorising animals, and our relations to and with them, suggests different avenues for research in the growing field of animal studies.
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    Beyond reason: revising the place of literature in theories of the uncanny
    (2016) Anderson, Wesley; Higgins, John
    The psychoanalytic fixation in seeking to validate 'the real' has long overlooked various key components in theories of the uncanny as they relate to literature. The goal of the present study is to reaffirm the roles of uncertainty, ambiguity, and the purposeful lack of closure in the experience of the uncanny, features which will come to form an integral part of a new theory.
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    The politics of visuality in Beloved and The Colour Purple
    (2017) Roberts, Abby; Young, Sandra
    The 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.
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    Responsible responding: the ethics of a literary criticism of the Other
    (2013) Maserow, Joshua; Clarkson, Carrol
    Derek Attridge’s insight that, ‘Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility towards the Other?’ (Attridge 2005: JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, xii), is conceptually rooted in Attridge’s tour de force on the theory of literary invention, The Singularity of Literature. In it he spins a complex, nuanced and powerful idea about the nature of literature as event in which the notion of otherness, or alterity, plays a primordial part in the advent of the literary. In this thesis, I develop a critique of the way in which a particular strand of literary criticism, which has blossomed in the field of Coetzee Studies, appropriates the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in its creation of an ethics-based, theme-reliant interpretive framework. While Derek Attridge, Mike Marais and Stefan Helgesson have each contributed greatly to this critical outlook, which I abbreviate as the ‘Levinasian Approach’, I choose to focus my research on the work produced by Attridge. My argument unfolds across two main sections. Section 1 contains a disquisition on pertinent aspects of Levinas’s ethical philosophy to literary aesthetics (Chapter 1). Section 2 consists of two chapters where the first (Chapter 2) is a study of the interface of Levinasian ethics with Attridge’s theory of literature in the event. There, I begin with an exposition of Attridge’s theory of literature, exploring its conceptual bearing on Levinas’s ethics. I make apparent the extent of his indebtedness to Levinas’s ethics by closely examining how and where, in the gestation of his theory, he borrows from Levinas’s ethical writings to develop a discourse on the nature of literature. This I follow up with a look at the nodes of divergence, unveiling the ways in which Attridge departs from Levinasian conceptions in his deployment of Levinasian terms. In conscripting the pseudo-phenomenological and transcendental ethics developed by Levinas into a hermeneutics of aesthetic evaluation and literary judgment, Attridge’s position diverges with undesirable consequence from Levinasian ethics. In the second chapter of Section 2 (Chapter 3) I reveal how Attridge’s method of textual analysis in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading goes against the grain of the theory of literary invention he elucidates in The Singularity of Literature. Furthermore, I argue that, in converting ethics into an applicative analytic for the audit of texts, with a view to exploring their literariness, he responds irresponsibly in Levinasian terms to Levinasian ethics. If his position is regarded as Levinasian, certain conceptual problems arise for his critical method. Should Levinas’s ethics be regarded as the source of Attridges’s notion of otherness and alterity, then Attridge’s selective appropriation is methodologically at odds with the source of its possibility, with Levinasian ethics.
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    Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights
    (2017) Kohler, Sophy; Samuelson, Margaret
    The Thousand and One Nights is often brushed aside as a manifestation of a long-ago past, its stories recast in orientalist tropes and scoured for clues to the secrets of foreign cultures. Yet, increasingly, scholars are engaging with the text in more complex ways, realising that to read it in this manner is to chain it to a context with which it was never entirely familiar. Born out of centuries of dissemination and cross-pollination, the Nights is better understood as a dynamic thing, a work produced in its movement through time and place. It therefore asks that we find a mode of reading suited to its restlessness, one that accounts for what, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski identifies as "the transtemporal liveliness of texts". Such a reading draws us towards a discussion of the text not simply as something that we can hold but as a phenomenon, as more thing than object. By looking at the text-as-thing alongside the things in the text, we can see the many ways in which the Nights can be considered what Marina Warner describes as a world of stories "lodged in goods" that are alive and sentient. Making use of Warner's insightful study of the text, Stranger Magic, together with Felski's literary reworking of Actor–Network Theory, this thesis explores the thing-culture of the Nights, looking at how the saturation of the text's historical and fictional worlds with objects, both worldly and otherworldly, reveals more than simply the artefacts of bygone eras. By recognising the agency of things, the thesis proposes, it is possible that we come closer to a method of reading that treats the text with neither reverence nor suspicion and, in doing so, reveal the ways in which the Nights is able to contribute to understandings of our own thing-culture and current literary praxes.
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    Symbolic masters/semiotic slaves : subjectivity and subjection in Atwood, with reference to The circle game and Two-headed poems
    (2008) Botha, Fourie
    This dissertation explores the construction of the subject via a relationship of power in two poem sequences, 'The circle game' and 'Two-headed poems', by Margaret Atwood. I argue that Atwood proposes a subject similar to the kind of subject found in psychoanalysis. Like the psychoanalytic subject, Atwood's subject is formed in relation to its other. This relation is essentially a power relation and can become unbalanced, forcing one of the two parties into a subjugated position. Atwood not only exposes these skewed relations of power, but also explores possible solutions for escaping or reconfiguring these relationships. The first chapter briefly discusses theories of the subject by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. I use Hegel's dialectic between the 'master' and 'bondsman', and subsequent psychoanalytic and postcolonial applications of it, to examine the construction of the subject in terms of an other in Chapter 2. Postcolonial map theory and Kristeva's ideas on the abject are used to verbalize the divisions, but also the interactions, between the subject and its other as well as possibilities of escape. Chapter 3 demonstrates these power relationships, and their expression in cartographic terms, in 'The circle game'. In Chapter 4, I show how processes analogous to the eruption of poetic language into the symbolic order are described in the poetry. Even though these processes do not provide a clear-cut solution to the position of the subjected, their presence signals the possibility of renegotiating unbalanced relationships of power.
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    Whose story is it anyway? The ethics of narration and the narration of ethics in Summertime and Die Sneeuslaper
    (2013) Holtzhausen, Janita
    This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind.