OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "Literary Studies"

Browsing by Subject "Literary Studies"

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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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Bessie Head : re-writing the romance : journalism, fiction (and gender)
(1997) Guldimann, Colette; Driver, Dorothy
This thesis examines the relationship between Bessie Head's work as a journalist during the late 1950s and two of her novels: the first written just after she had left formal journalism and the second a decade later. I claim, in this thesis, that early journalistic writing by Head, which has been critically ignored, and even dismissed, not only merits critical attention but, furthermore, that knowledge this work will yield new insights into Head's fictional writing for which she is famous. Between 1959 and 1960, before she left South Africa, Bessie Head wrote two weekly columns for children and teenagers, some book reviews and had a role in the production of "True Romance" stories for Home Post, a tabloid supplement to the Sunday newspaper Golden City Post. Head was involved in the production of these romances for over a year and I provide an analysis of the "True Romance" stories published in Home Post. I maintain that these romances, like all texts in popular romance genre (which I discuss) constructs the feminine in very particular ways. I locate this analysis within wider, but related, discussion about the representation of women in both Golden City Post and Drum magazine as they were both considered to be the authoritative newspapers representing black South African life in the 1950s. Head's columns, I claim, especially the one for teenagers, present constructions of the feminine, as well as the masculine, which are significantly at odds with the dominant representations of the feminine, and masculine, in the media I have mentioned, during the late 1950s. A close reading of the representations of gender which Head set up in this column, together with the book reviews she wrote, will give us new insight into her fictional work, particularly The Cardinals which is an early work written and set during this period but only published posthumously in 1993. Reading this novel against the background of the journalistic work and world Head was engaged in just before she wrote it will enable us to read its complexities, specifically those regarding gender and romance. I claim that Head also gave us what is probably the earliest gender perspective, and critique, of 1950s black journalism - a period generally considered to be a vibrant one for black journalism and writing in South Africa. In The Cardinals, which fictionally recreates the black journalistic milieu of the late 1950s in South Africa, Head suggests that black women journalists (and writers) found themselves facing a very different situation from black male journalists. Finally I suggest that with romance structure and the role which gender plays in the novel. Although critics have persistently read this novel as an idealistic, and unrealistic, romance with a happy ending, I suggest, in this thesis, that one can read the novel, in the light of Head's earlier work, as being a radical subversion of the romance.
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Character portrayal in three Icelandic sagas
(1996) Rogers, Eirlys Anne
This dissertation outlines the political and social organization of the Icelandic Commonwealth, and analyses the characters of Gunnlaug in Gunnlaugs saga; of Brodd-Helgi, Geitir, Bjami and Thorkel in Vápnfirŏinga saga and of Snorri in Eyrbyggja saga.
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Comfort factors, moral fantasy and social criticism in formulaic fiction : a study of literary formulas with particular reference to the 'hard-boiled' detective story
(1998) Roote, Christonie St Martin
The so-called 'hard-boiled' detective story is probably one of the most successful formulaic fictive patterns to be developed this century; and has been translated very effectively into popular film and television drama. Its founding fathers are normally deemed to be Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. A study of their works should provide a valuable insight into the structure of their patterns and how they are made to work to the public's satisfaction. After all, the one indisputable and verifiable matter in the whole business is that these sort of texts appeal to great numbers of people who read them because they enjoy reading them. Some of the interesting questions thus revolve around the issue of why these fictions are so well liked. However, a study of literary formulas assumes the necessity of demonstrating what those particular formulas are. There are three predominating structures which, to my mind, build this kind of fiction into its finished shape. Firstly, there are the comfort factors which offer the reader a sense of security. Secondly, there is their sense of moral fantasy which allows the reader to escape from the confines of their everyday lives. And thirdly, in the best of these works, there is some element of the new and/or the unconventional, often in the form of social and political criticism encapsulated within the safe formulas of the text. This adds the necessary spice to the life of the construct.
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Constructing activist identities in post-apartheid South Africa
(2013) Kelly, Claire; Foster, Don
With the understanding that every generation shares a generational consciousness, which locates individuals not only in a common geographical location, but also a historical one, this study uses social-constructionist accounts of collective identity, narrative inquiry and positioning theory to trace the moral careers of twenty-six young, middle-class activists, based in Cape Town, South Africa. In doing so it explores the relationship between their activism and identities, and how this relationship is contingent on the social and political context of post-apartheid South Africa. The first part of this study provides an account of the dynamics of political community formation amongst this group of activists, how they generate a shared understanding of the world, how they construct borders of belonging and influence, and how these borders sometimes mirror broader social cleavages in post-apartheid in South Africa. The second part examines how participants draw on two major narratives, or morality plays, with which to construct their activist identities. The most significant of these is ‘the Struggle’, the story of the struggle against apartheid. The other is the ‘the TAC Method’, the story of the Treatment Action Campaign’s struggle for the treatment of those living with HIV and AIDS.
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Constructing an alternative language: Historical revision in the fiction of Bessie Head
(1994) Kelly, Kristine N
Through consideration of Bessie Head's fiction and essays, the paper that follows investigates Head's use of fiction to challenge the hegemony of South African history, a history that fails to represent black South Africans except as "objects of abuse and exploitation" (Head, A Woman Alone 66). The absence of a subject position in history for black South Africans betokens a need for critical reevaluation of the structures and language of that history. History should document and create a people's identity; however, Head contends that South African historical discourse has obliterated the historical identity of black South Africans. The imaginative freedom that fiction allows provides Head with a radical means for reinscribing an alternative historical identity. Through four interrelated sections, then, this paper describes and evaluates the way in which Head's works challenge existing historical discourse by working through literature to establish an alternative set of historical structures. The Botswana land, offers Head, a space for experimentation with writing styles that evade reproducing an account of historical oppression and also for the practical construction of a new world. This construction includes agricultural reform that would give power over the forces of production to the workers of the land and which would in turn provide these workers with both economic and spiritual independence. The novels, however, display an incongruous duality wherein the construction of Head's new world is interfered with by the dominating voice of South African history. Hence, the subject and the problem of the novels becomes a conflict for the authority of history. Head's efforts towards constructing a new world also seek to implement women as a primary labor force in both material and creative production, thereby further challenging a history that has rendered women as sexual commodities. The Collector of Treasures offers a culmination of this conflict. Here, Head offers a strategy of narrative fragmentation interrelated with a dialogic, multi-voiced discourse that dismantles the single-voiced structure of a history determined by the politics of repression. Fiction offers a freedom of structure and thought unavailable to the historian; therefore fiction transgresses the boundaries created by a repressive history and is able to establish an original and self-sustaining historical world.
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Critical approaches to Soweto poetry : dilemmas in an emergent literature
(1989) Karassellos, Michael Anthony; Watson, Stephen
A review of contemporary South African and European critical approaches 'to "Soweto poetry" is undertaken to evaluate their efficacy in addressing the diverse and complex dynamics evident in the poetry. A wide selection of poetry from the 1970's and early 1980's is used to argue that none of the critical models provide an adequate methodology free from both pseudo-cultural or ideological assumptions, and "reader-grid"(imposition of external categories upon the poems).From this point of entry, three groups of critics with similar approaches are assessed in relation to Soweto poetry. The second chapter illustrates the deficiency in critical method- ology of the first group of critics, who rely on a politicizing approach. Their critique presupposes a coherent shift in the nature of Black Consciousness poetry in the 1970's, which is shown to be vague and problematic, especially when they attempt to categorize Soweto poetry into "consistently thematic" divisions. In the third chapter, it is argued that ideological approaches to Soweto poetry are impressionistic assessments that depend heavily on the subordination of aesthetic determinants to materialistic concerns. The critics in this second group draw a dubious distinction between bourgeois and "worker poetry" and ignore the inter- play between the two styles. Pluralized mergings within other epistemological spectrums are also ignored, showing an obsessive materialist bias. The fourth chapter examines the linguistic approach of the third group of critics. It is argued that they evaluate the poetry in terms of a defined critical terminology which assumes an established set of evaluative criteria exist. This is seen to be empiricist and deficient in wider social concerns. In the final chapter, it is submitted that each of the critical approaches examined foregrounds its own methodology, often ignoring the cohabitation of different systems of thought. In conclusion it is argued that a critical approach can only aspire to the formulation of a "black aesthetic" if it traces the mosaic of cultural borrowings, detours and connections that permeate Soweto poetry. Michel Serres, with his post-deconstructionist "approach", is presented as the closest aspirant. Bibliography: pages 117-123.
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A deliberate resurrection of matter : a transhumanist vision (Postmodern Science; the Deathly Grammar of word and Consciousness)
(1995) Gebhardt, Hartwin
Section 1 will be a mostly descriptive engagement with the concept of 'post modern science', and will thus both quote and interpret scientific debate extensively. Although 'chaos' has been constituted as a formal discipline only after the publication of Gravity's Rainbow (GR), it has been included in the overview of postmodern science since it has both direct and indirect bearing on issues included within the scope of the thesis. Section 2 will deal with the use of postmodern science, and the 'scientific discourse' in general, within philosophical and artistic / literary activity. Special attention will be given to both limits and implications of this use. Section 2 will also develop the link with GR and Pynchcon's metaphorical use of the scientific discourse. Section 3 will deal more specifically with GR and will analyze various themes and topics in the light of the preceding discussion in Sections 1 and 2. Section 4 will focus on the broader connotations of GR and on possible avenues of 'escape' from cultural, economic, political and, even more elementary, linguistic processes and systems, in both definition and oppression of (and via) 'self.
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Detective/text/critic
(1994) Sorfa, David; Marx, Lesley
This thesis grapples with the curious relationship of the metaphors of detection and reading. Detective fiction is often seen as an enactment of reading, while the literary critic is often described in terms of detection, investigation and interrogation. The Introductory section discusses the implications that such a self-reflexive and reflecting involvement has for narrative, the self, logic and the very institution of academic literary criticism itself. The notion of a detective genre, and genre-criticism in general, is put into question by analysing the legal and coercive nature of a literary concept that styles itself as objective, scientific and historical. The power of the critic to construct genre is likened to the legal capacity of the detective and a polemical call is made to re-examine the academy's resulting claims of authority. An analysis of the crime of incest in two films, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Jack Nicholeson's The Two Jakes, is used to further problematise the notion of the law. Claude Levi-Strauss' work on kinship structures helps to point to the aporetic and contradictory position that incest can be seen to occupy in the formation of human society. Criminal anthropology provides an interesting frame for this discussion. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is used to explore the fundamental uncertainty in which the detective/reader necessarily finds herself. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny is introduced to account for the interpreter's state of unease in the face of ambiguity. Finally, a literary essay, Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", is read rather as a form of detective story than as a factual analysis, whether this experiment is successful will be up to the reader. The overriding claim of this thesis is that there is no such thing as perception.
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An examination of the politico-literary strategies of some Third World writers
(1994) Williams, Keith Christopher
In this study I attempted to examine the politico-literary strategies of some "Third World" writers. I used the Marxian notions of class and ideology in order to investigate how writers' biographies determined their literary interpretations. Basic writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and the theoretical work of Janet Wolff were used in this respect. I also used the Marxian concept of Historical Materialism in order to distinguish progressive interpretations from reactionary ones. The critical writing of Ernst Fischer was used in order to show that there was no unbridgeable gap between theoretical work in the "Third World" and the development of the aesthetic in Europe. The notion of socialist realism was of particular interest here. Notions of neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism were examined in order to set the context in which "Third World" authors write. The use of the mode of realism by these authors was investigated. The work of Hayden White was used to establish the fact that versions of history depend upon an author's moral purpose. The link was made between authors' moral purposes, their ideologies and their literary strategies. Literary analysis of some works by "Third World" authors was undertaken in order to see whether or not the authors succeeded in their attempts to give progressive interpretations of their historical contexts. Three "Third World" novels, that is, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood, Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude were examined in this regard. It was finally concluded that literary strategies have a material basis which is founded on the authors' life experiences and the historical context in which they write. This material bas is to the creative act is proposed as a way out of the labyrinth of textuality to which a "deconstructionalist" approach leads the critic.
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Exploding spaces : present and future urban spaces cinematically considered
(1998) Rijsdijk, Ian-Malcolm; Marx, Lesley
This study seeks to understand the visual dynamics of contemporary science fiction cities in film by exploring a number of diverse architectural and cinematic influences. The argument is initiated through a consideration of utopianism and science fiction, before moving onto specific architectural analysis focused on utopian plans from the modernist period, and the growth of New York during the 1920s. Through a brief reading of German Expressionist Cinema in Chapter 3, the spatial and architectural groundwork is laid for the analysis of several films in Chapters 4-6: Disclosure, Blade Runner, Selen, The Devil's Advocate, 12 Monkeys and The Fifth Element. (While not all the films would be considered as science fiction, those non-science fiction films offer provocative readings of the city as a whole). Within the discussion of these films, the paradigmatic nature of New York and Los Angeles is also analyzed. The author finds that the central thesis holds, though discussion of other contemporary films not dealt with here could produce an alternative interpretation. Specifically, the work of Edward Soja and Michel Foucault provide fruitful lines of examination through an engagement with the spatiality of postmodernism, though postmodernism is not analyzed in itself. The dissertation aims to have current application, in terms of the recent release of some of the films, but is also written with the aim of future expansion, stressing the design aspect of contemporary film.
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The expressionist debate in the light of the concerns of postmodernity : Lukacs, Brecht, Lyotard and Habermas
(1996) Fischer, Bettina; Pakendorf, Gunther
This dissertation investigates the debate between Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, known as the Expressionist Debate and the controversy between Jean-Francais Lyotard and Juergen Habermas. which took place in the 1980s. The two debates. both of which took place among writers of the Left are juxtaposed in order to shed more light on the issues at stake in the Expressionist Debate when looked at in the light of postmodern concerns. The dissertation is based on selected texts by each of the four writers. Bibliography: pages 82-85.
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The female quest in the novels of Alice Walker
(1987) Miles, Lesley Margaret Pears; Driver, Dorothy; McCormick, Kay
This study is an examination of the development of the quest motif in Alice Walker's novels, from a male quest in the first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, to the female quests which supersede it in the two later novels, Meridian and The Color Purple. In this analysis, brief reference is made to Walker's poetry, essays, and short stories, as well as to texts by black male writers and other Afro-American women writers.
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Garciá Márquez, magic realism and language as material practice
(1994) Moolla, F Fiona
In this essay I examine the political implications of the shifts in definition of the term, "magic realism". Magic realism as it was originally employed in the Latin-American context signified a concept different to what it is currently held to suggest in metropolitan literary discourse. Magic realism in the first world has come to be regarded as a third world reflection of its own cultural dominant, postmodernism, without an acknowledgement of the alternative material realities which inform it. I investigate these ideas through an analysis of the work of two novelists, namely, the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the American, John Barth. In a well-known essay titled "The Literature of Replenishment", Barth names Garcia Marquez as the foremost postmodern writer. This is deceptive, I argue, since although in the essay Barth presents postmodernist fiction as a political advance on the earlier styles of realism and modernism, his own fictional practice contradicts his claim. While in the essay Barth presents postmodernism as politically significant by virtue of its "democratic impulse", his novel, Chimera, seeks to avoid the political through a flawed understanding of textuality. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude stands in stark contrast with Chimera since it underscores the political consideration central to discourse through stressing the text's material, historical context. This distinction between the two novels is brought to light particularly through the incremental differences in their use of the techniques of "narrative circularity" and repetition. I argue, furthermore, that Garcia Marquez's emphasis on language as a material practice is, at least in part, owing to the specifics of the style of magic realism. While postmodernist fiction, one of the cultural effects of an advanced capitalism, may slide ineluctably into notions of pure textuality, magic realism, constituted as it is at the interface of pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, compels an acknowledgement of the material world.
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A gaze of one's own : feminist film theory, with application to Klute
(1994) Hicks, Pamela Jane; Higgins, John
This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute.
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Gothic urbanism in contemporary African fiction
(2016) Hugo, Esthie; Samuelson, Meg; Ouma, Christopher
This project surveys representations of the African city in contemporary Nigerian and South African narratives by focusing on how they employ Gothic techniques as a means of drawing the African urban landscape into being. The texts that comprise my objects of study are South African author Henrietta Rose-Innes's Nineveh (2011), which takes as its setting contemporary Cape Town; Lagoon (2014) by American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, who sets her tale in present-day Lagos; and Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, another South African author who locates her narrative in a near-future version of Johannesburg. I find that these fictions are bound by a shared investment in mobilising the apparatus of the Gothic genre to provide readers with a unique imagining of contemporary African urbanity. I argue that the Gothic urbanism which these texts unfold enables the ascendance of generative, anti-dualist modes of reading the contemporary African city that are simultaneously real and imagined, old and new, global and local, dark and light - modes that perform as much a discourse of the past as a dialogue on the future. The study concludes by making some reflections on the future-visions that these Gothic urban-texts elicit, imaginings that I argue engender useful reflection on the relationship between culture and environment, and thus prompt the contemporary reader to consider the global future - and, as such, situate Africa at the forefront of planetary discourse. I suggest that Nineveh, Lagoon and Zoo City produce not simply a Gothic envisioning of Africa's metropolitan centres, but also a budding Gothic aesthetic of the African Anthropocene. In contrast to the 1980's tradition of Gothic writing in Africa, these novels are opening up into the twenty-first century to reflect on the future of the African city - but also on the futures that lie beyond the urban, beyond culture, beyond the human.
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The grotesque in the works of Federico Fellini and Angela Carter
(1997) O'Gara, Maura Rayne; Bertelsen, Eve
Chapter one of this thesis attempts to explicate and analyze the controversy that has historically surrounded the grotesque. Contention over the grotesque has existed since the earliest known discourses on the subject by Horace and Vitruvius. The indeterminacy and paradoxical nature of the grotesque, which disturbed these men of antiquity, has continued to generate debate among modern theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser whose ideas serve as touchstones throughout this work. Understandably, theorists, who strive to create systems of ideas which attempt to explain and define phenomena, are drawn to the grotesque. However, they are inevitably placed in the paradoxical position of trying to categorize something which ultimately subverts the conventional logic which underlies that process. Furthermore, the standards of mimesis and decorum, from which the grotesque gets its disruptive force, are subject to society. Societies provide the different conventions and assumptions that determine the form of the grotesque. Therefore, the grotesque will always have to be approached in its historically specific contexts of production and reception. What becomes apparent in analysing the grotesque is that attitudes toward its indeterminacy and paradoxical nature, which transgress the monologic binaries and implied hierarchies of Western thought, reflect the position of the observer or producer of the grotesque. If one espouses the cause of the low, as does Balch tin, then the indeterminacy and paradox of the grotesque provides an egalitarian possibility for the marginalized. If one stands with the status quo, as does Kayser, the transgressing of the definitions and distinctions which support the status quo is experienced as frightening and sinister (Harpham, 73). The differences noted between Kayser and Balch tin as observers of the grotesque may also be made between Federico Fellini and Angela Carter as producers of grotesque texts. The following two chapters of the thesis explore how the grotesque is used in Fellini's films (chapter two) and Carter's novels (chapter three). Carter, like Bakhtin, celebrates the grotesque as a means of empowerment, particularly for women and her work seems to employ the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque. Fellini's films also use images of carnival, but Fellini, like Kayser, sees the grotesque as an isolating aspect of the human condition. Fellini uses the grotesque only to show humanity's alienation from a knowable world, whereas Carter uses it to demonstrate the possibilities of a totally new one. Carter appears to take the Fellinian, Kayserian, negative attitude towards the grotesque and turn it around for her feminist cause. She utilizes the emancipatory aspect of the grotesque inherent in its denial of hierarchy without, however, idealizing it as Bakhtin appears to. She is well aware that carnivals, like her novels, are author(ized). In analyzing the continuum of Fellini's and Carter's works, both artists show an increased dependence on the use of the grotesque combined with postmodern strategies to support their intentions. However, the continuum of Fellini's oeuvre suggests the development of a modernist approach which attempts closure, but faced with the impossibility of final determinacy, turns to the quagmire of simulacra where no meaning is possible. Carter, on the other hand, increasingly uses the grotesque and postmodern strategies not only to reveal and deconstruct oppressive representations, but to allow agency for the reconstruction of new subjectivities. As this thesis will demonstrate, the grotesque's indeterminacy may provide a way to understand "reality" or the means to construct a better one.
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Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben und D.F. Malherbe's Hans-die-skipper : ein Vergleich
(1990) Bertelsmann, Richard; Pakendorf, Gunther; Horn, Peter
Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855) and D. F. Malherbe's Hans-die-Skipper (1929) can both be read as reactions to early industrial capitalism, although neither text refers directly to this phenomenon. This dissertation attempts to show that both novels display a similar, ambivalent attitude, whilst defending the "logic of the market" against proponents of the moribund semi-feudal system, they pre-empt the moral indifference of the market by positing a "new" value in absolute terms. In either case, this value is "industry", in both the economical and the moral sense of the term. This aspect of both texts is analysed in terms of the literary theory of Peter V. Zima. On closer inspection, it is found that both authors attribute the moral value of "industry" exclusively to one social group, namely the group whose interests they hope to advance. In Freytag' s case, this is the conservative, pre-industrial German bourgeoisie; in Malherbe's case, the impoverished, Afrikaans-speaking rural population of the early 20th century. However, in translating their "ideological projects" into a literary "figuration" (in the sense of Pierre Macherey), both authors encounter certain problems, which only appear in the "absences" and the "silences" of their texts. These are analyzed in terms of the literary theory of Pierre Macherey. Finally, in both texts, the moral value of "industry", and the social hierarchy established in its name, are subliminally or temporarily threatened by the "pleasure principle". This aspect is analyzed- in terms of Klaus Theweleit's findings gained from "pre-fascist" texts of the early 20th century.
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Guy Butler and South African culture
(1989) Williams, Elaine; Visser, Nick
This paper looks at Guy Butler's theories about English South Africans and the English language. I have outlined his reputation as a critical thinker, poet and scholar, with a view to understanding the role he has played as an individual in South African cultural politics. I have also tried to trace some of the social roots and implications of the ideas he puts forward and the social purposes these serve. These have been investigated from a 'political' and sociological perspective. I have concentrated on his socio-political discourses as they have appeared in conference papers, journal articles and newspaper articles and the media response to the ideas has also been analysed. Butler's poetry and more properly literary work is not a direct concern of this paper and is not given extensive attention. I have concluded that Butler's work is an interpretation of South African reality which serves the purpose of promoting a set of mythical goals and purposes for English South Africans based on the founding myth of the 1820 settlers in the Eastern Cape.
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The healing power : mythology as medicine in contemporary American Indian literature
(1998) Kendall, George Henry; Marx, Lesley
This study explores the symptoms of alienation witnessed in Indian characters and the healing they achieve through myth in three contemporary American Indian novels. In James Welch's historical novel, Fools Crow, I explore the methods through which Welch tells the story of Fools Crow. I draw comparisons between oppositions such as oral and written language, oral and written history, and history and narrative. I examine the ideas of many theorists, including Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy and Hayden White's inquiry into historiography in Tropics of DiscouT'Se. My conclusions suggest that myth is the foundation of history and that Welch effectively uses myth to rehabilitate Fools Crow. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony presents its main character, Tayo, as alienated. He operates in a confusing world of dualities whereby the hegemonic culture brutalizes a feminine universe, and the counter-culture embraces a feminine universe. This study of Ceremony necessitates exploring the differences between Indian and Euro-American perceptions of landscape. Greta Gaard's studies on ecofeminism and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality help to focus the theories v presented in this chapter. In addition, I consider the opposition between European patriarchal and American Indian matriarchal cultures, a difference that may affect the way the two cultures perceive the landscape. Finally I look at the Laguna captivity narrative that heals Tayo and compare the Laguna captivity genre to Euro-American captivity tales. The juxtaposition of cultural captivity narrative types reveals further differences in Laguna and Euro-American perceptions of the land. Annette Kolodny's theories on landscape and feminism prove useful in focusing my conclusions. N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child explores the parameters of representation and struggles with the question of how an Indian author can effectively describe the condition of an alienated American Indian to an audience who is, for the most part, Euro-American. This novel ties together many of the themes explored in Fools Crow and Ceremony. Momaday shows myth as originating in oral language and oral language as invented by vision: The story's main character, Set, has to overcome his alienation by understanding the origin of a myth which exists in his 'racial memory.' As an Indian, Set must discover the importance of non-textual spatiality and not the spaces contained within and influenced by written texts such as the very one Momaday creates to depict this character. The term non-textual spatiality refers to the imaginative space created by oral language and myth and the notion of non-textual spatiality opens a path for Set's healing. W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory and Nelson Goodman's Languages of A rt are the main critical studies I use to amplify theories that grow out of The Ancient Child.