OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "Literature"

Browsing by Subject "Literature"

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A soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency
(2022) Smith, Robert Alex; Higgins, John
This thesis has the principle aim of providing a critical reading of the work of Lionel Abrahams, intending to provide the first serious scholarly interpretation of his thought. The argument that it purses is that what is at stake in his work is a thinking through the state of emergency. The state of emergency, however, is not approached as the formal legal periods in South African history under apartheid. Instead, following the insights of the Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it treats the legal state of emergency as the singular apparatus of the governing metaphysical paradigm that underpins modernity and its colonial instantiations. It adopts Agamben's notion of the ban as the paradigm for this metaphysic, using this as an entry point to understand Abrahams' participation in the debates of literature and the status of art in South Africa under apartheid. Throughout this study, the status of art is extended as an allegory for the status of life more generally. The movement is always the same: something is divided, with one element being excluded as illegitimate, and precisely through this exclusion is included in the other as its foundation. In sphere of art, the separation is between prose and poetry, commitment and autonomy, black and white art, with each working as the negative foundation of the latter. This too holds for notions of citizenship, where a line of distinction is drawn between the Bantu and the European, with the former's exclusion from the metropole serving as the foundation of the rights of the latter. So too for humanity, which is split into the distinct races, each of whose identity is the negation and the distorted image of the other. Having established the ban as the operative structure that defines the state of emergency, the study then turns to Abrahams first novel, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1976), as well as several collections of poetry with a specific task: interrogating strategies of its overcoming. By taking the ban as being primarily a structure of relation (between language and things, the subject and the other, as well as the subject's relation to their own capacity for action), the study concludes with an examination of two principle and interrelated themes in Abrahams' work: community and the literary act; or, put differently, what is the principle that founds and sustains both literature and community? Through a close reading of his fictional and poetic work, this thesis will argue that it is Agamben's notion of inoperativity, which is elaborated on most notably in the essay “What Is the Act of Creation?”, which resides at the heart of and is the key to understanding Abrahams' thought.
Open Access
“Brightly Colored Magic and Weird Worlds”: Sylvia Plath’s Creation of Personae Through Her Visual Poetics
(2019) Sholto-Douglas, Alice; Young, Sandra; Twidle, Hedley
In this dissertation, I extend existing acknowledgments of the impact of Sylvia Plath’s visual arts training on her writing in order to argue that her painterly sensibilities are central to her character construction. Specifically, I contend that Plath draws upon a set of visual techniques, which I categorise as hallucinations, mental images, dreams, blurriness, and visual-to-verbal re-inscription. The ability to control subjective experience through the imagination, a philosophy Plath discusses in her journals, acts as a framework for her narratives, and visual techniques become, for Plath’s personae, a method of manipulating their experiences through a blurring of the divide between individual imagination and subjective reality. Plath’s visual techniques further function to represent her personae’s psychic interiority in ways that not only illustrate the limits to expression of the traditionally literary but also offer a means of overcoming these limits through an alternative system of meaning-making. Thus, her personae’s agency exists at the level of form, through self representation that is not stymied by the limitations of the written word, as well as at the level of narrative, through her personae’s control of experience. Moreover, because these visual techniques appear frequently in narratives that are preoccupied with a gendered power dynamic, I contend that we should understand Plath’s moments of resistance to textual tradition as enabling her personae’s escape from patriarchal limitations to freedom and selfexpression. While this recognition of the significance of Plath’s visual techniques should not necessarily constitute a panacea to the constraints of traditional language, it does offer a new way of reading Plath which acknowledges her painterly sensibilities as crucial to the way in which she gives her personae agency and writes back to her literary forefathers.
Open Access
Denise Brahimi 'Nadine Gordimer la femme, la politique et le roman' : traduction et activités traduisantes
(2006) Shapiro, Cara; Everson, Vanessa
The nature of the translation process, that is, what occurs in the translator's mind when attempting to translate thoughts and ideas from one language to another, remains an enigma. The focus of this dissertation falls within the relatively unexplored field of "process-orientated descriptive translation studies (DTS)" as defined by Holmes (1972). This dissertation aims to contribute to a greater understanding of translation by analysing a number of cultural, linguistic and other difficulties encountered by the translator while translating a French text into English.
Open Access
Die Bemiddelaars met middelvingers: n' studie oor die verhoudiing tussen mag en satire
(2019) Vermaak, Johannes; Hambidge, Joan
Satire and power are inseparably interconnected. This study investigates satire and power as contextually informed by their socio-political milieu. The origins of satire, both etymologically and as genre, constitute the first section. This is followed by a description of the primary aims of satire. The focus is on three contrasting mediums of era-specific satirical delivery, namely: 1) Etienne Leroux’s satirical novels within the Apartheid era; 2) Bitterkomix and the impact of the satirical image in postApartheid South Africa; and 3) multimedia satire in the 21st century. Shifts in power, moral codes and satirical targets are analysed and deconstructed within the context of each timeframe. Considering the reconceptualisation of traditional power dynamics with regard to gender and identity within a post-colonial context, the question arises: What is the future of satire?
Open Access
Fractious Form: The Trans/Mutable Post-Apartheid Novel
(2008) Barris, Ken; Cooper, Brenda
The question which I explore is to what degree, and in what way, the paradigm of anti-apartheid literature gives way to its post-apartheid successor. More particularly, I explore how post-apartheid South African novels perpetuate, displace or transmute the narrative forms and conventions characteristic of anti-apartheid writing. I therefore read the forms and conventions in certain post-apartheid novels through the lens of anti-apartheid discourse, in particular its demand for politically engaged realism, tracing continuity and change. I argue that The Good Doctor (2003) by Damon Galgut and Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws (2004) reiterate anti-apartheid conventions through devices that become anachronistic, in that they reproduce antiapartheid literary dynamics without adaptation to the post-apartheid conditions represented or implied in these texts. Formal reinvention, however, is evident in the following novels. In The Restless Supermarket (2002), Ivan Vladislavi displaces political engagement from narrative form into the speech acts of his narrator. This text thereby stages a lexical meditation that displaces the typical realist sequence of symptomatic events. Despite this innovation, there are continuities between his work and the early writing of J.M. Coetzee, which suggest that Coetzee anticipated characteristic post-apartheid narrative strategies ahead of their time. Further, the innovative magic realist forms of Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) engage with crises of transition so dire that death becomes their central metaphor. Both writers introduce the device of orature as assertions of African identity. However, Mda counterposes orature against death, injecting through it a humanising principle. In Mpe&acirc;s novel, by contrast, orature acquires a murderous agency. I trace variants of what I term "fractured form", namely form that is duplicitous, or otherwise dualistic, through a further group of novels. My premise is that the social fracture represented as content scripts the formal fracture/fractiousness in their narrative forms. An attendant property is to disrupt nationalist discourse in its dominant post-apartheid manifestation, namely the rainbow nation mythos. The texts in this group are Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee, David's Story (2000) by Z Wicomb, Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), and What Kind of Child (Barris 2006). In conclusion, the central question to which I attend has been raised by Michael Green (1997: 7), namely how a body of texts generated within the episteme of anti-apartheid can be meaningfully related to the literary paradigm that replaces it. I find that in the collective formal inventions, fractures and displacements demonstrated in this thesis, an emergent post-apartheid episteme becomes discernable.
Open Access
Grenzüberschreitungen : Eine untersuchung ausgewählter Novellen Hans Grimms im Zusammenhang mit der kolonialen Grenzproblematik
(2006) Kaut, Nadja; Pakendorf, Gunther
The focus of this dissertation is the concept of liminality within selected novellas of the German colonial author Hans Grimm (1875-1959). Boundaries and frontiers are an omnipresent key issue within colonial literature. Within the postcolonial German literary studies ﬁeld, however, liminality has so far been given only very little interest, although it is an essential tool in elaborating our understanding not only of the colonial ideology and the colonial discourse, but also of society in general. The methodology used in this dissertation is derived from a postcolonial paradigm. Within the globalization tendencies of the 21st century the postcolonial discourse is characterized by the ﬂuidity and questioning of boundaries. Postcolonial and post-modern theorists have designated the identity formation with expressions like "hybridity" (Homi K. Bhabha) and "fragmentation" (Stuart Hall). Studies have shown that every human contact inﬂuences identity formation. Every exchange, every dialectic interaction between the heterogeneous "other" and "self" leads to new, complex and hybrid identities. Postcolonial and post-modern concepts are a signiﬁcant tool in understanding the colonial obsession with boundaries. Besides an understanding of the postcolonial discourse, an overview of the particularly complex concept of the German word "die Grenze," the boundary, is vital with regard to literary analysis. This literary study draws attention to gender, race as well as geographical boundaries within Grimm’s writings. In his novellas these boundaries are explored, undermined and underpinned at the same time. Any recognition of the "other," any hybridisation jeopardizes the colonial power, and calls for the constant reinforcement of the boundaries. The novellas reveal that any repressive and totalitarian boundary settings leave no space for any other aspirations, apart from power. That is the dilemma Grimm’s ﬁctional characters have to deal with. The colonial enterprise is not compatible with personal fulﬁlment and the human condition itself, which is the reason why most of the characters are doomed to failure in the colony.
Open Access
Haram Means Forbidden
(2023) Charles, Zubayr; Coovadia, Imraan
The thesis titled ‘Haram Means It's Forbidden' primary deals with the intersectionality of the religion of Islam and Homosexuality within a South African setting. The main narrative that arises within the thesis is the notion of “Can one be homosexual and Muslim?” In Islam homosexuality is known as haram (forbidden) and being gay is strongly frowned upon and believed to send one to hell. Many homosexual Muslim men live their lives filled with mental health issues, stemming from the idea of not being accepted by God, and the communities that they belong to. In many modern Islamic communities, men that identify as homosexual are still ostracised and ridiculed, and this thesis provides insight into the mind and life of a character struggling to find balance between religion and sexuality. This thesis centres the protagonist, Muhammad Gilbert, recounting his initial experience experimenting with his sexuality. He thereafter experiences a toxic relationship – which many young gay men experience. Furthermore, Muhammad has a co-dependent relationship with his mother, which the thesis explores. Through the character of Muhammad Gilbert, the thesis provides a much-needed narrative that exhibits the life of a gay Muslim subculture prevalent in a Cape Coloured community. There are less than twenty novels around the world that with the specific topic of the intersectionality of the religion of Islam and Homosexuality, and out of those twenty stories, none have a South African setting, despite there being approximately 600 000 Muslims living in South Africa. With this thesis, I hope to start a much-needed conversation surrounding the treatment of homosexual men, and others identifying with the LGBTQ+ spectrum, within Muslim Communities. It is evident that there is still a vast change that needs to occur within the mindsets of Muslims that justify their hatred towards the LGBTQ+ community because of religion.
Open Access
How to build a home for the end of the World
(2020) Shinners, Keely; Coovadia, Imraan
How To Build a Home for the End of the World is a magical realist dystopian road trip novel by Keely Shinners. Donny is a carpenter who renovates houses nobody lives in. His daughter, Mary-Beth, is hell-bent on donating her organs to her chronically ill ex-girlfriend, Aida. Together, they go on a road trip across a waterless American wasteland, populated by a peculiar cast of angels and ghosts, revolutionaries and academics, performance artists and desert hippies. Formulated as a case history of post apocalyptic times, How To Build a Home for the End of the World investigates the ways in which people understand memory, healing, and redemption in the throes of of ever-unraveling crisis.
Open Access
H i kinematics, mass distribution and star formation threshold in NGC 6822, using the SKA pathfinder KAT-7
(2017) Namumba, B; Carignan, C; Passmoor, S; de Blok, W J G
We present high sensitivity H I observations of NGC 6822, obtained with the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7). We study the kinematics, the mass distribution and the star formation thresholds. The KAT-7 short baselines and low system temperature make it sensitive to large-scale, low surface brightness emission. The observations detected ∼ 23 per cent more flux than previous Australian Telescope Compact Array observations. We fit a tilted ring model to the H I velocity field to derive the rotation curve (RC). The KAT-7 observations allow the measurement of the rotation curve of NGC 6822 out to 5.8 kpc, ∼1 kpc further than existing measurements. NGC 6822 is seen to be dark matter dominated at all radii. The observationally motivated pseudo-isothermal dark matter (DM) halo model reproduces well the observed RC while the Navarro Frank-White DM model gives a poor fit to the data. We find the best-fitting mass-to-light ratio (M/L) of 0.12 ± 0.01 which is consistent with the literature. The modified Newtonian dynamics gives a poor fit to our data. We derive the star formation threshold in NGC 6822 using the H I and H α data. The critical gas densities were calculated for gravitational instabilities using the Toomre-Q criterion and the cloud-growth criterion. We found that in regions of star formation, the cloud-growth criterion explains star formation better than the Toomre-Q criterion. This shows that the local shear rate could be a key player in cloud formation for irregular galaxies such as NGC 6822.
Open Access
Le thème de la satire dans le théâtre Malawien
(2010) Msusa, Naomi; Wynchank, Anny
Malawian theatre, like most theatre in the southern region of Africa, is composed of two distinct forms; oral traditional theatre mostly comprising of masks, music and dance, as well as popular theatre which seeks to follow the definition of modern Western theatre. This thesis seeks to show how, of all the elements inherent in both types of theatre, the theme of satire is a recurrent feature and is often found to be the foundation of both types of theatre. The thesis considers how both traditional and modern theatres explore and exploit satire, and how this theme has contributed to theatre as a whole. It also looks at the history of theatre in Malawi, its role in society as well as the impact it has had on the nation as a whole, for example where it has been used as a social tool.
Open Access
The light of the eye : doctrine, piety and reform in the works of Thomas Sherlock, Hannah More and Jane Austen
(2002) Brodrick, Susan Isabel
This thesis investigates the ways in which three eighteenth-century writers, Bishop Thomas Sherlock, Hannah More and Jane Austen embody orthodox Anglican doctrine according to their individual perceptions of the enlightening properties of Protestant Christianity. After situating them in their respective gender, literary and ecclesiastical contexts, I examine some of their key doctrines and analyse excerpts from their works. My selection of passages from Sherlock's works is fairly comprehensive, but in the case of More and Austen, where there is already a formidable body of literary criticism, it is more selective. Thus, I focus on doctrine in More's tracts, Strictures on the System of Female Education, An Essay on St Paul and most especially Coelebs in Search of a Wife and in the case of Austen, on her prayers and select passages from Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. I conclude that, although diverse in their particular kind of Anglicanism (High, Evangelical and Median) and in their choice of genre, transparency or obscurity (anonymity and pseudonymity) and the various narratological strategies some of them invoke to circumvent certain taboos, Sherlock, More and Austen champion the same central orthodox doctrines, defend them against current alternatives to orthodoxy such as Latitudinarianism, Deism and various forms of Freethinking, and promote similar moral and ecclesiastical reforms. However, indirectly (through female characters who resist male representation or control) the women writers subject their ostensibly authorially-endorsed male narrators/characters to scrutiny and sometimes (when the males objectify the women) subversion.
Open Access
Marketing a foreign language : the case of French in South Africa
(2005) Margerison, Angus; Fléchais, Olivier
It is not unusual for a student to study French from secondary school to university level and still not be able to communicate effectively with a native speaker. In addition, for many years, apart from translation diplomas, the traditional Bachelor of Arts degree in French prepared students for little more than teaching the language. In South African universities, the introduction of courses in Business French is relatively recent. An individual might be motivated to learn a foreign language because of its aesthetic value or practical use. Howevere, in South Africa, the decision to allocate state funds and school-learning hours towards the promotion and teaching of a foreign language has deeper implications, particularly when there are eleven official languages competing for recognition. In India in early 1900, Michael West had attempted to establish why Indian people should learn English ("in order to read") and how they should learn English ("through reading"). Abbot (1981: 12) called this random teaching of a foreign language "TENOR (teaching English for no obvious reason "'. Similarly, the question as to why South Africans should be taught French or any other foreign language needs to be answered. If not, we risk falling into he same trap as "TENOR" except in this case we will be teaching French for no apparent reason. While the purpose of this research is not to discredit those students who desire to learn French for personal reasons, the main argument presented in this thesis is based on whether South Africans should learn French in order to trade more effectively with Francophone countries. Combining qualitative and quantitative research, preliminary conclusions indicate that an in-depth cost and beneﬁts analysis might prove the link French language acquisition with economic expansion. However, within the limitations of this research, there is insufficient justification for the allocation of state funding for foreign language acquisition over and above the need for other mainstream school disciplines. A more viable solution would be to train and to employ South Africa's new language resource, that of the Francophone refugees currently living in the country, assuming that they are willing to remain in this country.
Open Access
'n Herwaardering van Olga Kirsch se oeuvre: Identiteit ,moederskap en ballingskap aan die hand van die psigoanalitiese toeriee van onder andere Sigmund Freud,Jaques Lacan en Julia Kristeva
(2012) Minnaar, William Frank Thomas
An investigation into the works of poet Olga Kirsch according to psychoanalytical theories reveals interesting possibilities about Afrikaans's sole expressly Jewish poet and only the second female poet to get published in this language. Her yearning to be accepted in Afrikaans circles seems to have been thwarted by the rise of racist Nationalist power. Motherhood, a career as educator and having an allochthonous creative language in Hebrew-speaking Israel were some of the factors that muffled the immigrant Kirsch's poetic voice for more than two decades after arriving in Israel in 1948. An inability to make a breakthrough in Modern Hebrew or English redirected her attention to the language she felt best at home in - Afrikaans. Kirsch, however, could not continue writing poetry indefinitely in a language she had been isolated from for so long. Psychoanalysis explores the drives behind Kirsch's writings: the flight from the phallic mother, loss of the paternal love object, longing for wholeness in the safety of the chora, as well as self-actualisation and jouissance through the creative process. Kirsch is reaffmned as an important Afrikaans poet who, with each volume of poetry, shared her life as a sujet en proces with her Afrikaans-speaking readers. Whereas Sigmund Freud's basic tenets and further developments in psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan form the underlying structure of this research, extensive insights from the prolific theoretician Julia Kristeva have been employed to counterpoint the masculine and arguably paternalistic views of the former two psychoanalysists. Some rediscovered poems have been included in this thesis and comments by Kirsch's family also add a new dimension to our understanding of her as a person and of her creative output. Further sources of information were found in a documentary about the poet, recordings for radio and articles in newspapers and literary magazines. In order to establish Kirsch's value and durability as an Afrikaans poet, the canonisation process and possible changes to the poet's position in it were also taken into account. It appears from these that Olga Kirsch is, albeit not one of the greatest poets due to her increasingly dated language, nevertheless an indispensable part of the Afrikaans literary canon.
Open Access
Troubles in Irish writing and the influence of politics and religion
(2005) Avni, D B
It appeared to me that the differences and a particular atmosphere I found in Irish writing were due to more than the syntax of Hyberno-English. I was curious and to investigate further I returned to university to add English literature as a major to an existing degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics and the relevant ancillaries. The literary approach to the few - mostly Anglo-Irish - writers on which single courses were offered left my questions mostly unanswered. My own research continue along historical and psycho-sociocultural lines. I believe this approach discovered what I sought.
Open Access
UNCAGING CICADAS: Lover, Beloved, and Reader in Contemporary Love Poetry
(2022) Murie, Alexander; Anderson, Peter
In this thesis, I read a selection of North American contemporary poets – namely John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Robert Duncan, Craig Dworkin, Robert Kendall, Jackson Mac Low, Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback – in the context of the tradition of love poetry and the overarching critical discourses offered by Erik Gray's. The Art of Love Poetry, Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, and Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. I argue that the lover-poets, in these poems, attempt to overcome what Anne Carson calls the “inevitable […] boundary of flesh and self between [the beloved] and [the lover]” by placing the lover – ontologically and at times physically – in the beloved, then in turn placing the beloved in the lover, each internalizing their other. Additionally, I argue that the lover-poet integrates the reader into the circuit of desire, as subtly as the variable pronoun ‘you' and as brazenly as overt gestures that construe her as an actor in the text and in the affair between the lover and the beloved of the text. The lover-poet draws the reader into his amorous geometry – a triangle of lover, beloved and reader – and into a “dance in which everyone moves” (as Carson writes).
Open Access
Uneasy reading : resistance and revelation in Willem Boshoff's "Verskanste Openbaring"
(2016) Edy, Alice; Twidle, Hedley
In 1978, South African conceptual artist Willem Boshoff retyped the Book of Revelation onto a single sheet of paper; reinserting the same page into his typewriter, layering the language upon itself. This project sets out to "read" the product of Boshoff's performance - a rectangle of superimposed text entitled "Verskanste Openbaring" ("Entrenched Revelation"). Entirely illegible, this page is immediately resistant to conventional strategies of reading. However, perhaps the text's provocation might also be an invitation of sorts; in the absence of discernible language, can we read the text's act of resistance? "Verskanste Openbaring" oscillates unpredictably between image and text. Rather, then, than imposing a rigid mode of interpretation, I situate the poem flexibly within the theoretical frameworks of concrete poetry, book history and conceptual writing. I begin at the surface of the page, approaching the the text in aesthetic and material terms. Here, specific attention is paid to considerations of the authorial performance, temporality, sound and typography. Having considered the author's performance of writing, I consider his medium: Afrikaans. Might we "read" a language aesthetically? Finally, focus is shifted from the ink to the book that is hidden within: Revelation. Looking back two thousand years, I explore the socio-political context in which John of Patmos produced this strange and deeply violent prophesy. Guided by the material conditions of Boshoff's piece, this paper seeks to respond to the provocations of both "Verskanste Openbaring" and its source text. Might the plagiarism be productively put into conversation with the original - and vice versa? In producing "Verskanste Openbaring" Boshoff foregrounds the performance of writing. In response, this project takes the shape its own self-conscious interpretive performance; an exploration of the possibilities of reading - via a single illegible page.

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