ETD Collection

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Author: search.filters.author.Nudelman, JillSubject: search.filters.subject.post-apartheid literature

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    Waking the White Goddess: a novel
    (2010-08-25) Nudelman, Jill
    Abstract (Jill Nudelman) This dissertation presents a novel that charts the progress of the white protagonist, Rose, whose mysterious origins have rendered her disconnected and alienated. In addition, moulded by her sheltered and privileged lifestyle she experiences guilt faced with the suffering and poverty that she encounters in post-apartheid South Africa, but lacks the strength to act. The novel opens with Rose, now 30, bereft and alone. When she discovers a box of mysterious objects which hint at her origins, she is lead to Oberon, a fictional village in the southern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. Here, Rose’s search becomes more than a search for her biological parents as she experiences events that lead her to an identity beyond whiteness and help her to find rootedness in African soil. A reflexive essay follows. The essay is a personal reflection of the writing process, and includes the inspiration and development of the story line, problems encountered around the narrative voice and the contribution of the Masters programme workshops to the project. It also explores and expounds on the theoretical underpinnings of the novel, such as white identity in post-apartheid South Africa, the use of Western mythologies in an African context, and a discussion of San culture, including concerns around its inclusion in the text. The use of the heavily-loaded signifier, “White Goddess” as in the title, is also touched upon.
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    CONTESTED DOMESTIC SPACES: ANNE LANDSMAN'S "THE DEVIL'S CHIMNEY"
    (2006-11-15T11:17:48Z) Nudelman, Jill
    This dissertation interrogates Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney. The novel is narrated by the poor-white alcoholic, Connie, who imagines a story about Beatrice, an English colonist living on a farm in the Little Karoo. Connie, who is a product of the apartheid era, interweaves her own story with that of Beatrice’s and, in this way, comes to terms with her own memories, her abusive husband and the new South Africa. Connie deploys the genre of magical realism to create a defamiliarised farm setting for Beatrice’s narrative. She thus challenges the stereotypes associated with the traditional plaasroman and its patriarchal codes. These codes are also subverted in Connie’s representation of Beatrice, who contests her identity as the authoritative Englishwoman, as constructed by colonial discourse. In addition, Beatrice’s black domestic, Nomsa, is given voice and agency: facilities denied to her counterparts in colonial and apartheid fiction. Nomsa’s relationship with Beatrice is also characterised by subversion as it blurs the boundaries between colonised and coloniser. In this regard, the text demands a postcolonial reading. Connie, in narrating Beatrice’s and Nomsa’s stories, reinvents their invisible lives and, by doing so, is able to rewrite herself. In this, she tentatively envisions a future for herself and also potentially ‘narrates’ the nation, thus contributing to the new national literature. The nation is inscribed in the Cango caves, whose spaces witness the seminal episodes in Beatrice’s narrative. In these events, the caves ‘write’ the female body and women’s sexuality and the text thus calls for an engagement with feminism. The caves also inscribe South African history, the Western literary canon, the imagination and Landsman’s own voice. Hence, the caves assume the characteristics of a palimpsest. This, together with the metafictive elements of the novel, invites an encounter with postmodernism.