Theses and Dissertations (Literature, Language and Media)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/10539/35935

Browse

Start date: 2010

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "So, what are you?": analysing erasure, shame and (mis) appropriation of coloured narratives in South Africa through social media
    (2018) Khan, Jamil Farouk
    This study examines how Coloured people are constructing Colouredness and by implication, themselves through the Facebook web series, Coloured Mentality.Coloured identities have been a very uncomfortable part of South African race politics since colonialism and have carried a range of stereotypes and myths with them. Despite being constructed as monolithic and essential, Coloured identities have long undergone processes of creolisation under conditions of brutality to continue making and remaking themselves as political landscapes change. To explore how Colouredness is being constructed, this research employed critical discourse analysis to evaluate its relationships with history, blackness in post-Apartheid South Africa, language, culture and privilege. In particular, much of the sense making around Colouredness operates through a discourse of origin exemplified by the question: Where do we come from? Through the lens of creolisation theory, this research reveals Colouredness to be introspective in that Coloured identities are constantly negotiating possibilities for change and impossibilities of historical ways of identification that compete with each other for relevance. Coloured identities are sweeping through archives of information to inform a new way of telling their stories.Tensions and contestations within Colouredness are central to their making and remaking, as identities are made sense of through changing discourses which serve as a gateway to social change
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    " To see another person's face... to touch another person's hand": bodies and intimate relations in the fiction of Marlene Van Niekerk
    (2014-06-20) Buxbaum, Lara
    Marlene van Niekerk is an original and virtuouso writer who has been lauded both locally and internationally. Although Van Niekerk’s works have aroused considerable critical attention, analysis has thus far focused mainly on the individual novels. Furthermore, the importance of bodies in her writing has been neglected. In this thesis I attempt to correct that critical occlusion by analysing bodies and intimate relations in Van Niekerk’s three novels, Triomf (1994/1999), Agaat (2004/2006) and Memorandum (2006). Corporeality is emphasized in the interactions between characters; in fact it seems that any kind of understanding is mediated, facilitated or impeded through the body. I adopt Elizabeth Grosz’s explanation of embodied subjectivity which avoids what she might term the Cartesian, monist or essentialist fallacy of embodiment (1994). The first chapter presents an overview of the existing literature on Van Niekerk and theories of bodies. In Chapter Two I propose that any consideration of spatiality in the novel must also take into account corporeality. With reference to apartheid spatial discourse and the recurring cartographic motifs, I argue that all of the protagonists articulate the desire for a nurturing environment. Chapter Three explores the relationship between narrative and body fragments in order to determine whether remembering (or re-membering) can prove salutary. I consider how intimate relationships are implicated in working through the embodied experience of trauma and whether recognition might provide an alternative narrative of healing to the confessional mode. I inquire whether, in the absence of a coherent narrative and healed body, there might prove something liberating in celebrating the potential of the fragment. Relations of looking are the focus of Chapter Four where I investigate whether reciprocity is possible. Chapter Five objects to allegorical readings of the incest and sexual relations which forecloses more nuanced readings. Furthermore I maintain that some of these encounters be read as rape. Triomf and Agaat subvert “the rape script” thus raising difficult questions about the nature of complicity, intimacy and power. The final chapter illustrates the manner in which intimacy is affected by the imminence of death. I consider the extent to which the bodywork entailed in caring for a dying person alters relationships and explore the changes in metaphors of embodiment employed by the dying person. In this manner I hope to illuminate hitherto unexplored similarities in these three novels which make for a richer appreciation of Van Niekerk’s oeuvre as well as encourage new ways of reading embodiment and intimacy . Key Words: Marlene van Niekerk, Bodies, Intimacy, Triomf, Agaat, Memorandum, Embodied Subjectivity, Spatiality, Rape, Dying, Voyeurism, Fragments, Trauma.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "Murder alla siciliana" - representations of the Sicilian "exotic other" in translation
    (2012-08-16) Siniscalchi, Natasha Joan
    The different ways in which the translators of Camilleri’s La Gita a Tindari have (consciously or unconsciously) used the translation procedures outlined by Vinay and Darbelnet are analysed in this study in an attempt to identify instances of foreignisation and/or domestication in the English, French and Spanish Target Texts (TTs). The translation of Camilleri’s very Sicilian/Sicilianised work involves much decision-making concerning Italian/Sicilian cultural and linguistic aspects which both characterise the Montalbano series and render it arguably inaccessible to those with little or no Italian/Sicilian Source Culture familiarity. This study is a comparative analysis revolving around the use of the translation procedures outlined by Canadian scholars Vinay and Darbelnet in the English, French and Spanish translations of Camilleri’s La Gita a Tindari and the foreignising and/or domesticating effects the use of these strategies has in relation to the rendition of Source Culture and Source Language elements in translation. The analytical model used in the study is a descriptive and comparative one based on an approach to translation studies which is both quantitative andpara-textual analyses conducted herein, this study presents conclusions in respect of the overall foreignised and/or domesticated feel of the English, French and Spanish Target Texts in relation to the depiction of Sicily and Montalbano as “exotic others”, or “localised others”. qualitative. On the basis of the findings drawn from the micro-textual and
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "... as far as words can give:" Romantic poetry as displaced mystical experience in William Wordsworth's Prelude
    (2011-11-28) Kallenbach, Bradley Dean
    This dissertation investigates the ways in which a broad and perennial problem – ‘the problem of dualism’ - is approached by three areas of inquiry, namely, English Romanticism, mysticism and contemporary studies of consciousness. By comparative analysis of key passages in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Huxley’s survey of mystical traditions in the Perennial Philosophy and work by contemporary philosopher Colin McGinn on the ‘mind-body problem,’ I explain how each discipline proposes an ideal state of ‘synthesis’ or ‘coalescence’ between the subjective and objective as a solution to ‘the problem of dualism.’ In turn, each discipline discerns a faculty or means towards such a synthesis. These are the ‘Imagination,’ ‘Third Eye,’ and ‘Bridging Principle’ respectively. Thus, this dissertation has three additional aims. First, I argue that the Romantic ‘Imagination’ and mystical ‘Third Eye’ faculty are conceptually similar in an attempt to show that certain Romantic poets (primarily Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley) sought access to a super-sensuous realm via the ‘Imagination.’ However, seminal texts such as Coleridge’s Biographia, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy imply that the Romantic poet, unlike the mystic, is thwarted from voluntary and veridical access to these realms: the Imagination reaches an impassable threshold which the mystical ‘Third Eye’ traverses. This condition, coupled with an inability to convey mystical experience in language with greater acuity, I argue, may account for the presence of melancholy in key Romantic works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude and Immortality Ode. I thus seek to enhance our understanding of the critical commonplace referred to as “Romantic melancholy.” Second, I aim to illustrate this view by analysis of key passages in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Immortality Ode. Finally, I aim to show that the early Coleridgean understanding of ‘the problem of dualism’ as highlighted in the Biographia can be further elucidated by contemporary theories of consciousness on the ‘mind-body’ problem.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "The art of visible speech": infernal and purgatorial figurations in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities
    (2010-08-03) Fanucchi, Sonia
    Abstract This dissertation is a study of the Dickensian imagination, focussing on the power of Dickens’s symbolism in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Although Dickens believed himself to be a realist, this thesis explores a particular way in which his narrative style departs from realism as it came to be formulated by George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that Dickens’s symbolism, intuitive and even chaotic as it seems, is informed by his exposure to works of allegory through reading and performance. Thus he evokes allegorical patterns of Dante, Bunyan and the Medieval Morality tradition to infuse his depiction of reality with a transcendent life. This gives it a greater dramatic intensity which effects a turn towards allegory. In a critical, evaluative study of the two novels, the dissertation foregrounds the relationship between the real and the allegorical strands of Dickens’s narrative. This is an artistic question but it is bound up with an ideological enquiry into the connection that Dickens makes between the secular and the religious. The balance between these two poles of Dickens’s vision differs in each novel but it is at its most effective in Great Expectations where the allegorical dimension arises seamlessly out of the material.