3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Ucwaningo ngokwethulwa kwabalingiswa basefazane emanovelini amathathu abhalwe ngababhali besifazane: ngokwendlela yewumenizimu(2018) Khoza, Nonthethelelo LoraineItem Imagining our end: South african apocalyptic fiction(2018) Pitt, Daniela DinaABSTRACT “End-time” narratives have created interest and appeal in a variety of contexts. They serve different purposes, whether to entertain in their depiction of catastrophic disasters, or to afford the opportunity for deeper, and more serious engagement, with preoccupations relating to anxieties in differing contexts, such as socio-political and environmental. This study explores how “End-time” narratives serve a more ethical discourse in a turbid political climate in South Africa, between 1972 to 2006. In this study, I offer close contextual readings of five South African novels that span the period from the apartheid era to post-democracy. The central concern in this study is the stylistic choice made by each of these writers in selecting apocalyptic rhetoric in a narrative which is set in a future, imagined South African space. The five South African fictions selected for this study (Promised Land by Karel Schoeman, July’s People by Nadine Gordimer, Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee, The Mask of Freedom by Peter Wilhelm and Horrelpoot by Eben Venter) each portrays a dystopic imaginary present, and offers the reader an “unveiling” of historical truth and thus a possibility of deferred eschatology. These novels form part of a body of South African literature that represents the critical self-consciousness of white writers as oppositional voices to the historical setting within South Africa from 1972 to 2006. I suggest that the apocalyptic in these texts is allegorical and that, by subverting its form, writers insinuate the limitations of the apocalyptic. In each instance, the anxiety surrounding eschatology opens up the urgent need for a new discourse and national narrative, offering a qualified hope for a feasible albeit, challenging future.Item The Barber: manuscript for novel(2012) De Vita, VeruskaItem Damon Galgut and the critical reception of South African literature(2014-06-24) Kostelac, Sofia LucyDamon Galgut has been a prolific contributor to South African literature since the early 1980s, but has only recently gained recognition as a significant presence in our cultural landscape. This thesis considers what the vicissitudes of Galgut’s critical reception — which have seen him, by turns, celebrated, ignored and even explicitly discounted as a noteworthy South African author — reveal about the shifting standards of cultural legitimacy which have been set for local writers since the late apartheid years. It offers, in turn, an extended close reading of each of his novels and considers the challenges which they pose to hegemonic assumptions about developments within the field of South African literature over the past three decades. I demonstrate that no coherent line of transition can be traced across the individual novels which make up Galgut’s oeuvre. They represent, instead, shifting degrees of discordance and concordance with an epochal metanarrative of South African literature and the progressive transformation of the field which it implies. In so doing, they enliven us to the thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity which has always already constituted the field.Item Mothers, madonnas and musicians: A writing of Africa's women as symbols and agents of change in the novels of Zakes Mda(2008-03-31T09:11:00Z) Mazibuko, NokuthulaAbstract My dissertation interrogates the ways in which Zakes Mda has made women central to his novels. I argue that the women characters in Mda's novels are key to the idea of the rebirth of Africa (and the simultaneous birth of a (South) African identity) a rebirth made necessary by years of dispossession through colonialism and apartheid. I will explore how on one level Mda, through magical realism, represents women as symbols of both destruction and construction; and how on another level he represents them as complex characters existing as agents of history. Mda’s novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays With the Darkness (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000) and The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) critique the topdown approach of the postapartheid, postcolonial discourse of African Renaissance a discourse which aims to reverse the damage done to the lives of Africans who have been brutalised by history. Mda writes an African renaissance (with a lower case “r”), which acknowledges and explores the ways in which people on the margins of power, recreate and transform their lives, without necessarily waiting for politicians to come up with policies and solutions. The renaissance of ordinary people privileges the spirit of ubuntu, whereby the individual strives to work with the collective to achieve a more humane world. Mda’s female characters are central to the debate on renaissance and reconstruction in that he questions existing gender roles by ii highlighting strongly the rights still denied African women his challenge to the discourse is whether a renaissance is possible if the humanity of women (and others marginalised by class, age, location, ethnicity, and other categories) continues to be denied. I ask the question whether Mda, goes further, and envisions women participating as leaders in traditionally male spaces.Item CONTESTED DOMESTIC SPACES: ANNE LANDSMAN'S "THE DEVIL'S CHIMNEY"(2006-11-15T11:17:48Z) Nudelman, JillThis 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.