Doctoral Degrees (English)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Jones, Megan"

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    Appraising the counterpoint : bifocal readings of literary landscapes in the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-03) Theron, Cleo Beth; Jones, Megan; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study constitutes an experimental bifocal reading that was prompted by historical and literary parallels and convergences between the United States and South Africa. In particular, the study demonstrates several thematic similarities between literature produced during the “American Renaissance” in the mid-nineteenth century and post-apartheid South Africa. Bifocalism is based on conceptions of world literature as 1) a domain that brings into contact texts from different geographical contexts, and 2) a mode of reading comparatively. Bifocalism is employed in conjunction with Edward Said’s characterisation of contrapuntalism, a means to reappraiselong-standing interpretations or bring to the fore subtle or occluded features of one text through a reading of another placed alongside it. Each chapter is devoted to a textual pairing that is based on similarities between the socio-historical contexts of the American Renaissance and the post-apartheid period. Chapter One looks at Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843(1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: VisitingAncestral Sites(2008),two female-authored travel narratives that engage with the effects of European expansion on the frontier and the resultant displacement of indigenous communities. Chapter Two focuses on inherited land among descendants of European settlers and the legacies of political and judicial injustices that helped to construct whites’ occupation of the land as a given while eliding the presence of those who inhabited the land before them. It analyses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic story, The House of the Seven Gables(1851),and Michiel Heyns’s translationof Marlene van Niekerk’s Afrikaans plaasroman, Agaat(2006). Chapter Three concerns myths of paradisiacal landscapes, how these are employed to legitimise claims of landownership and how mixed bloodlines complicate such claims in its reading of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter(1853) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story(2000). Chapter Four analyses Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative My Bondage and My Freedom(1855) and Aziz Hassim’s historical novel Revenge of Kali(2009) to compare depictions of imported labour. The chapter juxtaposes Douglass’ view on slavery and Hassim’s depiction of indentured labour to compare their texts’ representations of national belonging for those who worked on plantations. The bifocal readings are anchored in the significant body of comparative work that has already been done on American and South African society and literature. Attention to these literary contexts reveals that they have in common concerted efforts to put in writing the circumstances of a purportedly new nation built on the principles of democracy. I argue that such attempts are frequently addressed in these two eras by means of the motifs of land and landscape (the latter being the aesthetic configuration of the former). I analyse how land, as a deeply contested phenomenon in both countries in the periods under consideration, is used by writers to depict national struggles pertaining to democracy, national newness, identity and belonging.
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    The city that billows smoke : a spatial reading of Bulawayo in prose fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Dube, Nhlanhla; Jones, Megan; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My study investigates the ways in which Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, is represented on the page. By reading fiction authored during the ‘lost decade’, I explore images of the city which emanate from novels and short stories from writers in Zimbabwe and abroad. I answer the question, what argument about place is being made when a character is in a particular locale? Theoretically, I deploy Geocriticism in order to show that space is made up of places. This is done by reading sections of the literary city such as the suburb, the Location and the diasporan constituency as parts of a larger whole. The fact that all narratives have to happen somewhere is at the core of the idea that the geographical location ‘where’ narratives occur, is more than just background setting and aesthetic. My exploration of the literary suburb is concerned with concepts of belonging and the racial aspects of city space. I show the importance of walking the suburb and the significance the process of losing home has in defining the 21st century suburb. Through studying the Location, I privilege the importance of places of drink and construction activities in high density living areas, to show how they indicate a spirit of place. To add to this, I also account for the diasporan view in order to see how the idea of the literary city is complicated by the act of diasporic return. Diasporic return unearths versions of the city that exist outside national borders and it highlights that Bulawayo is in conversation with other cities. My project demonstrates the existence of a Bulawayo literary city which has intricate local political realities and socio-economic conditions. This thesis also establishes that readings of the city have to take into account history, politics and geography in order to gauge the conditions under which unique literary cities are formed.
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    Globality : the double bind of African migrant writing
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Shabangu, Mohammad; Steiner, Tina; Jones, Megan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I consider the political implications of the aporetic position of contemporary African migrant writing in the arena of world literature. For this type of writing, forever interpellated by the domain of the world literary marketplace, there is a discernible worldly causality that seems to have exceeded its enunciatory modality. Following Pheng Cheah’s lead, I argue that the selected writing gestures towards a concern with a conception of the world beyond its merely spatial dimension which, at a certain hermeneutic level, would assume that globalisation creates a world. Because of this, I am interested in the more spiritual dimension of the narratives, more abstract than the concrete, visible presence of globalisation’s physiognomy and physical border crossings. More important, this literature’s worldly causality is to be found in those textual moments when it calls into question the very organising philosophy, the temporal force, of our era of globalisation. I argue that the works offer us a discursive and imaginative space from which to consider some of the economic implications of migrant life framed by global capitalism. Yet, this happens in a rather radical way when the writing enters the personal and tender zones of utterance, where the personal attributes interact with the juridical predispositions of migrancy. In doing this, significantly, the writing seems to suggest a deferral or diverting of the call of the ethnographic imperative which would have African migrant writing respond to all manner of calls that are put out, all of which seek to delimit and make recognisable so-called ‘African’ literature. The source of the call is quite specific, though it does not mean that it is singular. It therefore emerges that, as they pertain to African writing, our reading practices seem overdetermined by a curious predisposition, they seek to make individual voices intelligible according to a particular structure of recognition. This anticipated rubric, or the unique stage directions established for contemporary African writing, the narrowly conceived socio-political problems it is expected to address ahead of its arrival, has the effect of subsuming African writing into the logic of commodity markets. In their own ways, these texts seem to be answering a call for the capaciousness of African writing in content and form, where the challenge is to render art that is not eclipsed by the demands of group representation or the ethnographic imperative within the realm of world literature. These works thus seem to indicate a refusal to be interpellated by pre-established criteria about identiarian politics, while they activate our imagination towards globality. In the same breath, I consider the structural interpellation that forces writers to negotiate what I call the double bind of African migrant writing, two contradictory injunctions issued at the same time. This double bind, between the market’s demand for the ethnographic imperative (or something like (un)strategic ethnification) and the framing of the linguistic operation of globality as cultural globalization, may prove instructive for our approach to African migrant writing. True to the structure of a double bind, African migrant writers cannot ‘solve’ or escape the double bind of their positionality, they can only negotiate it. Thus, an important point of departure will be to highlight the discursive difference between, on the one hand, globalisation (the globalising protocols, processes and effects) and on the other hand, globality (the end state of globalisation). The hermeneutic value of the term globality lies in its simultaneous difference and sameness from the term globalisation, it mobilises the dialectic analogous to that which operates when we theorise different but complementary entities such as race and colour, sex and gender, class and poverty, citizen and nationality and so forth, now, globality and globalisation. In other words, the relation between globality and globalisation seems to inhabit a continuous space where globalisation stands for the processes and modes by which the ideological project of global markets, immigration and transcultural movement on a global scale, operates to conceal the force of capitalism, so that we think of globalisation as a quasi-natural phenomenon, about which little can be done. I suggest that prevailing literary approaches to African migrant writing will need to be supplemented by an ethical politics of reading, one that centres the status of globality. With such a reading practice, we may arrive at a new enunciatory register that captures the ontology of transnationalism beyond merely the anthropologies of ‘the immigrant experience’ of displacement or unbelonging and a critique of Euro-Americanism, so that the texts complicate our relationship to global capital at the same time as they throw the chaos of globality, and global capitalism, into sharp relief.
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    Historicising borders : studies in Nigerian novels
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Okolie, Mary JanePatrick Nwakaego; Jones, Megan; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: More than ever before, border studies is enjoying scholarly attention and cutting across many disciplinary boundaries. The re-shaping of borders, triggered by globalisation and other trans-border historical events, has brought about the reassessment of the notion of borders as more than physical demarcations. Nonetheless, there has been little contribution from studies of African scholarship, and almost none from Nigeria, to the growing concern with and re-imagining of the border. My thesis provides an alternative imagining of the border by examining fictional representations of bordered identities foregrounded in the three generations of Nigerian literature. From the perspective of border poetics, which is the intervention of arts and culture in border studies, my research examines a range of fictional novels that thematise historical concerns related to geographical, cultural, ethnic, and social divides. The primary texts for this research are: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn (1976), Festus Iyayi’s Violence (1979) and Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer (2012), and Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2016). This study engages three dimensions of borders and bordering in the novels selected: first, borders as social constructs drawn between opposing ideologies; second, borders as fluid and complex forms of intervention in social life; and third, borders as sites of frictional exchange and transformative interaction between the individuals and territories that are divided by these social constructs. The thesis is particularly preoccupied with literary characters' ability to negotiate their identity in the encounter with socially and culturally created divides and the spatial shifts that attend these forms of division. By engaging novels that speak to the national concerns prevalent in different periods of Nigerian literary history, my research demonstrates how literary texts conceptualise and engage the lived experience of shifting borders, and the cultural and social distinctions that attend the historical changes in Nigeria from the colonial era to the present. This study provides insights that can potentially enlarge the scope of border studies from the perspective of the humanities and recast the traditional assumption of the border as a fixed geographical divide. Most importantly, my thesis argues for border inclusivity, achievable through a radical delinking from the mentality of superiority and fixity. It suggests an expanded notion of difference as part of a solution to the crisis of cultural and symbolic othering in Africa, and in the world at large.