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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "De Villiers, Dawid"
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- ItemAppraising 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.
- ItemDisenchanting the American dream : the interplay of spatial and social mobility through narrative dynamic in Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Wolfe(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Theron, Cleo Beth; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the long-established interrelation between spatial and social mobility in the American context, the result of the westward movement across the frontier that was seen as being attended by the promise of improving one’s social standing – the essence of the American Dream. The focal texts are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), journey narratives that all present geographical relocation as necessary for social progression. In discussing the novels’ depictions of the itinerant characters’ attempts at attaining the American Dream, my study draws on Peter Brooks’s theory of narrative dynamic, a theory which contends that the plotting operation is a dynamic one that propels the narrative forward toward resolution, eliciting meanings through temporal progression. This thesis seeks to analyse the relation between mobility and narrative by applying Brooks’s theory, which is primarily consolidated by means of nineteenth-century texts, to the modernist moment. It considers these journey narratives in view of new technological developments and economic conditions, underpinned by the process of globalisation, that impact upon mobility.
- ItemFilms by Kenyan women directors as national allegories(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Ojiambo, Jacqueline Kubasu; Green, Louise; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines how selected Kenyan fiction films directed by women filmmakers intervene in national politics. To achieve this, I employ Frederic Jameson’s concept of ‘national allegory’ to understand how within the context of the Kenyan political situation, the private stories of individuals can be read allegorically to refer beyond their immediate circumstances to wider political concerns. Although these films are predominantly realist in narrative form, I propose that reading them as national allegories allows their wider political implications to emerge. The films also draw on local traditions of allegory as a complex didactic form. I critically analyse the films to explore the different allegorical shapes each film takes and how these allegorical shapes, in turn, resonate with the larger national story. I complexify Jameson’s theory, which suggests that all third world texts are to be read as national allegories, and demonstrate that they can, in fact, be interpreted at both a realist and allegorical level. The early films Saikati and The Battle of The Sacred Tree investigate the idea of returning to the past. This discussion contributes to African cinema’s ‘return to the source’ movement, which did not account for the complications women face on their return to the past. I argue that for women, the return is fraught with challenges that must constantly be negotiated and renegotiated. In the next set of more contemporary films, I demonstrate how the daily private lives of the characters illuminate broader social-political concerns. The more overtly allegorical, Soul Boy, together with the social realist Killer Necklace, Project Daddy and Leo, highlight the conditions of the marginalized in the society and decry poor governance. Finally, I explore From a Whisper and Something Necessary that fictionalise real traumatic national events. These two, mix real footage and fictional narrative to provide a path for engagement with broader political implications. I will show how through various imaginations, all the filmmakers transcend their present realities and imagine a more desirable nation. My argument is that although these films can be read as realist films, reading them as national allegories foregrounds the diverse ways Kenyan women filmmakers engage with national politics.
- ItemFrom Chawton to Oakland : configuring the nineteenth-century domestic in Catherine Hubback's writing(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Davids, Courtney Laurey; Ellis, Jeanne; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis engages the ideological ambivalence about the nineteenth-century middle-class domestic that emerged at mid-century by focusing on the non-canonical British and Californian writing of a fairly unknown but prolific author, Catherine Hubback, Jane Austen’s niece. It explores the tension between ideology and practice in Hubback’s writing, and argues that her work simultaneously challenges and endorses the ideal of domesticity. To the extent that it challenges this ideal, Hubback’s fiction, in its representation of domestic practice, negotiates class and gender ideologies that play out in the middle-class home. The thesis also traces how her endorsement of middle-class domesticity became more pronounced in the story and letters she wrote after her emigration to California, taking the form of overt criticism of American femininity and domesticity. Hubback’s concern with women’s position in relation to law and marriage is read within the context of developments in the genre of domestic fiction. My close reading of four novels – The Younger Sister, May and December: A Tale of Wedded Life, The Wife’s Sister; or, The Forbidden Marriage and Malvern; or, The Three Marriages – examines Hubback’s representation of marital and domestic configurations that are consistently viewed in relation to the social and legal position of women. The novels explore alternative options for women’s lives illustrated by their negotiation of the constraints of middle-class womanhood on their own terms; in marriage, or by choosing not to marry. Similarly, my discussion of Victorian masculinity in Hubback’s fiction focuses on the concern with moral and industrious middle-class manhood that establishes middle-class values as the definition of proper Englishness. As part of this discussion, I demonstrate how Hubback’s fiction reworks middle-class masculinity in order to establish a model for marriage that ensures domestic stability and ultimately the order of the English nation. In the final chapter of this thesis, I continue my exploration of Englishness and domestic ideology by reading Hubback’s short story and letters from California. In contrast to the ideological ambivalence registered in the novels, these texts more overtly subscribe to middle-class English values. My reading of Hubback’s work for this thesis thus aims to contribute to an understanding of the complex interrelation between ideology, domestic practice and literature in the nineteenth-century.
- ItemLanguage limits : the dissolution of the lyric subject in experimental print and performance poetry(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-12) Pieterse, Annel; Green, Louise; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, I undertake an extensive overview of a range of language activities that foreground the materiality of language, and that require an active reader oriented towards the text as a producer, rather than a consumer, of meaning. To this end, performance, as a function of both orality and print texts, forms an important focus for my argument. I am particularly interested in the effect that the disruption of language has on the position of the subject in language, especially in terms of the dialogic exchange between local and global subject positions. Poetry is a language activity that requires a particular attention to form and meaning, and that is licensed to activate and exploit the materiality of language. For this reason, I have focused on the work of a selection of North American poets, the Language poets. These poets are primarily concerned with the performative possibilities of language as it appears in print media. I juxtapose these language activities with those of a selection of contemporary South African poets whose work is marked by the influence of oral forms, and reveals telling interplays between media. All these poets are preoccupied with the ways in which the sign might be disrupted. In my discussion of the work of the Language poets, I consider how examples of their print poetics present the reader with language fragments, arranged according to non-syntactic principles. Confronted by the lack of an individuated lyric subject around whom these fragments might cohere, the reader is obliged to make his/her own connections between words, sounds and phrases. Similarly, in the work of the performance poets, I identify several aspects in the poetry that trouble a transparent transmission of expression, and instead require the poetry to be read as an interrogation of the constitution of the subject. Here, the ―I‖ fleetingly occupies multiple, shifting subject positions, and the poetic interplay between media and language tends towards a continuous destabilising of the poetic self. Poets and performers are, to some extent, licensed to experiment with language in ways that render it opaque. Because the language activities of poets and performers are generally accommodated within the order of symbolic or metaphoric language, their experimentation with non-communicative excesses can be understood as part of their framework. However, in situations where ―communicative‖ language is expected, the order of literal or forensic language cannot accommodate seemingly non-communicative excesses that appear to render the text opaque. Ultimately, I am concerned with exploring the manner in which attention to the materiality of language might open up alternative understandings of language, subjectivity and representation in South African public discourse. My conclusion therefore considers the consequences when the issues opened up by the poetry – questions of self and subject, authority and representation – are translated into forensic frameworks and testimonial discourse.
- ItemOrigins, endings and the posthuman imperative in Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic fiction(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Kershaw, Andre James Daniel; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, I undertake an analysis of five primary texts in the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres, namely: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Drawing chiefly upon Frank Kermode’s work in The Sense of an Ending, in which he argues that imaginings of origin and end are crucial for conferring intelligibility upon being “in the middest” (8), I show how the confrontation of a particular kind of end point characterised by the proleptic spectre of the posthuman, invoked by texts within the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres, generates what I call a posthuman imperative to reinterpretation. This imperative is implicitly invoked by a text insofar as it raises or gestures towards the possibility of the posthuman and demands that the reader reorientate themselves, in the middest, in relation to this horizon. The process of reinterpretation of being-in-themiddest which occurs in response to the posthuman imperative, drawing upon narratives of origin and end, is primarily mediated through language and story. This process has implications for frameworks of meaning, value, ethics, truth, the self, and relation to the transcendent as well as to time and history. My analysis draws out a number of generative paradoxes which arise when attempting to write and read the possibility of the posthuman. To do so depends upon language, and yet language is brought into confrontation with its own limits as the limits of the human are approached. Further, while the posthuman imperative to reinterpretation is only generated in the face of the end, and an end in some sense is an essential precondition for the narrative concord of existence to which this process of reinterpretation is directed, the end is ultimately also that which threatens to undermine the possibility of narrative as such.
- ItemPast (pre)occupations, present (dis)locations : the nineteenth century restoried in texts from/about South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-12) Ellis, Jeanne; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the 'restorying‘ of British settler colonialism in a range of texts that negotiate the intricacies of post-settler afterlives in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In this, I do not undertake a sustained, programmatic comparative reading in order to deliver a set of answers based on insights achieved into the current state of post-settler colonial identities. Rather, I approach the study as an open-ended exploration by reading a combination of texts of various kinds – novels, poetry, drama, films and installation art – from and about these different geographical and historical contexts, structured as a sequence of four chapters, each with a distinct theoretical ensemble specific to the (pre)occupations of the settler colonial past and the linked senses of (dis)location in the present that emerge from the primary texts combined in each case. Since this project is informed by my location as a South African researcher, the cluster of primary texts in every chapter always includes one or more South African texts as pivotal to the juxtapositional dynamics such a reading attempts. By placing this study of the textual afterlives of settler colonialism undertaken from a South African perspective within the ambit of neo-Victorian studies, it is my intention to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work emerging from this interdisciplinary field and to introduce to it a set of primary texts that will extend the parameters of its productive intersections with colonial and postcolonial studies.
- ItemPoetics of passage in modernist reconfigurations of Odysseus(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Slabbert, Talitha; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: While the prevalence of the figure of Odysseus in Western literature has been much studied, insufficient attention has been paid to its associations with epistemology, and to the semiotic potential of the navigator-hero’s contest with the sea in figuring the relation between the episteme and the world it seeks to know. This thesis draws on Hans Blumenberg’s notion of “absolute metaphor” and Giambattista Vico’s notion of “poetic wisdom” to argue that Odysseus – in his ineluctable association with the image of the sea – serves, for modernist authors, as a means through which to represent the uncertain and difficult movement of existence and interpretation in the early 20th century, and that it becomes, for certain authors, an exceptionally intelligible means through which to figure their own hermeneutic ventures. The primary examples of this self-implicated hermeneutics studied in this thesis are Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and on James Joyce’s Ulysses, but, in order to contextualise these authors’ respective reconfigurations of the navigator-hero, I commence with a survey of some of the most influential reconfigurations of Odysseus that lead up to the 20th century, and of the disparate inflections given to the figure according to the epistemological attitudes of different authors and of their various historical contexts. This groundwork includes a consideration of the epistemological specificities of the 19th century, as the matrix from which the self-conscious hermeneutics of modernist literature would emerge. This project ultimately aims to lead to a more nuanced understanding of the way in which the figure of Odysseus operates within literature, and to an appreciation of the protean semiotic resources which it presents to authors, given its long history and its association with the similarly resonant image of the sea. In this thesis, I go on to reconsider Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential – but potentially reductive, if taken as absolute – claim that Odysseus is essentially a literary instantiation of Enlightenment reason on its trajectory towards a final disenchantment of the world. Instead, it is the argument of this thesis that the figure tends to exceed the specific configurations it is given, subtly destabilising – and potentially enriching – authors’ intended meanings through the inflections and the echoes of the multiple other configurations associated with it. As such, the figure operates in the milieu between determinate meaning and meaninglessness, providing authors with a provisional vehicle for their hermeneutics, a sort of poetics of passage through which to navigate an ‘oceanic’ and unhomely modernity.
- ItemScreening the posthuman : disembodied masculinity in virtual reality films(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Steenkamp, Lize-Maree; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In science fiction films, cyborgs are often represented as embodiments of a transhuman drive to escape the limitations of the human body. This technologically mediated evolution is a continuation in the extreme of humanist principles such as linear progress, reason, autonomy and the primacy of mind over body. Donna Haraway has registered the possibility that, as a hybrid, the figure of the cyborg could be utilized to revise humanist principles, rather than reiterate them, through posthumanist representation. However, this seems counter-intuitive, as cyborgs in popular culture are known to exaggerate dualist gender ideals rather than subvert them. What is more, the disembodied cyborg that is constituted by human interaction with virtual reality seemingly maintains the mind/body binary rather than challenging it. Through the study of three virtual reality films that construct different kinds of interaction between human and machine, Brainstorm (1983), eXistenZ (1999) and Her (2013), I contend that the representation of the disembodied cyborg collapses the mind/body binary primarily through representations of sex and death, but that the subsequent invocation of associated gender identities reinstates the masculine/feminine binary. I accomplish this through a method of formal analysis of the cinematic representation of the disembodied cyborg and the spaces it moves in. Filmic virtual reality in Brainstorm and Her resonates with posthumanist concerns, and is discussed in relation to existing poststructuralist paradigms of signification in the works of primarily Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and N. Katherine Hayles. The formally alienating effects of Brainstorm are also integrated into a larger framework of film convention. With reference to Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and Neil Badmington, I discuss the disembodied cyborg as a posthuman figure in terms of its potential to collapse binaries, specifically those of mind/body and masculine/feminine. In order to appreciate the always-virtual nature of gender, the work of Judith Butler is utilized to explore the ways in which eXistenZ displays the fluidity of gender performances in virtual reality. I further argue that the three films accomplish the collapse of the mind/body dualism through the representation of sex and death, and reinstate binarist conceptions of gender performances. In Brainstorm and Her, desire and eroticism are coded as male undertakings that respond to the passive and objectified female form, whereas in eXistenZ, the representation of sexuality is more progressive. Violence, pain and death are also represented as the business of men in Brainstorm, while it is represented more playfully in eXistenZ. I aim to reveal the ways in which the emphasis on ultimate embodiment in virtual reality films through sex and death reinstates a sex-gender correlation, and thus, for the most part, do not succeed in the collapse of the gender dualism.