Masters Degrees (English)

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The afterlife of the Victorian marriage plot in neo-Victorian fiction
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Vorndran, Truchen; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The neo-Victorian novel is known for exposing the hidden sex lives of what Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1964) and, following him, Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1984) describe as the “Other Victorians”, those marginal and sexually transgressive figures who now populate its pages. However, this has led to the neo-Victorian novel being criticised for its reconstruction of nineteenth-century history into a sexually explicit narrative for the enjoyment of a contemporary audience, or what Marie-Luise Kohkle in “The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth-Century Erotic” refers to as “sexsation” (345). Neo-Victorian novels critically engage with the Victorian past and its narratives by employing either an historical, or partly historical setting. A number of recent novels which are not historical in their setting similarly respond to or engage with a particular Victorian novel or Victorian morals and values either explicitly or implicitly in this highly self-conscious, revisionary fashion. Examples of such novels are Here on Earth (1997) by Alice Hoffman, On Chesil Beach (2007) by Ian McEwan and Re Jane (2015) by Patricia Park. In this thesis, I undertake to read these novels as representative of a separate category of neo-Victorian fiction by focussing on the “afterlife” of the Victorian marriage plot in them, a term I take from John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff’s Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century.
Identity and the children's literature of George MacDonald
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-03) George, Carla Elizabeth; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACTThe Victorian period, often heralded as the golden age of children‘s literature, saw both a break and a continuation with the traditions of the fairy tale genre, with many authors choosing this platform to question and subvert social and literary expectations (Honic, Breaking the Angelic Image 1; Zipes, Art of Subversion 97). George MacDonald (1824-1905), a prolific Scottish theologian, whose unspoken sermons, essays, novels, fantasies and children‘s fairy tales deliberately engage with such issues as gender, mortality, class, poverty and morality, was one such author (Ellison 92). This thesis critically examines how the Victorian writer George MacDonald portrays the notion of a ‗self‘ in terms of fixed ‗character‘ and mutable physical appearance in his fairy tales for children. Chapter One provides a foundation for this study by studying MacDonald‘s literary and religious context, particularly important for this former preacher banned from his pulpit (Reis, 24). Chapter Two explores a series of examples of the interaction between characters and their physical bodies. This begins with examining portrayals of characters synonymous with their bodies, before contrasting this with characters whose bodies appear differently than their inner selves. Chapter Two finishes by observing those characters whose physical forms alter throughout the course of the tale. As these different character-body interactions are observed, a marked separation between character and body emerges. In Chapter Three, the implications of this separation between character and body are explored. By writing such separations between the character and their body, MacDonald creates a space where further questions can be asked about our understanding of issues such as identity and mortality. Chapter Three begins with an analysis of the observations made in the first chapter, posing that MacDonald crafted characters consisting of an inner self and a physical body. This was then further explored through images of recognition in the tales, finding that characters are expected to recognize one another despite complete physical alterations; the inner self is able to know and be known. Chapter Three concludes by studying mortality in the tales, particularly MacDonald‘s portrayals of the possibility of life after death.
Intersections of language, landscape and the violated female body in the texts of Yvonne Vera
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2004-03) Murray, Jessica; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis will examine the way in which representations of landscape and the language of nationalist discourse contribute to the creation of an environment in which the female body is particularly vulnerable to violation. In her novels Without a Name, Under the Tongue and The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera identifies the extent to which the linguistic and representational legacies of colonialism, as well as the language and operational strategies of nationalism, conspire to facilitate the layered disempowerment and victimisation of women in Zimbabwe. Vera exposes the inconsistencies in the symbolic economy of colonialism and nationalism by problematising the equation of the African woman with the African landscape in the case of colonial discourse and by questioning the equation of the African woman with the good, nurturing and self-abnegating mother of the nation in the case of nationalist rhetoric. By articulating the experiences of her female protagonists, Vera makes it clear that the liberation of the Zimbabwean land from white minority rule does not necessarily lead to the liberation of the women who live and work on the land. Colonialism, nationalist movements and the wars that sought to reclaim the land that was appropriated in the imperial endeavour impacted men and women in very different ways. In order to voice the stories of women, Vera chooses to eschew conventional modes of writing and speaking since they are pervaded with metaphors that perpetuate the disempowerment of women. Instead, she attempts to develop a new discourse that amalgamates poetry and prose, orality and writing and innovation and tradition. She turns to the female body and engages with the Zimbabwean landscape in an alternative way in her attempt to speak the hitherto silenced stories of women. In doing so, Vera reclaims the subversive power of women's speech and silences within communities of women. The way in which women communicate in these distinctly female spaces forms the basis of the language Vera creates to tell of women's experiences of rape, incest and mutilation.
The metaphorics of erotic pursuit and sexual violence in classical mythology and its transformations by women poets
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Slabbert, Janie; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The portrayal of heterosexual desire in classical myth is often ambivalent, without clear distinctions between seduction and sexual violence. The sexual exploits of male gods like Zeus, Apollo and Poseidon are frequently described, as Kate Nichols observes, with the term “seduction,” though the unions commonly involve “sexual violence” (109). The underlying imagery on which these tales are built is the metaphor of the hunt, which casts the male as predator and the female as prey, and involves a relentless attempt to capture and possess the woman sexually. An example is the tale of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, where the god is compared to “a wolf” or “a lion,” the fleeing nymph to “a lamb” or “a deer” (Ovid 1.504-6). This portrayal of male desire as something that necessitates the overpowering of the female figure, often performed as an act of sexual violence, is revised by woman poets, who rewrite the tales of figures such as Daphne, Medusa and Leda in a manner that exposes this dynamic. In the word “revision” lies the concept of improving or rewriting, while the word mythopoeia is made up of the Greek words mythos (μῦθος), meaning “tale” or “story,” and poéia, semantically related to the verb poéõ (ποέω), meaning “to make,” which leads to the literal translation of “story-making,” or, as Alicia Ostriker and Deirdre Byrne word it, “mythmaking” (4, 71). When women writers engage in the making of myth by altering and transforming the original tales in their poetry, particularly in the case of accounts where distinctions between seduction and sexual violence are ambivalent, the lack of clarity that exists in the primary sources is erased through the creation of a new language and new focal points to effect their retellings. In the poetic re-appropriations of Medusa unpacked in this thesis, for instance, aspects such as rage, creative inspiration and sexuality are conveyed through the perspectives of female first-person speakers to grant the Gorgon a complexity and agency not present in the classical texts, whereas the revisions of Leda engage with the pertinent question of consent in all its capacities. Consequently, this thesis considers the perspectives of the female figures of classical myth through the poetic re-appropriations of H.D. (“Pursuit,” “Leda”), Edna St. Vincent Millay (“Daphne”), Anne Sexton (“Where I live in this Honorable House of the Laurel Tree”), Sylvia Plath (“On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad”), May Sarton (“The Muse as Medusa”), Carol Anne Duffy (“Medusa,” “Leda”), Amy Clampitt (“Medusa”), Eleanor Brown (“Leda, No Swan”) and Maxine Kumin (“Pantoum, with Swan”).
Monstrous losses and broken fairy tales : fantasy, loss and trauma in young adult literature
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Dabrowski, Stephanie Elizabeth; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the portrayal of loss and mourning in young adult fiction by analysing three contemporary examples, namely David Almond’s Skellig, Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls and Alexia Casale’s The Bone Dragon. In each of these novels the process of an adolescent protagonist coming to terms with a major loss or change, in itself a form of loss, is expressed and facilitated through the inclusion of a fantasy being that acts as a companion or guide within an otherwise realistic setting. While the fantasy elements draw from conventions in children’s fiction and forms such as the fairy tale, the complexity of their function in these novels, in which they give access to interiority by prompting the exploration of internal issues or as externalised manifestations of internal states, is also consistent with conventions of narrating trauma which, according to psychoanalysis, seeks expression but cannot be confronted directly. The thesis thus traces the way in which fantasy features in these young adult fictions, looking at the shift away from fantasy being uncritically accepted as it is in children’s fiction, a mode that is more consistent with magical realism, to the more ambiguous presence of fantasy in these young adult novels where fantasy can be read as an expression of psychological subjectivity and is more consistent with the fantastic. This allows for the exploration of difficult subject matter in a way that still resonates with children’s fiction, expressing the process of transition into adolescence. Theory on adolescent development, loss, mourning and trauma is thus brought together with theory on fantasy and fairy tales in order to critically analyse the way these novels deliberately draw on children’s fiction but move beyond it in terms of both the themes that are explored and the sophisticated use of fantasy to portray the internal confrontation with change and loss.
Representations of landscape and gender in Lady Anne Barnard's "Journal of a month's tour into the interior of Africa"
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2007-12) Collins, Brenda; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis will focus on Barnard’s representations of gender and landscape during her tour into the interior of the South of Africa. Barnard’s conscious representation of herself as a woman with many different social roles gives the reader insight into the developing gender roles at the time of an emerging feminism. On their tour, Barnard reports on four aspects of the interior, namely the state of cultivation of the land, the type of food and accommodation available in the interior, the possibilities for hunting and whether the colony will be a valuable acquisition for Britain. Barnard’s view of the landscape is representative of the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with control over and classification of nature. She values order and cleanliness in her vision of a domesticated landscape. She appropriates the land in wanting to make it useful and beautiful to the colonisers. However, her representations of the landscape, as well as its inhabitants, remain ambivalent in terms of the discourse of imperialism because she is unable to adopt an unequivocal colonial voice. Her complex interaction with the world of colonialism is illustrated by, on the one hand, her adherence to the desire to classify the inhabitants of the colony according to the eighteenth century’s fascination with classification and, on the other hand, her recognition of the humanity of the individuals with whom she interacts in a move away from the colonial stance.
Reza de Wet's channelling of the long nineteenth century on post-1994 South African stages
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Stander, Daniel Botha; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on Reza de Wet's channelling of the long nineteenth century on post-1994 stages. I conceptualise her adaptation and appropriation of nineteenth-century British and European literature as well as her performance of colonial history as a theatrical séance by which she revives the past to comment on contemporary white South African cultural identity. The Gothic, which is a central element of De Wet's work, informs my conceptual lens alongside two theoretical notions engaged with nineteenth-century rewrites: the neo-Chekhovian and the neo-Victorian. I use “neo-Chekhovian” to describe De Wet's transformation of Anton Chekhov's plays, The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) in A Russian Trilogy (Three Sisters Two, Yelena and On the Lake). I draw on specifically neo-Victorian notions such as revision and biofiction to analyse her reworking of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) into the unpublished play Heathcliff Goes Home. Lastly, I refer to theatre theorist Freddy Rokem's notion of performing history to discuss De Wet's neo-Victorian dramatisation of British colonial history in A Worm in the Bud and Two Plays: Fever and Concealment. The neo-Victorian is a relatively new field in South Africa and the theatre theoretical dimension thereof is still under-explored. My analysis of De Wet's work within this intellectual context will branch out its inquiries to contemporary South African theatre studies.
Trauma, healing, mourning and narrative voice in the epistolary mode
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-15) Louw, Bronwen Mairi; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The epistolary mode in fiction has long been associated with the expression of trauma experienced by women who are confined to a private, domestic and interior space. However, this mode also, paradoxically, opens up this space because the sending of a letter to an addressee invites the letter’s fictional recipient to act as witness to the letter writer’s account of her painful experiences. This thesis will, firstly, provide a brief historical overview of the development of epistolary fiction and will then set out to examine how epistolary narratives position the external reader in relation to the private exchange between narrator and trusted confidant. This voyeuristic position influences the way in which the text will be read regardless of the historical context in which the text is written. The period on which this thesis focuses is the 1980s to the turn of the millennium during which feminist ideals spread and found reflection in literature. This study analyses how Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) appropriated the epistolary mode to reveal and critique the silencing mechanisms suppressing its female narrators who write from within societies where multiple forms of marginalisation continue to constrain women and limit their engagement with the public sphere. Although the narrative voices of the two novels differ, both narrators use their letters to work through their experiences of trauma and heal through the process of sharing their recollections with another. In Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003) no such resolution is possible for its narrator writes to her husband who has been killed by their son. This thesis will demonstrate that Shriver’s novel, while sharing many of the features of the epistolary mode, unsettles the certainties that underpin the reader’s associations with the mode. Whereas Bâ’s and Walker’s novels affirm the importance of motherhood, female connections and self-determination for women, Shriver presents us with a pessimistic text with an ambivalent, unreliable narrative voice which calls these affirmations into question. Her novel uses the epistolary mode to show that motherhood is embedded in socio-political issues that continue to constrain women. We Need to Talk about Kevin inflects motherhood with the prominent debate about school shootings and its attendant culpabilities, as well as the narrator’s struggle with constructions of nationality, belonging and identity. This study will show that, as such, this text demonstrates a shift in how the epistolary mode is used. Its prior associations with healing from trauma through corresponding with an empathetic witness have made way for irremediable mourning and absolute isolation. The epistolary mode in this novel is used to articulate alienation from the historical precedents set by the mode itself.

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Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Ellis, Jeanne"

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