Masters Degrees (English)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Green, Louise"

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    Alternative afterlives : secular expeditions to the undiscovered country
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-03) Adriaanse, Jaco Hennig; Green, Louise; Slabbert, Mathilda; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis investigates texts which are argued to construct secular imaginings of the afterlife. As such my argument is built around the way in which these texts engage with death, while simultaneously engaging with the religious concepts which have come to give shape to the afterlife in an increasingly secular West. The texts included are: Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907), Mark Twain’s unfinished reimagining of Christian salvation; Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998) by Etgar Keret, its filmic adaptation Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), as well as the Norwegian film A Bothersome Man (2006), which all strip the afterlife of its traditional furnishings; Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy (1995, 1997, 2000) in which he wages a fictional war with the foundations of Western religious tradition; and finally William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Feersum Endjinn (1994) by Iain M. Banks, two science fiction texts which speculate on the afterlife of the future. These texts are so chosen and arranged to create a logical progression of secular projects, each subsequent afterlife reflecting a more extensive and substantial distantiation from religious tradition. Twain’s text utilises a secularising satire of heaven, and draws attention to the irrational notions which pervade this concept. In the process, however, it embarks on the utopian endeavour of reconstructing and improving the Christian afterlife of salvation. In Chapter 3, the narratives under investigation discard the surface details of religious afterlives, and reimagine the hereafter against a contemporary backdrop. I argue that they conform, in several significant ways, to the mode of magical realism. Furthermore, despite their disinclination for evident religiosity, these texts nevertheless find problematic encounters when they break this mode and invoke higher authorities to intervene in the unfolding narratives. Chapter 4 focuses on Philip Pullman’s high fantasy trilogy, which enacts open war between the secular and religious and uses the afterlife as an integral part of the secularising agenda. With the literal battle lines drawn, this text depicts a clear distinction between what is included as secular, or renounced as religious. Finally, I turn to science fiction, where the notion of the virtual afterlife of the future has come to be depicted, with its foundations in human technologies instead of divine agencies. They rely on the ideology of posthumanism in a reimagining of the afterlife which constitutes a new apocalyptic tradition, a virtual kingdom of heaven populated by the virtual dead. Ultimately, I identify three broad, delineating aspects of secularity which become evident in these narratives and the meaningful distinctions they draw between religious and secular ideologies. I find further significance in the way in which these texts engage with the very foundations on which fictions of the afterlife have been constructed. Throughout these texts, I then find a secular approach to death as a developing alternative to that which has traditionally been propagated by religion.
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    From Solastalgia to Soliphilia : reimagining home in the Anthropocene in Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-12) Vosloo, Robert Roux; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, I aim to study the relationship between home environments and solastalgia during the Anthropocene. I shall argue that it is fruitful to interpret this relationship through the medium of cinema, and through the lens of eco-film criticism in particular. I have selected three significant films to work with for the sake of my argument. These are Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film mother!, Paul Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed and Wanuri Kahiu’s 2009 short film Pumzi. One consequence of the Anthropocene is the increasing rate of climate change, which poses a direct threat to Earth as a home environment. “Solastalgia” is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Australia, and retired Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. Solastalgia refers to the psychic condition a person suffers from when their home environment is under immediate threat. The Anthropocene, in this case, refers to the idea of a geological epoch in which humanity controls, moves and converts resources more than any other group or force on Earth. The scale of this resource manipulation can be comprehended when considering the fact that the human-made materials on Earth now weigh more than the matter untouched by humanity. I argue that each film achieves a unique effect via its use of filmic techniques. In mother!, this technique relates to the aesthetics of disaster and desolation, as well as to Cara Nine’s reading of home in her article “The Wrong of Displacement: The Home as Extended Mind.” In the chapter on First Reformed , I examine Schrader’s use of transcendental style and the way it links to the powerlessness that solastalgia leads to for different characters. In the chapter on Pumzi, the director’s depiction of action-based approaches and its relation to Albrecht’s concept of soliphilia (love for the maintenance and reparation of home spaces) will be addressed. This will be done in relation to Kenyan environmental activist, Wangari Maathai’s ideas surrounding the “Green Belt Movement.” All of this will be done to envision possible ways of exiting the Anthropocene and entering a new era, referred to by Albrecht as the “Symbiocene” – an age that emphasizes the interconnectedness of nature and culture.
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    Nihil moralia: culture industries in the 21st Century
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Roux, Louis; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Utilising the works of Theodor W. Adorno (especially Minima Moralia (1951)) and other Critical Theorists, this dissertation examines and critiques contemporary cultural products, in search of cultural alternatives to the capital-driven ideologies and mythologies of the ‘global village’. Through an exploration of everything from animal abuse in Pokémon to cell phone advertisements and African e-waste dumping sites, to social media and the growing political alienation/radicalisation of the youth, Nihil Moralia seeks to show that the most deeply reprehensible ideas of our society are the ones that are the most profligate, and perhaps the most deeply held. This wide-ranging yet deeply interconnected critique is made possible by the use of Adorno’s aphoristic style and form, most clearly seen in Minima Moralia. With the deep and apparently irreversible entrenchment of free market capitalism, with the ecological crisis looming large, and with workers suffering more than ever, I believe it is time to reinvestigate the questions that Adorno put to his contemporaries about culture, industry, progress and ethics, and to ask them again. I hope to illuminate – in some ways, negatively – some of our contemporary moral/ethical predicaments, and suggest that if we have any hope of surviving the century, we have to become a radically different society.
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    Picturing South Africa : an exploration of ekphrasis in post-apartheid fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Pretorius, Jana Lorraine; Green, Louise; Jones, Megan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa's period of transition has given rise to new forms of cultural and artistic production, which both speak to and reflect the nation's changing social, political and ethical climate. This dissertation explores a narrative form which remains relatively uncharted in current critical conversations about post-apartheid fiction, namely ekphrasis, or the textual re-presentation of visual art. Although ekphrastic narration can be traced to the Classical antiquity, it has also emerged in seminal post-1994 texts, including Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Patricia Schonstein's Skyline (2000) and Ivan Vladislavić's The Exploded View (2004). Consequently, this study considers how the authors have used ekphrasis to represent the 'new' South Africa, as it undergoes the precarious process of transformation. Beginning with an analysis of Mda's novel, I survey how the author employs pre-existing artworks created by the Flemish Expressionist painter-priest, Frans Claerhout, as a means of performatively rewriting the nation's troubled past, and engaging with the contemporary context of national reinvention. Specifically, I consider how the transliteration of these images serves to re-imagine the identities of black women publicly shamed and privately violated under apartheid's hegemonic ideologies. In so doing, I foreground how Claerhout's mystical protest paintings become central to the author's own narrative project of recovery, restoration and remembrance. Building on this, the chapter thereafter explores how the artworks also provide rich imaginative templates which enable Mda's narrative to challenge the social fractures and dissonances of the post-1994 transitional period. Focusing on the artist's hybridised formal aesthetic, I suggest that the ekphrasised paintings model the conditions for psychic and social transformation; consequently, their presence signals a need for malleability, improvisation and renewal, in order to rework the available categories of South African identity, and the broader socio-cultural landscape. Schonstein's Skyline, in turn, incorporates notional ekphrasis, or imaginary visual artwork, to represent South Africa's new social order based on the principles of Ubuntu. Chapter Three therefore considers how the ekphrastic pieces unsettle homogeneous paradigms of nationality, and serve to envision an inclusive, hospitable and multicultural public home-space. Diverging from Mda's and Schonstein's use of ekphrasis as a positive imperative toward transformation, however, Vladislavić's text offers a despairing portrayal of contemporary South African life. Accordingly, my final chapter explores how the fictional artworks accentuate the shortcomings of our democracy, and reinvigorate an awareness of the marginalised lives rendered invisible within the country's increasingly globalised and culturally opaque urban spaces. These ekphrastic readings illustrate, in various ways, how South African authors have specifically drawn on the visual arts to represent the post-apartheid condition in their own works, as the nation attempts to reinvent itself in the wake of a traumatic past. Thus, the study foregrounds how this synthesis of literary and visual art lends itself to opening new or alternative dialogues, critical frameworks and self-reflective spaces in contemporary transitional narratives, and indeed, within the present historical moment.
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    A queer (re) turn to nature? : environment, sexuality and cinema
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-12) Olivier, Francois; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is in interested in the potential of (New) Queer Cinema, with its often cited subversive qualities, as a means to delineate the historical and discursive dimensions of an ongoing relationship between the politics of nature and sexual politics, and to articulate the complex array of ideas that result from this relationship. In this thesis, I investigate how a selection of films actively reproduce, question, deconstruct, or reinforce particular constructions of nature and/or epistemologies of (homo)sexuality, often demonstrating such ideas through particular expressive modes, such as nostalgia, mourning, melancholia, and postmodern play, and by referencing certain literary forms, such as the pastoral, georgic and elegy. To facilitate the analysis I outline above, I have chosen to investigate three films which enable me to move from national to transnational and postcolonial cinematic contexts. I read these films alongside a selection of literary/historical texts that I feel inform or preface each filmic text. The first film is James Ivory’s adaptation (1987) of E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice. The second is Derek Jarman’s elegiac film, The Garden (1990), which I read alongside the English filmmaker’s journal, Modern Nature (1991). And finally for my third chapter I turn to the work of Canadian filmmaker, John Greyson; specifically Proteus (2003), his recent collaboration with South African activist/filmmaker, Jack Lewis. This final filmic text prompts questions of postcoloniality and Eurocentric modes of knowledge production. I provide context for my argument by outlining recent developments in the history of Queer Cinema and by introducing two distinct but related areas of recent academic enquiry – firstly the notion of Queer Ecology (alongside related studies on the “gay pastoral”) and, secondly, the field of Green Film Criticism or Ecocinema.