Masters Degrees (English)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/606

Browse

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Embedded subjectivity in the work of J.M. Coetzee
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2007-03) Smuts, Merriman Eckard; Klopper, Dirk; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is the result of an immersion in the work of J.M. Coetzee. I have taken various of Coetzee’s novels, namely Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg, Foe, Life & Times of Michael K and Slow Man, and constructed readings of these novels from the inside out. The overarching concern of the dissertation is the notion of subjectivity and Coetzee’s methods of representing subjectivity. It is my contestation that the experience of authentic subjective awareness arises from the process of reading itself. It is not a state of being that is described by the text, but rather a layered constellation of substitutive exchanges that emerges from the process of textual relation. The notion of embeddedness serves as a description of the way in which the text materializes this experience of subjectivity. The structure of exploration in each chapter has taken as its paradigm a conceptual concern arising from the text itself. In the first chapter (Elizabeth Costello) the concern is with structure itself. The character of Elizabeth struggles against the limitation inherent in the process of representation; this struggle is read as an indication of authentic subjective experience in the face of reduction to a system of codes. The second chapter (Disgrace) attempts to formulate the dynamic of subjective awareness in romantic terms. I construct a reading of Lurie’s predicament in terms that arise from his conceptual environment, in order to indicate the primacy of textual materiality as the locus of subjective awareness. The notion of the classic informs the third chapter (The Master of Petersburg). I use an essay by Coetzee to delineate a conception of the classic, which is then applied as a theoretical framework for an exploration of Dostoevsky’s pursuit of his stepson. The fourth and last chapter (Foe, Life & Times of Michael K and Slow Man) focuses on Coetzee’s use of the body as a figure for embedded subjectivity. It emerges that the body as a trope of embeddedness forms an important aspect of Coetzee’s work throughout his career. As such it is a very suitable figure for describing the dynamics of embeddedness as a mode of representation that aligns itself with the textual materiality of subjective being.
“A life lived in cages”: strategies of containment in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of iron, Life & times of Michael K, Elizabeth Costello: eight lessons and “The poetics of reciprocity”
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009-12) Van Heerden, Imke; Klopper, Dirk; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In its conversations with four texts by J.M. Coetzee – Age of Iron (1990), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) as well as the critical essays published in Doubling the Point, “The Poetics of Reciprocity” (1992) – this thesis will demonstrate the manner in which the singularities of each of these texts prompt, expand and challenge the framework that sustains its reading of Coetzee’s fiction. Whereas some critical methodologies seek to eliminate the characteristic indeterminacy of Coetzee’s fiction, imprisoning his novels in a contextual cage, this thesis demonstrates an allegiance to the primacy of the literary text together with a concern with the ethics of reading. The thesis proposes – in both content and form – an inductive ‘style of reading’ concerned with the continuous modification of its own strategies according to the ‘internal logics of the text’. I first encountered the term, ‘confinement’, in relation to Coetzee in an unpublished conference paper by Lucy Graham, “‘It is hard to keep out of the camps’: Areas of confinement in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee”. Graham’s paper focuses on the different camps, the ‘different circles of hell’, in Life & Times of Michael K especially, mentioning that ‘images of the camp resonate throughout Coetzee’s most recent fiction’. Although this thesis considers a variety of concrete and conceptual camps as well, it rather places predominant emphasis on the relationship between reader and literary text, which is examined in terms of two forms of delimitation, confinement and containment. This study identifies its style of reading as a ‘containment’ rather than a ‘confinement’. The term is intended to evoke an adaptable, constructive delineation of Coetzee’s fiction that involves a reciprocal relationship between reader and/or critic and text. As the thesis’s primary conceptual tool, one that I will argue is both solicited and thematised in Coetzee’s fiction, containment refers not only to a style of reading, but also to any reciprocal relationship, any mutual exchange. It applies to the relationship between genres (realism and metafiction) and ‘reality’ in Age of Iron; between text and reader in Life & Times of Michael K; between self and other in Elizabeth Costello; and between text and critic in “The Poetics of Reciprocity”. The notion of containment accepts the critical challenge posed by Coetzee’s fiction to engage with what Derek Attridge would call each ‘singular event’ or ‘act of literature’ on its own terms.
Separate and warring selves : identity crises in Africa in Shiva Naipaul's "North of South: an African journey"
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009-12) Coetsee, Jarryd; Klopper, Dirk; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This project seeks to analyze the representation of identities in Shiva Naipaul's travel narrative North of South: An African Journey (1978) as encoded in the binaries of primitive / traditional; civilized / modern; settler / native; civic / tribal and neo-colonial / liberated. By analyzing this select series of identities, this project aims to explore the fractured nature of identity as constructed in the post-colony. It will argue that the identities are rendered unstable by the ungrounded nature of the post-colonial space in which they are located. Naipaul concludes his travel narrative by qualifying the postcolonial situation as an abortion of Western civilization in the trope of Conrad's Kurtz. Naipaul implies that any identity in Africa is a simulacrum, a phantom double, a copy of something that was not there to begin with. He attempts to articulate the diverse cultures that he encounters as though he were apart from them without recognizing that he is essentially and inextricably a part of the various cultural articulations themselves. It is easy to criticize Naipaul, therefore, as a non-starter. With the advantages of hindsight, however, it is possible for the contemporary reader to recognize these instabilities as evidence of the post-modern phenomenon in which reality is not an absolute. As a modernist writer, Naipaul's efforts to understand these instabilities of identity as an articulation of culture are circumvented by a Sisyphean struggle wherein he attempts to establish a sense of ontological alterity in the narrative yet implicates himself, as well as his invocation of archival literature and hence his ultimate position of disillusionment, hopelessness and doom.
Solitude, suffering, and creativity in three existentialist novels
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009-12) Boag, Cara Ingrid; Klopper, Dirk; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: As existent beings, we identify with the world through our thoughts and perceptions. Man is driven to seek meaning by the very complexities and contradictions of existence. As self-conscious beings, we cannot live without a sense of awareness and understanding. Creativity allows an individual to develop a unique understanding of the nature and destiny of man. This study draws attention to writers who were able to transcend their external environment and immerse themselves in a setting where man’s individuality is fundamental to living an authentic life. Camus, Dostoevsky and Kafka made every effort to live consciously and authentically. They believed that inwardness was not to be defined by an external, social setting, but rather through an intimacy of consciousness. This awareness and unveiling of being enables us to create meaning. These authors removed their social mantles and were willing to sacrifice acceptance in the pursuit of this cause. They believed that every man has a responsibility to live an individual and authentic life. This psychological and even physical isolation is not easy, however, and often causes much suffering. Using existentialism as a framework, this thesis will focus on solitariness, suffering and creativity, all of which point to the importance of individual consciousness rather than living a life of societal pressures and conformity.
"Stealing the story, salvaging the she" : feminist revisionist fiction and the bible
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-12) Goosen, Adri; Steiner, Tina; Klopper, Dirk; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis analyses six novels by different women writers, each of which rewrites an originally androcentric biblical story from a female perspective. These novels are The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, The Garden by Elsie Aidinoff, Leaving Eden by Ann Chamberlin, The Moon under her Feet by Clysta Kinstler, The Wild Girl by Michelle Roberts and Wisdom’s Daughter by India Edghill. By classifying these novels as feminist revisionist fiction, this study considers how they both subvert and revise the biblical narratives they are based on in order to offer readers new and gynocentric alternatives. With the intention of establishing the significance of such an endeavor, the study therefore employs the findings of feminist critique and theology to expose how the Bible, as a sexist text, has inspired, directly or indirectly, many of the patriarchal values that govern Western society and religion. Having established how biblical narratives have promoted and justified visions of women as marginal, subordinate and outside the realm of the sacred, we move on to explore how feminist rewritings of such narratives might function to challenge and transform androcentric ideology, patriarchal myth and phallocentric theology. The aim is to show that the new and different stories constructed within these revisionist novels re-conceptualise and re-imagine women, their place in society and their relation to the divine. Thus, as the title suggests, this thesis ultimately considers how women writers ‘steal’ the original biblical stories and transform them in ways that prove liberating for women.
V.S. Naipaul : homelessness and exiled identity
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2008-12) Cader, Roshan; Klopper, Dirk; Ramal, Ashraf; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
Thinking through notions of homelessness and exile, this study aims to explore how V.S. Naipaul engages with questions of the construction of self and the world after empire, as represented in four key texts: The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. These texts not only map the mobility of the writer traversing vast geographical and cultural terrains as a testament to his nomadic existence, but also follow the writer’s experimentation with the novel genre. Drawing on postcolonial theory, modernist literary poetics, and aspects of critical and postmodern theory, this study illuminates the position of the migrant figure in a liminal space, a space that unsettles the authorising claims of Enlightenment thought and disrupts teleological narrative structures and coherent, homogenous constructions of the self. What emerges is the contiguity of the postcolonial, the modern and the modernist subject. This study engages with the concepts of “double consciousness” and “entanglements” to foreground the complex web and often conflicting temporalities, discourses and cultural assemblages affecting postcolonial subjectivities and unsettling narratives of origin and authenticity. While Naipaul seeks to address questions of postcolonial identity, his oeuvre is simultaneously entangled within the Anglophone literary tradition. The texts in this study foreground the convergence of the politics of writing and the politics of subjectivity. Through continuous re-writing of the self, the past and history, Naipaul focuses on the fragmentary, the partiality of knowledge and the obscurity of the present to evince the continuous renewal of subjectivities. His narratives enact deep feelings of despair and melancholy that attend the migrant position in the current age of mass migrations, technological advancement, militarism, and essentialised ethnocentrisms and cultural constructions. In his poetics of exile, he endorses the particular over the universal. His commitment to a “politics of difference” underscores the texts in this study and serves to foreground Naipaul’s position of otherness.
“The weight of my skeleton is my only honesty” : language and the speaking body in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-03) Levinrad, Ester; Klopper, Dirk; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis proposes a detailed study of the novel Agaat by South African author Marlene van Niekerk (first published 2004). A particular focus throughout is on constructions of identity and subjectivity, and the novel is considered as writing within and against both the Realist tradition as well as the South African genre of the plaasroman and/or farm novel. The translation of the novel into English by Michiel Heyns (published 2006) is used as primary text, which furthermore raises questions of language and interpretation already implicit in the narrative, questions which provide a compelling filter for reading the novel in its entirety. In the Introduction, I briefly delineate the novel’s storyline. This serves to introduce the novel’s thematic concerns and outlines the linguistic complexities which emerge as a result of the novel’s structure. An exposition on Realism in the novel follows, where I suggest how a consideration of the Realist tradition might be useful in exploring the mimetic effect in Agaat. Next the appearance and history of the plaasroman and farm novel in South African literature is considered. In Chapter One, the novel’s structural elements are examined in greater detail, through a close analysis of the five different narrative voices of the novel. I suggest that the novel is an elaborate study of identity and subjectivity which simultaneously uproots questions of voice and authorship. While the subject matter of the novel and the attention to details of farming and the physical environment makes it seem a near-historical record and places Agaat within the genre of the plaasroman, the effect of the different voices of the novel is to undercut fundamentally any stable narrative authority. Agaat is nevertheless an incredible compendium of the nitty-gritty of life. In Chapter Two I explore the manner in which the body and the self are located within a very particular landscape and setting. How and for what purpose is subjectivity and identity refracted and articulated through metaphors of space and the experiences of place? In the course of a close reading of the novel, I draw on broadly post-structuralist conceptions of language, as well as South African critics’ writing on the genre of the plaasroman. The third and final chapter examines the novel Agaat in translation. Agaat is a deeply literary novel, drawing on a remarkably wide lexicon of cultural references, suffused with questions of interpretation and a compelling and complex inquiry of language. The English translation by Michiel Heyns remains a novel of and about Afrikaans. Quite how this is achieved raises questions of translation pertaining both to the ‘postcolonial’, if one reads South Africa as such, and to the specifically local. To this end, a brief context to translation and language politics within the ‘postcolonial’ and South Africa is considered, before engaging in a closer examination of the techniques by which Agaat was translated from Afrikaans into English. I conclude with remarks regarding the success of the translation into English and suggest that the translation is masterful but that its most striking characteristics depend on a local South African reader.

Browse

Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Klopper, Dirk"

Results Per Page

Sort Options