Masters Degrees (English)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Mbao, Wamuwi"

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    Absence as narrational trope in the fictionalised transliteration of experience : a discussion of Dominique Botha's False River
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-12) Visser, Lisa Marie; Mbao, Wamuwi; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Dominique Botha‟s False River, published simultaneously with the rewritten Afrikaans text Valsrivier in 2013, is a fictionalised memoir presented as a novel that is written into the tradition of the plaasroman. The text follows the lives of the Bothas of Rietpan in the Free State and spans the years between 1980 and 1997. In this thesis I discuss the novel focussing on questions surrounding narration and its affirmation or negation of agency, embodiment and subjectivity, the narrative construction of the Botha family‟s isolating liberalism in its present post-apartheid context, and the perception of the author and the novel by Afrikaans and English literary communities. I explore the text‟s relationship to genre, drawing on J.M. Coetzee‟s examination of the literary pastoral in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. It is through this theoretical lens that I argue that False River depicts a conflicted, inconsistent and perforated view of Afrikaner identity and its relationship to gender, notions of landed belonging, Afrikaans-English linguistic co-habitation, and black subjectivity, in an agrarian landscape that dominates through anthropopsychism and primogeniture.
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    The spectral being of whiteness : exploring the presence of under-examined whiteness through the work of Clarice Lispector
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Swanepoel, Zane; Mbao, Wamuwi; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The lack of critical examination of whiteness and white racial identity in the work of Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) is reflective of a larger social and scholarly issue in Brazil and in English scholarship globally, in which whiteness is maintained as hegemony through maintaining the invisibility of whiteness. The presence of under-examined whiteness in Lispector’s work is most notably highlighted in Lucia Villares’ 2011 book entitled Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through the Work of Bessie Head and Toni Morrison, and is a key text in the development of this thesis. The universalisation of Lispector as a writer for [white] humanity is a conflation of the tendency of whiteness to maintain its unracialized social category through universalizing techniques found in religion, in writing and narrative authority, and through consumer capitalism. Brazil’s racial democracy enforced a silence on race and racism that allowed for the entrenchment of institutionalized racism through the negation of race, a negation that is dualistically intertwined in the ‘hyperconsciousness of race’ (Vargas, 2004). This thesis seeks to investigate some of these moments of under-examined whiteness in Lispector’s work, and in so doing, will attempt to highlight the mechanisms (namely through religion, narrative power, and capitalism) which allow for the maintenance of the hegemony of whiteness and its reach of power.
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    Stigma and the metaphorics of language : reading disease as dis-ease and reclaiming metaphor in selected contemporary South African literature
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Schneider, Carron; Mbao, Wamuwi; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Contemporary South African literature dealing with HIV/AIDS and depression serves to interrogate and expose the racist ideological foundations for the stigmatic language of metaphor which surrounds these diseases. There is an increasing literary urgency and necessity for a reimaging, retracing and rewriting of the language(s) of metaphor which surround these diseases not only in the South African literary context, but also in the greater socio-political context of the country. This thesis ultimately concludes that the South African literary works offered for study work toward reclaiming metaphor by re-appropriating the same linguistic building blocks from which stigma, as language of metaphor, has been itself constructed. In so doing, this study concludes, these authors effectively write toward a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of both HIV/AIDS and depression.