Browsing by Author "Britz, Carmi"
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- ItemDie kartering van ’n distopiese Suid-Afrika in Lien Botha se Wonderboom (2015)(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Britz, Carmi; Visagie, Andries Gerhardus; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Afrikaans and Dutch.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study researches Lien Botha’s novel Wonderboom (2015) and how the narrative and paratextual elements produce different visual and textual cartographies of a dystopian South Africa. The different storylines are interwoven with South African history and geography. The mappings form an image of a dystopian society and are told achronologically. This study utilises Timothy Morton’s ecocritical concept of dark ecology as well as Franco Moretti’s model of distant reading to analyse the narrative and visual mappings. Botha plays with the idea of a place and a person’s remembrance of that place. Magriet Vos (the protagonist) lives in a South Africa that is on the brink of collapse, but she also lives in an imagined world (in her memories). The visual inserts in Wonderboom are metatextual references to Botha’s Parrot Jungle-exhibition (2009), Yonder-exhibition (2014) and private photographs that visually map the journey. The plotlines produce a literary cartography. South Africa’s existing cartography is remapped narratively, cognitively, and visually by Magriet. It correlates and differs from the existing cartographical illustration of South Africa. The protagonist’s fading memory influences her cartography: the mapping of the country correlates with her memory of that place. She becomes a cataloguer of individual and collective history which she maps throughout her travels. The thesis analyses the different of mappings presented and observed in the novel. The textual elements in the novel are categorised and explained. Wonderboom consists of different plotlines which are extricated. The plotlines form a master narrative. Together the construction of Magriet’s travels in the different plotlines and smaller mappings form a dystopian mapping of South Africa. The study concludes that the mixing of close- and distant reading produces a richer textual analysis because it focuses on the macro and micro level. The narrative can differ from the visual paratextual elements. The different mappings researched indicate that there are gaps in the protagonist’s narrative. The mapping reflects or rejects the protagonist’s spatial awareness. This study draws a map of Magriet’s travels which differs from the map that is included in the novel. Wonderboom (2015) maps a future that is dystopian due to humans’ destructive nature which has far-reaching ecological consequences.