Browsing by Author "Stander, Daniel Botha"

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    Reza de Wet (1952-2012) : life and works
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Stander, Daniel Botha; Viljoen, Shaun; Oppelt, Riaan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Reza Wet, one of South Africa’s most awarded playwrights, reputed, both locally and internationally, for her prodigious body of work, passed away in 2012 and yet her life as a writer, actress, director and scholar is sparsely documented and under researched. Apart from Erika Terblanche’s writer’s profile on the website Litnet, no serious attempt has been made to properly document De Wet’s upbringing, education and career as an actress, academic scholar, lecturer, and theatre professional and no study has been made at all of the thriving afterlife of her works abroad. This exemplifies J.C. Kannemeyer’s observation that biographies of South African authors are remarkably rare (83). This thesis aims to map De Wet’s intellectual and artistic development within the context of South African theatre and literary studies and history and to analyse her work’s unique position within these fields. It places a special emphasis on De Wet’s idiosyncratic Jungian psychoanalytic poetics and reads her oeuvre as an expression of a psyche in search of greater self-knowledge. To this end it relies on a combination of close reading and archival research to conduct an encompassing life-works analysis by which De Wet’s life history is the favoured source underpinning an interpretation of the works, while the work remains the central focus of the thesis at large. This project will hopefully contribute to the expansion of South African theatre and literary auto/biographical archives.
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    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.