Masters Degrees (English)

Permanent URI for this collection

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

Browse

Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by Subject "African literature -- Criticism and interpretation"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    From ‘Apartheid’ to the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and beyond : the representation of childhood and youth in South African coming-of-age narratives
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Patterson, Rebecca Rachelle; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines the representation of childhood and youth in South African coming-of-age narratives set in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Although child and youth protagonists feature prominently in many South African literary texts, the trope of childhood has yet to be systematically and extensively examined by scholars. Thus, this research attempts to address this gap by surveying a wide-ranging selection of childhood narratives using a modified version of Franco Moretti‟s concept of „distant reading‟. The objective is to map something of the field of childhood and youth in South African texts in order to open it up to various analytical possibilities, hence making a useful contribution to this growing body of research. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of this thesis is the accompanying appendix, which comprises a list of two hundred and forty-five South African texts that feature the theme of childhood to varying degrees. Throughout this study, I approach childhood itself as a critical frame and locus of concern, rather than as a subsidiary trope or lens through which other themes and concepts are highlighted and thus take precedence. In order for this type of comprehensive analysis of childhood and youth to emerge, I investigate and interrogate five main binary oppositions (victim/perpetrator, child/adult, domestic/political, agency/powerlessness, and identity/ difference) that govern notions of childhood. These binaries form a major part of the analysis of apartheid and post-apartheid childhood texts in Chapters Two and Three respectively. One of the central arguments of this study is that despite the paradigmatically severed depictions of childhood that exist side by side (due to apartheid policies of segregation), childhood is nonetheless represented as a „site of struggle‟ regardless of the race, culture, or economic class of the young protagonist. I maintain that these „sites of struggle‟, which are often located within the aforementioned binaries, extend into the post-apartheid era, thus dissolving the utopian vision of a „rainbow nation‟ and a „new‟ South Africa.