Doctoral Degrees (English)

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The application and modification of human resource management in the critical analysis of Harry Potter
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Cox, Alexia Georgina; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis revisits the much-discredited idea of a “common sense” way of reading a literary text. It proposes that a common sense reading – one that treats narrative fictions as reflections of the real world, and that focuses on the didactic message of the story – can provide particular kinds of insights about social life. Such insights are not readily available to the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterise literary and cultural studies in the academy today. The case study for this exercise is J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series, and the theoretical wager advanced in this thesis is that Human Resource Management (HRM) theory can act as a powerful, if unconventional, tool for exploring common sense assumptions about human behaviour in the context of neoliberal Western culture. In order to conduct this kind of theoretical experiment, it is necessary for a narrative to comply with three components: (1) a formal institution must be present; (2) the institution can be regarded as a learning organization, (3) there is a clearly articulated common objective against which to compare and analyse individual behaviour. By ensuring that these three components are present in the narrative, the language of HRM, its theory and general practices, can be retooled for a specialised form of literary analysis that provides insight into common sense assumptions that circulate in present-day society. This can be achieved by applying four HRM relatable topics: (1) organizational structure, (2) organizational culture, (3) identity and emotional intelligence and (4) leadership. This thesis demonstrates how organizational structure theory can be used to identify Hogwarts, the fictional school, as a bureaucratic institution. By positioning the fictional characters within this specific framework, it becomes possible to determine various culturally mediated dispositions by analysing the bureaucratic structure in light of the issues typical of such a structure in HRM theory. HRM theory, then, provides a language for thinking about the historical context and the impact of environmental forces on Hogwarts in a way that employs the fictional school as a didactic model that speaks to real-world situations. Simultaneously, the application of HRM theory allows us a unique way of thinking about narrative design and plot development in relation to institutional processes. In other words, HRM theory allows us to consider the possible connections between a fictional environment and the real world, while also providing us with an unusual approach to narratology: one that thinks about literary actors, functions, narrative development and so on in relation to the idea of an institution or organisation. HRM processes such as recruitment, career development, performance management etc. can find surprising applications in literary analysis, especially when benchmarked against scholarly findings about British national culture and its predominantly neoliberal economic base. In general, this thesis argues that it is not only possible to apply general HRM theory language, theory, and practice to an apposite narrative, but also that this theory can serve as a viable tool for surfacing and critiquing particular cultural assumptions embedded in a text. Such a critique can be called a “common sense” critique because it is not based on a hidden foundation such as class conflict, the operation of the unconscious or the concealed structure of the sign, but instead on empirically based, practical scholarly observations working in the service of institutional efficiency.
Appraising the counterpoint : bifocal readings of literary landscapes in the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-03) Theron, Cleo Beth; Jones, Megan; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study constitutes an experimental bifocal reading that was prompted by historical and literary parallels and convergences between the United States and South Africa. In particular, the study demonstrates several thematic similarities between literature produced during the “American Renaissance” in the mid-nineteenth century and post-apartheid South Africa. Bifocalism is based on conceptions of world literature as 1) a domain that brings into contact texts from different geographical contexts, and 2) a mode of reading comparatively. Bifocalism is employed in conjunction with Edward Said’s characterisation of contrapuntalism, a means to reappraiselong-standing interpretations or bring to the fore subtle or occluded features of one text through a reading of another placed alongside it. Each chapter is devoted to a textual pairing that is based on similarities between the socio-historical contexts of the American Renaissance and the post-apartheid period. Chapter One looks at Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843(1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: VisitingAncestral Sites(2008),two female-authored travel narratives that engage with the effects of European expansion on the frontier and the resultant displacement of indigenous communities. Chapter Two focuses on inherited land among descendants of European settlers and the legacies of political and judicial injustices that helped to construct whites’ occupation of the land as a given while eliding the presence of those who inhabited the land before them. It analyses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic story, The House of the Seven Gables(1851),and Michiel Heyns’s translationof Marlene van Niekerk’s Afrikaans plaasroman, Agaat(2006). Chapter Three concerns myths of paradisiacal landscapes, how these are employed to legitimise claims of landownership and how mixed bloodlines complicate such claims in its reading of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter(1853) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story(2000). Chapter Four analyses Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative My Bondage and My Freedom(1855) and Aziz Hassim’s historical novel Revenge of Kali(2009) to compare depictions of imported labour. The chapter juxtaposes Douglass’ view on slavery and Hassim’s depiction of indentured labour to compare their texts’ representations of national belonging for those who worked on plantations. The bifocal readings are anchored in the significant body of comparative work that has already been done on American and South African society and literature. Attention to these literary contexts reveals that they have in common concerted efforts to put in writing the circumstances of a purportedly new nation built on the principles of democracy. I argue that such attempts are frequently addressed in these two eras by means of the motifs of land and landscape (the latter being the aesthetic configuration of the former). I analyse how land, as a deeply contested phenomenon in both countries in the periods under consideration, is used by writers to depict national struggles pertaining to democracy, national newness, identity and belonging.
Biafra as third space : reading the politics of belonging in Nigeria-Biafra civil war literature
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) David, Stephen Temitope; Viljoen, Shaun; Mbao, Wamuwi; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The image of Biafra as a space of belonging has assumed currency in contemporary secessionist discourse. Wartime Biafran society is framed as a utopia where everyone belonged and felt safe. Consequently, this framing has birthed a robust following among Igbo youths who desperately seek an alternative to the ‘unfriendly’ Nigerian space. This deployment of memory/remembrance stirs up a need to question how people belonged within Biafra as well as the dimensions of violence that being ‘an outsider within’ might have created during the war. Thus, this thesis examines the representation of un/belonging in Biafra in selected literary texts to map the violence and layers of exclusion which the politics of belonging generates. This is to map and listen to those marginal voices that often ‘fall through the cracks’ in the war’s historicity. I employ Nira Yuval-Davis’s situated intersectionality as my methodological anchor in teasing out the unique experiences of vulnerable ‘Biafrans’ who were differently located within the wartime society as ‘outsiders within’ due to their ethnicity, gender, age, ability/disability, sexuality and class. I pay attention to the ways in which the interaction of these axes of identity creates characters whose fraught narratives of unbelonging spill outside the binary narrative frame of Nigeria-Biafra which is mostly deployed in writing and reading popular histories of the conflict. My reading is further moored to Nira-Yuval Davis’ conception of the politics of belonging and Homi Bhabha’s idea of third space. I position literary texts as my canvas in engaging with Biafra and Biafranness due to the poignant way fictional narratives represent private suffering. I read nine fictional narratives and two memoirs to curate a conversation between literature and history as ‘cotexts.’ Memoirs are selected across victims/hegemons divide to question the politics of memory and remembrance. I have selected texts written by erstwhile Biafrans due to the intimate manner in which they narrate the Biafran experience, and to facilitate my aim of listening to Biafran voices and stories. My aim is to get a more nuanced reading of the ‘Biafran’ experience by bringing the victims into conversation with the power brokers in wartime Biafra. The study finds that the unavowed narratives of Biafra that are trapped within the binary approach are revelatory of the excess which plagues most hegemonic accounts of the war. Within these stories from in-between, which I have framed as third space stories, the idea of Biafra as a homely space is unsettled to reveal the multiple forms of violence deployed against characters caught at the margins of belligerent positions in order to police belonging, ensure dogmatic solidarity, and to smelt a linear Biafran identity. These stories that emerge from the interstices of the Nigeria-Biafra dichotomy indicate that adopting an intersectional frame in thinking about the civil war produces a much more nuanced encounter with Biafra. More importantly, the voices that come to light within this mode of reading speak of excess and absences in a way that calls attention to an unfinished business of mourning and healing. They speak of a lack of return in the post-war moment, and of a continuity of trauma which is tied to a ruptured sense of belonging. These voices, and the stories they tell, also reveal that by creating spaces for narrative engagements where speaking and listening can thrive, unencumbered by hagiographical histories, a measure of belonging could blossom.
Biography of a vanished community : South End, Port Elizabeth
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Hendricks, Shaheed; Viljoen, S.; Grundlingh, A.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study attempts to construct a biography of the community of South End, Port Elizabeth, in space and time. This project arises from a need to understand the birth, growth, zenith, decline and demise of this community. The need also exists to capture aspects of the heritage, history, experiences and perceptions of South End. A biographical approach will be used rather than a historical one because aspects of the lives of individuals are reconstructed as part of the life of a place. Furthermore, the study will deal with lives collectively of former residents of South End in its different facets, namely emotional, experiential, political, social and others. The community will thus be viewed as a complex and multi-faceted being. The intention here is to gather as much relevant information as possible on the historical, social, geographical and cultural context of the life of the community. This study will also explore what constitutes biographical writing and in what respect this biography differs from the traditional understanding of the term biography. A number of aspects namely history, the subjects and the subjects in relation to the community are explored in reconstructing this community. History forms an important aspect of this study, therefore it deals with issues such as what constitutes history and how it is written; a brief overview of the history of Port Elizabeth and the emergence of South End as a community and key legislation that affected the community. In addition to this the focus will also be on geographical space and specifically on the relationship between space and identity and space and community. The emphasis will be on the question of identifying how the individual identity is constituted in relation to community and how the individual assumes complex subject positions. Lastly, this study will focus on the discoveries I have made in the course of the research, it will reflect on the difficulties encountered in this project and the significance of the study and what the study has yielded.
C. Louis Leipoldt and the making of a South African modernism
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Oppelt, Riaan; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: C. Louis Leipoldt had, in his lifetime and after his death, a celebrated reputation as an important Afrikaans poet in South Africa. He remains most remembered for his contribution to the growth of Afrikaans literature and for the significance of his poetry in helping to establish Afrikaans literature in the early part of the twentieth century in South Africa. He is also mostly remembered for his recipe books and food and wine guides, as well as his career as a paediatrician. Between 1980 and 2001, scholarly work was done to offer a reappraisal of Leipoldt’s literary works. During this period, previously unpublished material written by Leipoldt was made publicly available. Three novels by Leipoldt, written in English, were published at irregular intervals between 1980 and 2001. The novels cast Leipoldt in a different light, suggesting that as an English-language writer he was against many of the ideas he was associated with when viewed as an Afrikaans-language writer. These ideas, for the most part, linked Leipoldt to the Afrikaner nationalist project of the twentieth century and co-opted him to Afrikaner nationalist policies of racial segregation based on the campaigning for group identity. The three English-language novels, collectively making up the Valley trilogy, not only reveal Leipoldt’s opposition to the nationalist project but also draw attention to some of his other work in Afrikaans, in which this same ideological opposition may be noted. In this thesis I argue that Leipoldt’s Valley trilogy, as well as some of his other, Afrikaans works, not only refute the nationalist project but offer a reading of South African modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This reading of historical events in South Africa that reveals the trajectory of the country’s modernity is strongly indicative of a unique literary modernism. It is my argument that Leipoldt’s Valley trilogy shows a modernist critique of the historical events it presents. Because the concept of a South African modernism in literature has not yet been fully defined, it is also an aim of this thesis to propose that Leipoldt’s works contribute a broad but sustained literary outlook that covers his own lifespan (1880-1947) as well as the historical period he examines in the Valley trilogy (the late 1830s -the late 1920s/early 1930s). This literary outlook, I argue, is a modernist outlook, but also a transplantation of a Western understanding of what modernism is to the South African context in which there are crucial differences. This thesis hopes to arrive at an outcome that binds Leipoldt’s anti-nationalism to his literary critique of the modernity he explores in the Valley trilogy, thereby proving that Leipoldt could be read as a South African literary modernist.
The city that billows smoke : a spatial reading of Bulawayo in prose fiction
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Dube, Nhlanhla; Jones, Megan; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My study investigates the ways in which Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, is represented on the page. By reading fiction authored during the ‘lost decade’, I explore images of the city which emanate from novels and short stories from writers in Zimbabwe and abroad. I answer the question, what argument about place is being made when a character is in a particular locale? Theoretically, I deploy Geocriticism in order to show that space is made up of places. This is done by reading sections of the literary city such as the suburb, the Location and the diasporan constituency as parts of a larger whole. The fact that all narratives have to happen somewhere is at the core of the idea that the geographical location ‘where’ narratives occur, is more than just background setting and aesthetic. My exploration of the literary suburb is concerned with concepts of belonging and the racial aspects of city space. I show the importance of walking the suburb and the significance the process of losing home has in defining the 21st century suburb. Through studying the Location, I privilege the importance of places of drink and construction activities in high density living areas, to show how they indicate a spirit of place. To add to this, I also account for the diasporan view in order to see how the idea of the literary city is complicated by the act of diasporic return. Diasporic return unearths versions of the city that exist outside national borders and it highlights that Bulawayo is in conversation with other cities. My project demonstrates the existence of a Bulawayo literary city which has intricate local political realities and socio-economic conditions. This thesis also establishes that readings of the city have to take into account history, politics and geography in order to gauge the conditions under which unique literary cities are formed.
Confession, embodiment and ethics in the poetry of Antjie Krog and Joan Metelerkamp
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Weyer, Christine Louise; Samuelson, Meg; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines the work of two contemporary South African poets, Antjie Krog and Joan Metelerkamp. Through an analytical-discursive engagement with their work, it explores the relationship between confession and embodiment, drawing attention to the ethical potential located at the confluence of these theories and modes. The theory informing this thesis is drawn from three broad fields: that of feminism, embodiment studies and ethical philosophy. More specifically, foundational insights will come from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. While much of the theory used originates from Western Europe and North America, this will be mediated by sensitivity towards Krog and Metelerkamp’s South African location, as is fitting for a study focused on embodied confession and the ethical treatment of the other. The first chapter will establish Krog and Metelerkamp as confessional poets and explore the ethical implications of this designation. It will also explore the contextual grounds for the establishment for a confessional culture in both the United States of America of the 1950s that gave rise to the school of confessional poets, and in South Africa of the 1990s. The second chapter will use embodiment theory to discuss the relationship between poetry and the body in their work, and the ethics of this relationship. The remaining chapters concentrate on three forms of embodiment that frequently inhabit their poetry: the maternal body, the erotic body and the ageing body. Throughout the analyses of their poetic depictions of, and engagements with, these bodies, the ethical potential of these confessional engagements will be investigated. Through the argument presented in this thesis, Metelerkamp’s status as a minor South African poet will be re-evaluated, as will that of Krog’s undervalued English translations of her acclaimed Afrikaans poetry. The importance of confessional poetry and poetry of the body, often pejorative classifications, will also be asserted. Ultimately, through drawing the connections between confession, embodiment and ethics in poetry, this thesis will re-evaluate the way poetry is read, when it is read, and propose alternative reading strategies.
Configuring ‘Maasainess’ : contested textual embodiments
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Laizer, Neema; Ellis, Jeanne; Musila, Grace; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis I seek to trace the figure of the Maasai as a fossilized (visual) image circulated in local and global imaginaries since the nineteenth century by British explorers, missionaries and administrators. This image of either the male warrior or wounded woman continues to be reproduced in literary and cultural productions from East Africa, America and Europe. My study explores the notion of ‘Maasainess’ as a cultural identity being claimed, appropriated, redefined and performed in various genres by non-Maasai and Maasai authors and musicians. I am particularly interested in exploring how this construct circulates in contemporary texts and performances that also contest and transform it in response to the Maasais’ negotiation of their cultural identity due to land grabbing in the name of environmental sustainability and the impact of globalization and contact with other cultures, notably through the tourist industry and urbanisation. Following the introductory chapter in which the historical and theoretical framing of the thesis is established, I discuss four autobiographically inflected novels by the prolific Maasai male writer Henry Ole Kulet as a basis for my further exploration of the portrayal of ‘Maasainess’. This is followed by the third chapter in which four autobiographies by two male Maasai writers and two female non-Maasai writers, one from Switzerland and the other from the United States, are examined in relation to the notion of cultural appropriation. The fourth chapter looks at two historically inflected novels by the former British settler in Tanzania, David Read and the Australian UN expatriate in Kenya, Frank Coates, who both claim an affiliation with the Maasai as the basis for their fictions, in order to engage the history of settler colonialism. The fifth chapter shifts the focus to contemporary popular cultural performances of ‘Maasainess’ by analysing three songs by a non-Maasai duo, Shengena Gospel Panorama, and two Maasai musicians, Abel Motika and Lekishon Ole Kamwaro. The thesis therefore attempts a multi-genre approach to reading texts in which the figure of the Maasai is configured within a range of contexts. In this, I am primarily guided by Rosi Braidotti’s concept of “nomadic embodiment” and Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zones” as facilitating change and challenging the fixity of stereotype. My argument is that ‘Maasainess’ is a shifting cultural signifier at porous contact zones where cultural exchanges continuously occur. Therefore, this figure renders itself available to various appropriations, reconfigurations and contestations.
Contemporary fictional representations of sexualities from authoritarian African contexts
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Mtenje, Asante Lucy; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I investigate the contentious subject of sexualities as represented in fiction from selected Anglophone African countries which, even post-independence, have tended to enforce authoritarian, hetero-patriarchal control. The study explores how contemporary African writers, writing in (or in relation to) repressive contexts, represent uneasy intersections between socio-cultural understandings of sexuality, gender, and desire, entailing varieties of relation such as control, reciprocity, negotiation and resistance. Allowing for some flexibility in categories, the dissertation analyses the treatment of male sexualities in novels by Helon Habila, Moses Isegawa, and Tendai Huchu; female sexualities in novels by Sefi Atta, Doreen Baingana, and Lola Shoneyin, and depictions of queer sexualities in short fiction by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Chinelo Okparanta, Stanley Onjezani Kenani, and Beatrice Lamwaka. All of these writers, in their respective contexts, offer fictional representations that unevenly subvert hegemonic sexual norms and discourses, even while they also draw on received ways of making sense of gendered and sexual identities. The thesis argues that such ambiguities attest to the complexity of understanding and representing sexualities in Africa, and that fiction, precisely because of its capacity to engage uncertainty, comprises an important mode of mediating repressive socio-political and cultural norms, showing the potential for fiction as a space which engages risky, even taboo, topics. The fictional texts studied make a varied case against the common assumption of a restrictive, monolithic, supposedly proper “African sexuality” that authoritarian governments attempt to reinforce. I argue that through the narrative spaces of fiction, contemporary African authors highlight the tensions and contradictions which shape sexualities, with regimes of sexual knowledge being always in a process of relational negotiation, even in coercive socio-political contexts.
The dialogics of satire : foci and faultlines in George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2000-12) Goodman, Ralph; Heyns, M. W.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis uses Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, as well as postmodernism, to open up faultlines in satire, and to explore and challenge various perceptions and discourses surrounding and related to it. Both dialogism and postmodernism are used to suggest fresh approaches to satire, by repositioning it in relation to other discourses and reframing it as a complex dynamic, rather than a closed and inflexible system. Chapter 1 of the thesis opens with an historical survey of the beginnings and subsequent development of satire. It also contains a general discussion of the nature of satiric strategies and opens the door for the incorporation of postmodern perspectives into the argument. Chapter 2 contrasts the issues of morality and re-presentation in satire, arguing that satirists do not simply invite their audience to condemn, but offer them an opportunity to discover alternative worlds. The affinity between satire and postmodernism is emphasised by the postmodern predilection for modes highly favoured by satire: allegory, parody and fantasy. In Chapter 3 the issue of language and its referents is explored, starting with Saussure's theory of how the signifier and the signified function. It is argued that satire has never respected this fixed relationship, and that it is in this respect similar to deconstruction. The last part of the chapter is devoted to examining four key socio-political discourses - psychoanalysis, ideology, propaganda and political myth - in relation to satire. These four discourses are, like satire, intent on influencing the perceptions which people have of the world. The intention in juxtaposing these discourses is to create a dialogic process which will throw a fresh light on all of them, including satire itself. The four socio-political discourses named above play an important part in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and are relevant to the subsequent discussion of these novels. Chapter 4 consists of a detailed discussion of Animal Farm, in which the various layers comprising the work are examined. The satirical aspects of the novel are closely related to the fabular and fairy tale elements which are an important part of its constitution. These elements or levels are juxtaposed with the historical details alluded to continuously in Animal Farm and indicate its close concern with the world outside the novel. Chapter 5 consists of a detailed exploration of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is illuminated by a process of dialogism between the modernist ideology from which the novel springs and the postmodern perspective introduced into the thesis, as well as the four socio-political discourses mentioned earlier. The main postmodern theories used in this chapter are those of Foucault. The last section of the thesis demonstrates how Orwell's personal experience drives his satire, and relates this specifically to a discussion of utopia / dystopia in satire.
Diasporic imaginaries : memory and negotiation of belonging in East African and South African Indian narratives
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Ocita, James; Samuelson, Meg; Steiner, Tina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores selected Indian narratives that emerge in South Africa and East Africa between 1960 and 2010, focusing on representations of migrations from the late 19th century, with the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism, to the early 21st century entry of immigrants into the metropolises of Europe, the US and Canada as part of the post-1960s upsurge in global migrations. The (post-)colonial and imperial sites that these narratives straddle re-echo Vijay Mishra‘s reading of Indian diasporic narratives as two autonomous archives designated by the terms, "old" and "new" diasporas. The study underscores the role of memory both in quests for legitimation and in making sense of Indian marginality in diasporic sites across the continent and in the global north, drawing together South Asia, Africa and the global north as continuous fields of analysis. Categorising the narratives from the two locations in their order of emergence, I explore how Ansuyah R. Singh‘s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) and Bahadur Tejani‘s Day After Tomorrow (1971), as the first novels in English to be published by a South African and an East African writer of Indian descent, respectively, grapple with questions of citizenship and legitimation. I categorise subsequent narratives from South Africa into those that emerge during apartheid, namely, Ahmed Essop‘s The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), Agnes Sam‘s Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) and K. Goonam‘s Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr Goonam (1991); and in the post-apartheid period, including here Imraan Coovadia‘s The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim‘s The Lotus People (2002) and Ronnie Govender‘s Song of the Atman (2006). I explore how narratives under the former category represent tensions between apartheid state – that aimed to reveal and entrench internal divisions within its borders as part of its technology of rule – and the resultant anti-apartheid nationalism that coheres around a unifying ―black‖ identity, drawing attention to how the texts complicate both apartheid and anti-apartheid strategies by simultaneously suggesting and bridging differences or divisions. Post-apartheid narratives, in contrast to the homogenisation of "blackness", celebrate ethnic self-assertion, foregrounding cultural authentication in response to the post-apartheid "rainbow-nation" project. Similarly, I explore subsequent East African narratives under two categories. In the first category I include Peter Nazareth‘s In a Brown Mantle (1972) and M.G. Vassanji‘s The Gunny Sack (1989) as two novels that imagine Asians‘ colonial experience and their entry into the post-independence dispensation, focusing on how this transition complicates notions of home and national belonging. In the second category, I explore Jameela Siddiqi‘s The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown‘s No Place Like Home (1996) and Shailja Patel‘s Migritude (2010) as post-1990 narratives that grapple with political backlashes that engender migrations and relocations of Asian subjects from East Africa to imperial metropolises. As part of the recognition of the totalising and oppressive capacities of culture, the three authors, writing from both within and without Indianness, invite the diaspora to take stock of its role in the fermentation of political backlashes against its presence in East Africa.
Discourses of poverty in literature : assessing representations of indigence in post-colonial texts from Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-03) Butale, Phenyo; Steiner, Tina; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative reading of post-colonial literature written in English in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to bring into focus the similarities and differences between fictional representations of poverty in these three countries. The thesis explores the unique way in which literature may contribute to the better understanding of poverty, a field that has hitherto been largely dominated by scholarship that relies on quantitative analysis as opposed to qualitative approaches. The thesis seeks to use examples from selected texts to illustrate that (as many social scientists have argued before) literature provides insights into the ‘lived realities’ of the poor and that with its vividly imagined specificities it illuminates the broad generalisations about poverty established in other (data-gathering) disciplines. Selected texts from the three countries destabilise the usual categories of gender, race and class which are often utilised in quantitative studies of poverty and by so doing show that experiences of poverty cut across and intersect all of these spheres and the experiences differ from one person to another regardless of which category they may fall within. The three main chapters focus primarily on local indigence as depicted by texts from the three countries. The selection of texts in the chapters follows a thematic approach and texts are discussed by means of selective focus on the ways in which they address the theme of poverty. Using three main theorists – Maria Pia Lara, Njabulo Ndebele and Amartya Sen – the thesis focuses centrally on how writers use varying literary devices and techniques to provide moving depictions of poverty that show rather than tell the reader of the unique experiences that different characters and different communities have of deprivation and shortage of basic needs.
Discursive features of health worker-patient discourses in four Western Cape HIV/AIDS clinics where English is the lingua franca
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-12) Njweipi-Kongor, Diana Benyuei; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Anthonissen, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This is a qualitative analytical study that investigates the use of English as lingua franca (ELF) between doctors and patients with different L1 at four different HIV/AIDS clinics in the Western Cape. The study addresses a gap in medical research, especially in the field of HIV/AIDS, namely, a lack of sufficient data-driven analytical investigation into the linguistic and conversational nature of doctor-patient communication in ELF in this setting in South Africa. A literature review contextualises ELF, discourse analysis (DA), conversation analysis (CA) and genre theory providing a theoretical framework for the study. The methodology involves audio-recording and transcription of HIV/AIDS consultations conducted in ELF. From the genre perspective, the study investigates the different genres in and determines if HIV/AIDS consultations are a sub-genre of medical discourses. DA investigates what contextual, socio-cultural linguistic features characterise medical interaction in this multilingual context and what ELF linguistic strategies participants use to signal and resolve misunderstanding. CA investigates the turn organisation and turn-taking patterns in the consultations to assess participants’ contributions and identify different types of sequences that characterise them, aiming to understand how they enable the interactants play their roles as doctors and patients. The results reveal that HIV/AIDS consultations exhibit formal features of doctor-patient consultations in general and intertextually revert to other oral genres leading to the conclusion that, considering their purpose, participants and context, HIV/AIDS consultations are like all medical consultations and are a sub-genre of medical discourse. The macro analysis reveals that the interactants’ socio-cultural and multi-linguistic backgrounds do positively influence the nature of the interaction in this context as it highlights characteristic linguistic features of ELF usage like borrowing, linguistic transference from L1, the use of analogy, code-switching and local metaphors all resulting from processes of indigenisation and hybridisation. The results reveal few instances of misunderstanding, concurring with earlier studies that problems of miscommunication may be minimal when two languages and/or cultural groups interact. The micro analysis reveals that the turns in the consultation follow the pre-selection and recurrent speakership patterns and that despite the advocacy for partnership between doctors and patients in their contribution and negotiation of outcomes, the doctor unavoidably remains the dominant partner. S/he determines the course of the consultation by initiating more turns, asking most of the questions and often unilaterally deciding on topic changes. S/he has longer talking time than the patient in the sequences and the physical examination and prescription phases of the consultation while the patient is mostly portrayed almost as a docile participant yielding to the doctor’s requests and taking very little if any initiative of his/her own to communicate his/her views and desires. The study reveals instances of both patient and doctor initiated repair to resolve any misunderstanding, which improves the quality of the interaction and its outcomes such as adherence and treatment follow-up. The study further highlights the challenges faced in the field which impacted on the data, the most crucial being the complicated but necessary ethical procedures required to get participants’ consent to participate in the study.
Eco-communitarianism : a poetics of the environment in East African literature
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Nabulya, Eve; Slabbert, Mathilda; Green, Louise, 1968-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study seeks to explore the ways in which stylistic techniques and modes of narration perform environmental activism in a selection of literary texts from East Africa. I reflect on the persuasive value of literary devices, notably personification, ekphrasis, metaphor and irony in effecting change in people’s attitudes towards the environment. My study considers how each of these devices enables conceptualization and animates conversations around contemporary issues in environmental discourse. I enlist environmentally committed texts: two dramas, three novels and five poems by East African writers to discuss the innovations and strategies through which the literary works access emotions and thus potentially influence the attitudes of readers. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s notion of "persuasion to attitude" as derived from Aristotle's theory of rhetoric, I demonstrate that an ecocritical approach can transcend the intra-textual focus of literature and investigate a text’s persuasive power or what I prefer to call textual eco-activism. I note that such a method, for the works in focus, unveils an underlying ecological consciousness amenable to African communitarianism, what I term as eco-communitarianism. I maintain that these works, in different ways, offer alternative visions and reflect on pertinent issues related to human and nonhuman agency, art and the representation of the physical landscape, the viability of apocalyptic rhetoric in the environmental campaign, and the relationship between governance and environmental conservation. Nestled in postcolonial eco-criticism, this study is predicated on the understanding that environmental literary productions and related criticisms constitute acts of activism and efforts at changing the status quo.
Ecocriticism and the oil encounter : readings from the Niger Delta
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Aghoghovwia, Philip Onoriode; Green, Louise; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study seeks to understand the ways that environmental concerns and the phenomenon of oil production in the Niger Delta are captured in contemporary literary representations. In the thesis, I enlist several works, five poetry collections and a Nollywood video film, produced between 1998 and 2010, to investigate and analyse the different ways they engage with the effects of oil extraction as a form of violence that is not immediately apparent. Amitav Ghosh argues that representing something of such magnitude as oil modernity can only be done adequately through narratives of epic quality such as realist fiction or the historical novel. I move away from Ghosh’s assumptions to argue that the texts, poetry and video film have adequately captured the oil encounter, but not on a grand scale or through realist fiction. I situate Niger Delta representations of the oil encounter within the intellectual frame of petrocultures, a recent field of global study which explores the representational and critical domain within which oil is framed and imagined in culture. In their signification of what I call the “oil ontology”, that is, the very nature and existence of oil in the Delta, lived-experience in its actual quotidian specificity, takes precedence in the imagination of the writers that I study. I propose that the texts, in very different ways, articulate these experiences by concatenating social and environmental concerns with representations of the oil encounter to produce a petro-literary form which inflects and critiques the ways in which oil extraction, in all its social and environmental manifestations, inscribes a form of violence upon the landscape and human population in the oil sites of the Delta. I suggest that the texts articulate a place-based, place-specific form of petroculture. They emphasis the notion that the oil encounter in the Delta is not the official encounter at the point of extraction but rather the unofficial encounter with the side-effects of the oil extraction. The texts, in very different ways address similar concerns of violence as an intricate feature in the Delta, both as a physical, spectacular phenomenon and as a subtle, unseen category. They conceive of violence as a consequence of the various forms of intrusion and disruption that the logic of oil extraction instigates in the Niger Delta. I suggest that the form of eco-poetics that is articulated gives expression to environmental concerns which are marked off by an oily topos in the Delta. I maintain that in projecting an artistic vision that is sensitive to environmental and sociocultural questions, the writings that we encounter from this region also make critical commentary on the ontology of oil. The texts conceive the Niger Delta as one that provides the spatial and material template for envisioning the oil encounter and staging a critique of the essentially globalised space that is the site of oil production.
Encountering strange lands : migrant texture in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Kagai, Ezekiel Kimani; Steiner, Tina; Odhiambo, Tom; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study engages with the complete novelistic oeuvre of the Zanzibari-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose fiction is dedicated to the theme of migration. With each novel, however, Gurnah deploys innovative stylistic features as an analytic frame to engage with his signature topic. From his first novel to his eighth, Gurnah offers new insights into relocation and raises new questions about what it means to be a migrant or a stranger in inhospitable circumstances and how such conditions call for a negotiation of hospitable space. What gives each of his works a distinct aesthetic appeal is the artistic resourcefulness and versatility with which he frames his narratives, in order to situate them within their historical contexts. This allows him to interrogate the motives behind his characters’ actions (or behind their inaction). Gurnah, therefore, employs a variety of narrative perspectives that not only challenge the reader in the task of interpreting his complex works, but which also allow for the pleasure of carrying out this task. In its exploration of migrant subjectivities and their multiple and varied negotiations to create enabling spaces, this thesis shows how Gurnah’s fiction deploys various artistic strategies as possible ways of thinking about individual identity and social relations with others. In short, this thesis explores how Gurnah’s texts become discursive tools for understanding the complexity of migrancy and cultural exchanges along the Swahili coast, in Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, and in the UK.
Ever other : unsettling subjects in contemporary revisions of fairy tales
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Marais, Adri; Steiner, Tina; Viljoen, Shaun; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Fairy tales create some of the first and most lasting impressions on young minds. In the formative years, they shape world-views, self-perceptions and opinions of ‘others’ in ways that persist into adulthood. Acknowledging that these presumably innocent stories are of greater social significance than is generally recognised, I am interested in contemporary revisions of the classic fairy tales widely critiqued by ‘second wave’ feminists for the restrictive gender expectations they prescribe. And yet, while it remains located in a larger area of scholarship that can be defined as revisionist feminist fiction, this dissertation focuses on revisions of classic fairy tales published after 1990 – effectively ‘after Angela Carter’ and her generation’s focus on voiceless and disempowered female characters during the sixties, seventies and eighties. My premise is that these post-1990 adaptations have moved beyond the white, middle-aged and heterosexual concerns of ‘second wave’ feminism, broadening their scope to include non-normative interests and counterhegemonic world views as reflected by ‘third wave’ feminism. As such, these texts have taken on the insights of postcolonial and queer theory as well as ageing studies in order to explore how race, age and sexual orientation or gender identity intersect with gender and sex to create marginal subjects or ‘others’. While I acknowledge all ten texts as feminist revisions, I also identify three new areas of difference that intersect with sex and/or gender to create marginalised and misrepresented black, ageing and queer ‘others’. I read Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick” (2001) and Shaida Kazie Ali’s Not a Fairytale (2010) as post-colonial revisions critical of the white ideal and Eurocentric discourses implicit in certain classic fairy tales. Considering a second tale from Hopkinson’s Skin Folk anthology titled “Riding the Red”, together with Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad (1991) and Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2007), I explore how they both underscore and problematise the ageism inherent in these classics, unsettling the glib and tired generalisations that fairy tales make about older women. Finally, I consider Malinda Lo’s Ash (2009), Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2006) and Emma Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Shoe” and “The Tale of the Witch”, both from the Kissing the Witch collection (1997), as queer retellings that centre around unconventional gender identities and non-normative sexuality which, by association, encourage readers to recognise the binary gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality and cisnormativity espoused by the most popularly read and repeated fairy tales. Although I primarily make use of the term ‘revision’, my study also employs synonyms like ‘rewriting’, ‘retelling’, ‘recasting’ and ‘counter-narrative’ to describe what it considers to be a literary act of confrontation, disruption and reinvention. As I engage in their comparative close reading, I explore the ways in which these contemporary revisions of fairy tales unsettle and renew convention instead of simply reproducing it. Ultimately I consider how they build on and move beyond the feminist revisions of the previous century in order to confront new and different sites of othering that hold potential for literary liberation.
Evocations of poverty in selected novels of Meja Mwangi and Roddy Doyle : a study of literary representation
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Ticha, Ignatius Khan; Gagiano, Annie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study explores fictional representations of poverty in selected novels of Meja Mwangi and Roddy Doyle, respectively Kenyan and Irish – examining techniques of literary representation and how the two authors make imaginative use of various stylistic techniques and verbal skills in a selection of their texts to achieve compelling representations of poverty. The study recognizes that poverty is one of the most recurrent subjects of discussion in the world, that it is a complex and multifaceted concept and condition and that it affects societal, political and economic dimensions of life. The study considers the (broad) United Nations definition of poverty as: “… a human condition characterised by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights” (United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, 2002). Rather than suggest that fiction replaces other approaches in the study of poverty, the study calls for a complementary “conversation” between fiction and the social sciences in depictions of the condition of poverty. However, the study notes the advantage that fiction has in its nuanced exploration of the subject of poverty. In fact, fiction reflects social reality in interestingly subversive but also empowering ways – showing a unique way of dealing with difficult situations. Fiction is equipped with the subtle instruments and complex power of literary devices to articulate multiple layers of possible meanings and human experiences and conditions vividly and movingly – in ways that are accessible to a variety of readers. While giving a voice to the voiceless – the poor – narrative fiction opens inner feelings and thoughts of the depicted poor and enables the reader to probe deeply into the inner feelings of characters depicted; allowing the reader to develop a deeper understanding of the condition of poverty, but also allowing the reader to bring his or her interpretation to bear on what is represented. The five main chapters of the thesis are thematically arranged, but the analysis draws on a variety of theoretical paradigms including but not limited to those of Maria Pia Lara and Mikhail Bakhtin. Significant to the study is Maria Pia Lara’s ideas of literature as a “frame for struggles of recognition and transformation” (Lara, 1998: 7) and of the “illocutionary force” (1998: 5) of literature – its ability to articulate aspects of a human condition (such as poverty) vividly and compellingly. Bakhtin’s suggestion that “language is not self-evident and not in itself incontestable” (Bakhtin, 2004: 332) is important – capturing the idea of a distinctive flexibility of discourse in the novel and rejecting simplistic ideas that there is a single truth concerning a particular situation such as poverty.
An examination of prison, criminality and power in selected contemporary Kenyan and South African narratives
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-12) Ndlovu, Isaac; Roux, Daniel; Samuelson, Meg; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative examination of South African and Kenyan auto/biographical narratives of crime and imprisonment. Although some attention is paid to narratives of political imprisonment, the study focuses primarily on autobiographical accounts by criminals, confessional narratives, popular fiction about crime and prison experience, and journalistic accounts of prison life. There is very little critical work at this moment that refers to these forms of prison writing in South Africa and Kenya. Popular prison narratives and to a certain extent the autobiographical in general are characterised by an under-theorised dialecticism. As academic concepts, both the popular and the autobiographical form are characterised by an unstable duality. While the popular has been theorised as being both a field of resistance to power and of consent to its demands, the autobiographical occupies a similar precariously divided position, in this case between fact and fiction, a place where the „I‟ that narrates is simultaneously the subject and object of the narrative. In examining an eclectic body of texts that share the prison as common denominator, my study problematises the tension between self and world, popular and canonical, political and criminal, factual and fictional. In both settings, South Africa and Kenya, the prison as a material and discursive space does not only mirror society but effects shifts and changes in society, and becomes a space of dynamic adaptation and also a locus that disturbs certain hegemonic relations. The way in which the experience of prison opens up to a fundamentally unsettling ambiguity resonates with the ambivalence that characterises both autobiography as genre and the popular as a theoretical concept. My thesis argues that during the entire historical period covered by the narratives that I examine there is a certain excess that attends on the social production of criminality and the practice of imprisonment, both as material realities and as discursive concepts, which allows them to have a haunting effect both on individuals‟ notions of „the self‟ and the constitution of national identities and nationhoods. I argue that the distinction between the colonial and the postcolonial prison is hazy. Therefore a comparative study of Kenyan and South African prison literature helps us understand how modern prisons and notions of criminality in contemporary Africa are intertwined with the broad European colonial project, reflecting larger issues of state power and control over the populace. In relation to South Africa, my study begins with Ruth First‟s 117 Days (1963), and makes a selection of other prisons narratives throughout the apartheid era up to the post-apartheid period which was ushered in by Mandela‟s Long Walk to Freedom (1994). Moving beyond Mandela, I examine other forms of South African crime and prison narratives which have emerged since the publication of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela‟s A Human Being Died that Night (2003) and Jonny Steinberg‟s The Number (2004). In Kenya, I begin with Ngugi wa Thiongo‟s Detained (1981). I then focus on popular narratives of crime and imprisonment which began with the publication of John Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Crime (1984) up to the first decade of the 21st century, marked yet again by the publication of Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Prison (2004). Besides Kiriamiti‟s two narratives, the other Kenyan texts which I examine are John Kiggia Kimani‟s Life and Times of a Bank Robber (1988) and Prison is not a Holiday Camp (1994), Benjamin Garth Bundeh‟s Birds of Kamiti (1991), and Charles Githae‟s, Comrade Inmate (1994).
Experimental explorations of selected women’s innovative poetry written in English, with a focus on ‘the Gurlesque’
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Simon, Francine; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores innovative poetry by selected contemporary English-language women writers. In particular, it deliberates how this poetry works between poetic traditions of lyric expressivity and forms of experimentalism. The dissertation comprises both a creative and a critical component: my debut collection Thungachi (see Addendum i), written as part of the doctorate, has already been published by the South African poetry press, uHlanga, in 2017. The scholarly component of the dissertation begins with a section which riffs on the poet Eileen Myles’s term “affidamento”. Searching for examples of local innovative female poetry, and unable to find an obvious local figure of female inspiration and guidance, where does a young South African ‘Indian’ female poet turn when she is writing between the uneasy claims of gendered identity and linguistic-conceptual experimentalism? This section of the study discusses (with different degrees of depth and intensity) my evolving poetic ideas and methods in relation to work by Meena Alexander, Eileen Myles, and Harryette Mullen, three female poets who have enabled me to frame self-reflexive thinking about my poetics. I suggest that their poetry has assisted me in exploring the various possibilities that arise when lyric expressivism is placed under the pressures of raced bodies, queerness and linguistic-conceptual experimentalism. In drawing attention to experimental women's poetry as a marginal form, I propose the concept of ‘non-place’ as a useful provisional term, able to situate and yet repeatedly to re-locate the writing of female experimental poets in their prolific and varied exploration of boundaries such as language and lyric. Here, I also draw on Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic consciousness” as a useful conceptual node. Central to the dissertation is an extended engagement with an emergent Gurlesque, a poetics first theorised by the North American experimental female poets Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum. This section of the study explores some of the theoretical frameworks that Greenberg and Glenum have found useful in thinking through the poetries which they collected in Gurlesque: the New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics. Among these are critical girlhood studies, Riot Grrrl, camp and a female grotesque, all of which offer enlightening optics in respect of young female poets “Gurlesque tendencies”. I speculate about the possibilities of a Gurlesque poetics, considering whether more marginalised femalenesses may also find some kind of conceptual home in the term. Here, I use Ailbhe Darcy’s concept of “alternate sets of cultural referents” (2015: 3) to explore the feasibility of a more inclusive Gurlesque poetics that could be transnational, queer and raced. Overall, using examples of contemporary experimental poetry by a range of women writers, I demonstrate that women’s so-called experimental poetry cannot be restricted to received notions of Language poetry, or an avant-garde, or to refutations of a ‘confessional impulse’ in favour of disembodied abstraction. Instead, the young women poets whose work I engage illustrate the complex inflections of female, feminine, feminist, subversively drawing on a disparate range of processes, styles and indeed subjects to answer the call of what Kathleen Fraser terms “the innovative necessity” (2000).

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