Masters Degrees (English)

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    Gender and violence in representations of female characters in selected contemporary short fiction by Zambian women writers
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Chisoko, Shilika; Murray, Sally-Ann, 1961-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The selected short stories in this thesis offer imaginative treatments of the daily lives of women in Zambia, lives characterised by gender discrimination and difficulties associated with living in a patriarchal society. The thesis argues that the representations of female characters in the examples of contemporary short fiction by Zambian women constitute important forms of knowledge through which to understand the complexity of Zambian women’s engagement with patriarchy. Here, I draw on Ranka Primorac’s comments on short fiction by earlier female Zambian writers. Primorac identifies a tendency, in the stories she analyses, to provide accounts of the difficulties associated with living in a postcolonial society by depicting female characters experiencing the challenges of everyday life. My own study furthers Primorac’s claims by suggesting that the representation of female characters in much current short fiction by Zambian women begins to offer a feminist-inflected critique of Zambian society via dissenting portrayals of the violence experienced by female characters. The word violence is used in this thesis to describe the gendered and sexual discrimination experienced by the female characters, and I draw on the ideas of Pumla Dineo Gqola, Johan Galtung and Slavoj Žižek (among others) to argue that the varied kinds of discrimination experienced by the female characters in the stories emanates from patriarchal regimes of power and violence, which in my argument means that such discrimination is itself a form of violence. In my analysis of the depictions if violence in various examples of short fiction, I position the stories as illocutionary forces which, according to Maria Pia Lara’s theorisation of the illocutionary capabilities of feminist narratives in the public sphere, have an unsettling revelatory capacity that embodies a transformative socio-textual potential in the development of emergent Zambian feminist epistemes. (In exploring the possibilities of emergent feminisms in short fiction from Zambia, my study also points to the fact that in the last two decades there has been an increase in the production of short fiction by Zambian women, and indicates that this increase is partly due to literary awards such as the Kalemba Short Story Prize, which is awarded to short fiction by Zambians. The majority of shortlisted stories are female-authored, and all the winners are women.
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    The haunted house/haunted mind as a gothic trope in Mike Flanagan’s The haunting project and source texts : a comparative analysis
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Botes, Christan Nancy; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The haunted head as a haunted house trope, which is the focus of this thesis, has long been a staple of the Gothic genre, appearing in seminal Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The haunted head as a haunted house trope was once again revitalised in renowned horror director Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting Project (2018-2020). Multiple screen adaptations of Gothic haunted-house texts have been created over the last century, often tackling the difficulty of portraying the haunted head as a haunted house trope using visual and auditory language. This study aims to examine how two seminal Gothic haunted-house texts, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), use the trope to explore the social anxieties surrounding female mental illness and the mother figure of their respective periods, as well as how Flanagan re-contextualises those social fears and re-presents the trope in his adaptations of the source texts for his project. In 2018, Flanagan adapted Jackson’s 1959 novel into a ten-episode long series that would form the first instalment of The Haunting Project, a horror anthology for Netflix. James’s famous novel received the same treatment in 2020, wherein Flanagan once again demonstrated his unique style of adaptation and homage to his source texts. This thesis examines the concept of the uncanny and its relationship with the haunted house and how the haunted head as a haunted house trope is utilised as a tool through which the Gothic explores underlying social anxieties surrounding the perceived sanctity of the domestic home, the threat that female mental illness poses to the structure of the household and the effect that patriarchal ideology has upon the feminine-coded space of the home and subsequent enactment of patriarchal oppression through the maternal figure. In my examination of James’s The Turn of the Screw and Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), I will use Sigmund Freud’s theory of “The Uncanny” (1919) to read how both the source text and its adaptation confront the underlying concerns of their respective periods by employing the haunted head as a haunted house trope. I will further use Gaston Bachelard’s theory of the oneiric home (The Poetics of Space 1958) as a lens through which Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation of the same name utilise the same trope to explore the social fears of their respective contexts. This study aims to compare how the source texts use the trope to explore the social anxieties of their time with how Flanagan employs the trope in his adaptations as a means to re-present the concerns explored in his source texts to a contemporary audience whilst also addressing how those past anxieties have been translated into the present’s fears.
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    Fictionalising Charles Dickens : his public and private lives in three Neo-Victorian biofictions
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Troost, Josephine Jay; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 1849 and 1860 Charles Dickens burned all of his correspondence and diaries in an effort to avoid his fiction being read/interpreted through the lens of its author’s life. This thesis analyses three neo-Victorian biofictions: Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) by Gaynor Arnold, Jack Maggs (1997) by Peter Carey, and Wanting (2008) by Richard Flanagan to explore the contradiction between Dickens’s public persona and his private life. This thesis explores his obsessive secrecy and need for control over his life’s narrative, together with his willingness to hurt other people in order to maintain his version of events and preserve his image as the epitome of Victorian middle-class, family-centred morality and caring philanthropy. The three focus texts are linked by their respective depictions of Dickens’s intimate relationships with the different women in his life, by the parallels and differences between these texts and a range of biographies about Dickens, and by the different ways each author has engaged with the ethical considerations inherent in neo-Victorian biofiction’s reimaging of real historical figures from the nineteenth century. This thesis also links Girl in a Blue Dress to Victorian marriage law, Jack Maggs to questions of authorial ethics, stealing stories, and the development of copyright law, and Wanting to Dickens’s own perspectives on the colonial project, as demonstrated by his fiction and journalism.
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    The representation of water in selected Southern African fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Mbingo, Seluliwe Felicia; Steiner, Tina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Water, in all its forms, is essential to human life. This thesis offers a study of the representation of water in selected novels from Southern Africa, namely Bessie Head When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Karen Jayes For the Mercy of Water (2012) and Unconfessed: A novel (2007) by Yvette Christiansë. The thesis explores the trope of water in these selected texts and highlights how water in its absence and abundance represents fundamental human experiences, while in a political discourse it represents inequality and dispossession, frequently as a response to colonial violence. I analyze both the material reality of the element of water as well as its metaphorical meanings as depicted in the three narratives. I argue that the representation of water articulates the intricate traits of water as it affects social and ecological concerns. In my exploration of water, I adopt the idea of water as a literary device which enables dialogues across different times, cultures, and contexts. I focus in particular on the way in which characters experience the presence or absence of water. I am interested in the context in which water or bodies of water appear and how this is used to represent social realities as well as abstract qualities. The three main chapters focus on how human nature is connected and reliant on watery resources of nature. Through close reading of the selected novels in each chapter, the discussions within this study involves a selective emphasis on how the narratives explore human nature and the theme of water. The watery reading of texts invites us to explore the interaction of the political, social, and ecological frame.
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    Thinking through postcolonial climate justice with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Joubert, Isabelle Elena; Jones, Megan; Jones, Megan, 1979-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood is a much-studied, pioneering work of climate fiction. It is celebrated for its exploration of the place of the human within the web of life, its critique of neoliberal capitalism, and its navigation of horrific climate disasters. However, in all the work produced around the trilogy, there is little that considers the implications of the series for the postcolony. In this study, I provide a close reading of the trilogy and place it in conversation with postcolonial and anticapitalist thinkers. I examine the stimulus that the trilogy provides for thinking through climate justice in a poor and postcolonial context, the consequent demands of the most vulnerable on the efforts of climate justice, and the ideologies and ecophilosophies that hamper the development of bespoke, reparative environmental action. The trilogy provides a deft navigation of the experiences of the environmentally vulnerable, demonstrating the correlation between privilege and exposure to climate catastrophe. It denounces the trends in ecological discourse that blame homogenous humanity, call for depopulation, and ignore or negatively impact the postcolony. Moreover, it locates the origins of such ecophilosophies in reductive epistemological frameworks. Finally, it cultivates hope for the postcolony by suggesting that change is possible through its exposure of the farcical belief that the harmful status quo is inevitable and unchangeable. There are several limitations which complicate the trilogy’s fruitfulness as anintellectual tool for engaging the issue of decolonised environmentalism. However, the successes of the series outweigh its limitations, and ultimately, The MaddAddam Trilogy is a nuanced work that drives the reader to consider the ecological and social needs of the poor and the postcolony. It exposes the failures of dominant environmental discourse that must be avoided in the development of climate justice that amplifies the survival chances of the most vulnerable. Finally, it fosters the energising hope that change to the systems that have produced our climate crisis – and the social inequality that makes poor humans most vulnerable to ecological decline – is possible through collective reimagination and action.