This thesis provides a detailed socio-political and literary analysis of &quot / A walk in the night : seven stories from the streets of Cape Town&quot / . It investigated and systematically compared each short story to the novella or compared the short stories with each other and showed their thematic and formal similarities and differences.

Although Annie Dillard has frequently written about the subject of time, no serious study of her treatment of this subject has been published. The purpose of this study was to open the conversation, particularly in the light of her recent book, For the Time Being.Dillard's strongest interest in time is in the relationship between the temporal, time here and now, and the eternal, generally located sometime in the future, somewhere other than here. Since Dillard has repeatedly alluded to this subject in her previous nonfiction books, one may trace the development of her concept of time and eternity from earlier works such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone To Talk, and Holy the Firm, to its current expression in For the Time Being. She places her questions about time and eternity in a distinctly down-to-earth spirituality informed by modern science and sharpened by pungent humor.Beginning with an analysis of the influence on Dillard's writing of Romantics such as Wordsworth and Transcendentalists such as Thoreau but more particularly Emerson, as well as ancient Judaic thought, this study focuses on how Dillard blends with these theinfluence of twentieth century Christian theologian-philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin to form an eclectic spirituality that is distinctly her own.Though Dillard has often been called a mystic, her spiritual quest is intensely practical and purposeful: by cracking open the mystery of time she intends to discover nothing less than the secrets of God. This study concludes that Dillard is calling readers to recognize that the spiritually alive person can transcend the barriers of the temporal, experience the eternal in the present, and participate with God in the redemption of the universe. / Department of English

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Over the course of his life Beckett's work moves through a process of reduction toward increasing simplicity and concentration of means. 1 trace this reduction in Beckett's later works for the stage and compare it with the dialectics of negative theology, both Buddhist and Orthodox Christian, paying particular attention to structures of visuality and iconicity (both visual and not) in Beckett's work. The visual enjoyed a status of peculiar ontological primacy for Beckett. In it he saw exemplified both the dualisms he worked to overcome throughout his career and the saving grace that will overcome them: a "breathless immediacy" (Beckett's words) that will skip the mediation of language and the linearity of discourse and present exquisitely balanced, essentially still, nondual images. Beckett's metaphorical, that is, vertically structured stage images are subtended by metonymic texts that run through a strategic process of self-emptying in a kind of kenosis of discourse. The aporetic figures thus produced form similarly iconic structures on the textual level as can be found on the visual level. In Beckett's horizontal world a displaced sacramentalism and a phenomenologically motivated process of enquiry into the nature of things combine to create an empty space, a gray area through which the divine can enter if the audience is inclined to make such an act of faith. Beckett creates an art of Erfahrung that leads to a confrontation with an Other beyond the limits of a reductive concept of instrumental reason.

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M.A. (Philosophy) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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