The dissertation treats of Paul Natorp's and Martin Heidegger's interpretations of Plato. My goal is twofold: sympathetically to expound each of these interpretations in its own right, and to contrast them against each other as emblematic of the conflict between neo-Kantianism (Natorp) and Phenomenology (Heidegger). The philosophical controversy centers on the relation of thinking and being, a controversy which in this specific context may ultimately be traced back to Kant. Natorp and Heidegger both, for different reasons, return to the Platonic "theory of forms" in order to ground their respective conceptions of thinking and being. Accordingly, I discuss in Chapter One the role of the Platonic forms in Kant's own philosophy. In Chapter Two, I examine the central doctrine of neo-Kantianism and its roots in post-Kantian German philosophy. In Chapter Three, I show how this doctrine is embodied in Natorp's analysis of several of Plato's dialogues. In Chapter Four, I lay out the principal points of Phenomenology's dispute with neo-Kantianism, as well as Heidegger's understanding of that dispute. Finally, in Chapter Five, I show how Heidegger's fundamental ontology is expressed in his interpretations of several key passages of Plato.

This master's thesis in creative work includes two parts: A tale and a critical study. The creative work is entitled Les fleurs de lotus, which delineates the life of a Chinese woman from the last Empire to the communist regime. The story unfolds around the bound-feet of the central character. The feet, in the different period of time, have different consequences for her. The world changes, so does the prejudice against her in various forms. The tale questions the destiny of human being in history. / The critical work explores historical novel through the study of France's novel, Les dieux ont soif. Having demonstrated that history is the main subject of this novel, I contend that skepticism forges France's vision about revolution and the destiny of human being. Then I detect some literary techniques such as repetition, contrast and irony that France uses in expressing his contemplation about historical processes.

The following study investigates the fictional works of an early twentieth century Czechoslovakian writer named Franz Kafka. "The space of Kafka" is explored primarily through the "identity" of his characteristic monster figures and the temporally disjunctive narratives through which they travel. Monstrosity is qualified here as a principal mode of translation through which Kafka engaged the very terms of "identity" which an "individual" faces in the appearance of any "work". The intimations of a monstrous self are probed through Kafka's work in relation to human experience, intentionality, alterity and a "present" which is en-acted specifically as one form of the past. Through Kafka's paradigmatic "monster", "double" and "bachelor" figures, we find not "alternative" orientations of the "self" which contemporary literature and architecture may choose to undertake, but intrinsic re-presentations of the very relation which any self, any author, already is in the appearance of a "work".

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) wrote this little phrase one day in a notebook: Writing as a form of prayer. This dissertation will examine his highly personal and Judaic conception of the act of writing in order to demonstrate that it constitutes in fact the cornerstone of Kafka's activity as a writer and that it can be traced in a significant number of his literary works as their regulating instance. / In order to do so, we will first examine the social, political and economic conditions prevailing in Central Europe at the turn of the 20th century, in order to ascertain its tremendous impact on the Jewish communities living in that part of the world, in terms of loss of traditional Jewish identity culminating in many cases in assimilation. Kafka's work will thus firstly be situated in the historical and political context out of which it emerged. / In the course of this work, we have used the concepts of sacre and profane as developed by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade throughout in order to demonstrate that there exists in Kafka's work a constitutive tension articulated between those two poles, not only at the level of the plot, but at the level of language itself. / Since the central element at the root of this tension is expressed in terms of presence and absence, we have also analysed the philosophy of language of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, which are themselves articulated exactly in those terms. / The use of these categories has helped us show that if Kafka's work is indeed at time very close to that of Scholem and Benjamin, especially in its literary rendition of motives underlining the absence of the divine in language, it also distinguishes itself markedly from the work of the two philosophers by the use of other motives which underline the immediate presence of the message of Revelation, made directly accessible within the modern and profane language, which is also that of literature.

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This dissertation analyses the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba, Joe Mogotsi and Hugh Masekela. The story of these formerly exiled musicians' lives as musicians who embodied the urbanising and eclectic black musical ethos of the 1950s onward has been integral to the music historiography on this era. The exilic trajectory of their story also has political resonance, as it parallels the shifts in structures of power characteristic of apartheid South Africa. Popular discourses that construct and narrate an incrementally conscientizing South African populist culture through this period have therefore also represented the musicians, through written and visual material, with this political resonance in mind. The musicians' autobiographies, however, articulate discourses of the nation from positions other these. These other positions are interanimated by literary, musical and socio-political discourses that already pervade the South African historical sphere. This informs the dialogic interplay of time, space and character in their texts, which I examine using the literary figure of the chronotope as a perceptual tool for their reading. Through analysis, I unpack how time becomes symbolically charged and space becomes mythologized in the autobiographies, how departure and eventual exile are narrated, and how the subsequent chronotopic rupture created by exile affects narration of home. Reading the struggle for authorship and authority evident in the texts' vacillation between biographical and autobiographical 'truth', the possible significances towards which this struggle points for a (re ) interpretation of South Africa's (hi)story of exile permeates the subject and process of this research. / Thesis (M.Mus.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

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