The thesis examines some of the short and long fiction set in Johannesburg, which is published between approximately 1980 and 2003. The thesis examines how the residents viewed themselves, and evaluates the various social and political struggles and strategies that were employed in an attempt to belong, imagine the city differently and establish strategic identities that would enable them to live a better life during the focused quarter of a century of experiences in an ever-changing fictive Johannesburg. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The broad aim of this study is to show, through a comparative and contrasting analysis of three thematically related texts - namely Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy; Alan Patan's Cry, the Beloved Country and Phyllis Altman's The Law of the Vultures - the ideologically mediated nature of the relationship between the 'real' history which constituted their context, and the representations of it in the historical realist form. An examination afthe texts' characters and events; political formulations, and formal devices reveals three very different representations of the same object. This diversity is significant in so far as it supports a Marxist conceptualisation of the [historical] realist text as a production of ideology as opposed to a portrayal of reality. The study considers the nature of the relationship between each text and ideology in terms of three aspects of this relationship: the 'objectively determinable' relation between history, ideology and text; the ideology of the text itself, and the mode of a text's insertion into an 'ideological sub-ensemble.' In relation to the modes of a text's insertion into an ideological sub-ensemble, my specific aim is to assess the extent to which each text actually challenges the political dispensation to which it was addressed. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Touching Brýnstone is the story of Beth, a young journalist who is troubled by misfortunes in her family and work circumstances. In a Pretoria library she is seduced by a book that consoles her and progressively becomes a fetish object. It sparks a journey to Japan, where she arrives to teach English. She is intent on meeting the author, whom she confounds with protagonist and book. This Bildungsroman is an exploration of the complex relationship between inner and outer self, and the struggle towards wholeness. Beth must find a way out of the obsession so that she can return to South Africa with an enriched insight into her shadow self.

The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.

This dissertation examines the way in which South African colonial texts may be read for the historical signs they inadvertently reveal. The history of land acquisition in South Africa may be read through the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy in South African farm novels. Both burial and illegitimate pregnancy are read as signifiers of illegitimacy in the texts, surfacing, by indirection, the question of the illegitimacy of land acquisition in South Africa. The South African farm novel offers a representational form which seeks (or fails) to mediate the question of land ownership and the relationship between colon and indigene. In the four texts under discussion, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, Florence Ethel Mills Young's The Bywonner[sic], Pauline Smith's The Beadle and Daphne Rooke's Mittee, the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy is problematic and marked by narrative displacements and discursive breakdowns. KEY TERMS burial, colonial discourse, farm novel, illegitimacy, illegitimate pregnancy, land, postcolonial theory, representation / English / M.A. (English)

This thesis examines the representation of home and hospitality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, and Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It attempts to trace the un-homeliness of the central characters and to account for their feelings of discomfort. As such, it argues that the home is incapable of being inviolable because the invasion of the public is always a possibility. The implication is that master narratives such as race, history and politics are always entering the space one constructs as private. That said, this study also argues that the home and those things with which it is most closely associated, such as belonging, comfort and safety, may actually hide a form of violence. By this I mean that in the desire for homeliness, one may exclude others from one’s home. Consequently, this argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s writings on the aporia of conditional and unconditional hospitality to investigate what ethical possibilities might, somewhat unexpectedly, be created by the un-homely home. The study is therefore an exploration of the potentials that inhere in a certain kind of un-homeliness, the most important of which is the chance to respond ethically to the alterity of the other. In sum, there is a necessity to extend hospitality beyond condition and beyond limit, and this ethical imperative is at odds with the desire for comfort and safety. The way in which post-transitional novels explore these issues of hospitality and home is the primary focus of this study.

In this study I focus on a number of collections of short fiction by the South African writers Joël Matlou, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb and Ivan Vladislavić, all of which evince certain of the characteristics of short story cycles or sequences. In other words, they display what Forrest L. Ingram describes as “a double tendency of asserting the individuality of [their] components on the one hand and of highlighting, on the other, the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole”. The cycle form, thus defined, is characterised by a paradoxical yet productive and frequently unresolved tension between “the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit”, between “the one and the many”, and between cohesion and fragmentation. It is this “dynamic structure of connection and disconnection” which singularly equips the genre to represent the interrelationship of singular and collective identities, or the “coherent multiplicity of community”. Ingram, for example, asserts that “Numerous and varied connective strands draw the co-protagonists of any story cycle into a single community. … However this community may be achieved, it usually can be said to constitute the central character of a cycle”. Not unsurprisingly, then, in its dominant manifestations over much of the twentieth century the short story cycle demonstrated a marked inclination towards regionalism and the depiction of localised enclaves, and this tendency towards “place-based short story cycles” in which topographical unity is a conspicuous feature was as pronounced in South Africa as elsewhere. However, the specific collections which are my concern here increasingly employ innovative and self-reflexive narrative strategies that unsettle generic expectations and interrogate the notions of regionalism and community conventionally associated with the short story cycle. My investigation seeks to explain this shift in emphasis, and its particular significance within the South African context.

M.A. (English) / In the following dissertation, the literary representation of the farm in Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (18%3), Smith's The Beadle (1926), and Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1976) will be examined under two main categories. The first is the treatment of the farm landscape, or the specifically '* South African version of the pastoral myth. The second, and interrelated category, is the stereotypic vision that originated around the inhabitants of the South African farm. In both categories the focus will fallon the stereotypes of both land and inhabitants that existed at the time that Schreiner and Smith wrote, and the ways in which these stereotypes were used, modified, or expanded by these two authors. In the final chapter I shall examine Coetzee' s ironic use of these stereotypes, especially those that were created around the farm landscape during the nineteenth century.

Vicky, a thirty something English radio journalist, has moved to Cape Town to try and work out what it is that's missing from her life and to fill the gap. At first she thinks she's found what she's looking for, but a series of unsettling events makes her realise she has simply brought her problems with her. She goes back to England, ostensibly for work, where she is contacted by her stepbrother, Mark. They hardly know each other but he has a reason for wanting to find her. They meet and, for both of them, their encounters change the way they see themselves and their relationships. Vicky comes to understand more about her past and her family and, for the first time, to find a connection with her emotional life