Starting with a broad attempt to define the general concerns in African literature, and the cultural esthetics which form the basis of this writing, this thesis tries to place the emerging East African literature in English literature in English into the stream of African literature, and of literature at large. It focusses particularly on the works of Okot p'Bitek and James Ngugi and treats broadly the themes emerging from the East African environment and the artistic challenges which these themes pose to the writer. It concludes that meaning and strength in this emerging literature will stem from the writer's awareness and sensibility to their environment and a willingness to make an honest and artistic appraisal of this situation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln. / Includes added t.p. without thesis statement. Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-353).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-186). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln. / Includes added t.p. without thesis statement. Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-353).

Abstract My dissertation interrogates the ways in which Zakes Mda has made women central to his novels. I argue that the women characters in Mda's novels are key to the idea of the rebirth of Africa (and the simultaneous birth of a (South) African identity) a rebirth made necessary by years of dispossession through colonialism and apartheid. I will explore how on one level Mda, through magical realism, represents women as symbols of both destruction and construction; and how on another level he represents them as complex characters existing as agents of history. Mda’s novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays With the Darkness (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000) and The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) critique the topdown approach of the postapartheid, postcolonial discourse of African Renaissance a discourse which aims to reverse the damage done to the lives of Africans who have been brutalised by history. Mda writes an African renaissance (with a lower case “r”), which acknowledges and explores the ways in which people on the margins of power, recreate and transform their lives, without necessarily waiting for politicians to come up with policies and solutions. The renaissance of ordinary people privileges the spirit of ubuntu, whereby the individual strives to work with the collective to achieve a more humane world. Mda’s female characters are central to the debate on renaissance and reconstruction in that he questions existing gender roles by ii highlighting strongly the rights still denied African women his challenge to the discourse is whether a renaissance is possible if the humanity of women (and others marginalised by class, age, location, ethnicity, and other categories) continues to be denied. I ask the question whether Mda, goes further, and envisions women participating as leaders in traditionally male spaces.

This thesis examines the trope of the child in South African literature from the early years of apartheid to the contemporary moment. The chapters focus on some of the most established and prolific authors in South African literary history and roughly follow a chronological sequence: autobiographies by the exiled Drum writers (Es'kia Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane) in the early 1960s; Nadine Gordimer's writing during the apartheid era; confessional novels by Afrikaans-speaking authors (Mark Behr and Michiel Heyns) in the transitional decade; and J. M. Coetzee's late and post apartheid works. I argue that, while writing from diverse historical and political positions in relation to South Africa's literary culture, these authors are all in one way or another able to articulate their subjectivities-with their underlying ambiguities, contradictions, and negations-by imagining themselves as the child or/and through childhood. My analyses of the works under discussion attend to the subversive and transformative potential of, and the critical energies embedded in the trope of the child, by investigating narrative reconfigurations of temporality and space. Firstly, I will be looking at the ways in which the images, structures, and aesthetics making up the imaginings of the child disrupt a linear temporality and serve as critique of a teleological historiography of political emancipation and the liberation struggle. Secondly, I will pay attention to the spatial relations with which representations of the child are bound up: between the country and the city, black townships and white suburbs, the home and the street. By attending to specific transgressions and reorderings of these spatial relations, my reading also explores the ways in which spatial underpinnings and ideological boundaries of national identities are contested, negotiated, and restructured by forces of the transnational, the diasporic, and the global around the figure of the child.

Thesis (diploma in librarianship)--University of the Witwatersrand.

No description available.

Thesis (diploma in librarianship)--University of the Witwatersrand.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Perpignan, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-371) and index.