This thesis consists of two sections. The intention of Section One, 'Biographical Texts: Theoretical Underpinning', is to explore and discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Maori feminism and Kaupapa Maori as they relate to biography as a research method into the lives of Maori women. Biography, as a literary genre is also examined with particular reference to feminist, women of colour and Maori biography. Section One is a wideranging section, encompassing a broad sweep of the literature in these areas. It both draws from existing literature and contributes to the discourse regarding Maori feminism, Maori biography and Maori research. It is relevant to but unconstrained by the content of Section Two. The intention of Section Two, 'Locating the Story of Betty Wark; A Biographical Narrative with Reflective Annotations', is to provide an example of the biographical method and what might constitute Maori biography. The subject of the biographical narrative, Betty Wark, was a Maori woman who was actively involved with community-based organisations from the 1950s until her death in May 2001. Several major themes which emerged from Betty's biographical history occur throughout her narrative and provide a framework in which her story is located. One of the most significant themes was the notion of 'home'; both literal and metaphorical. This theme is reflected in the title of the thesis, Writing Ourselves 'Home'.

This thesis consists of two sections. The intention of Section One, 'Biographical Texts: Theoretical Underpinning', is to explore and discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Maori feminism and Kaupapa Maori as they relate to biography as a research method into the lives of Maori women. Biography, as a literary genre is also examined with particular reference to feminist, women of colour and Maori biography. Section One is a wideranging section, encompassing a broad sweep of the literature in these areas. It both draws from existing literature and contributes to the discourse regarding Maori feminism, Maori biography and Maori research. It is relevant to but unconstrained by the content of Section Two. The intention of Section Two, 'Locating the Story of Betty Wark; A Biographical Narrative with Reflective Annotations', is to provide an example of the biographical method and what might constitute Maori biography. The subject of the biographical narrative, Betty Wark, was a Maori woman who was actively involved with community-based organisations from the 1950s until her death in May 2001. Several major themes which emerged from Betty's biographical history occur throughout her narrative and provide a framework in which her story is located. One of the most significant themes was the notion of 'home'; both literal and metaphorical. This theme is reflected in the title of the thesis, Writing Ourselves 'Home'.

This thesis consists of two sections. The intention of Section One, 'Biographical Texts: Theoretical Underpinning', is to explore and discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Maori feminism and Kaupapa Maori as they relate to biography as a research method into the lives of Maori women. Biography, as a literary genre is also examined with particular reference to feminist, women of colour and Maori biography. Section One is a wideranging section, encompassing a broad sweep of the literature in these areas. It both draws from existing literature and contributes to the discourse regarding Maori feminism, Maori biography and Maori research. It is relevant to but unconstrained by the content of Section Two. The intention of Section Two, 'Locating the Story of Betty Wark; A Biographical Narrative with Reflective Annotations', is to provide an example of the biographical method and what might constitute Maori biography. The subject of the biographical narrative, Betty Wark, was a Maori woman who was actively involved with community-based organisations from the 1950s until her death in May 2001. Several major themes which emerged from Betty's biographical history occur throughout her narrative and provide a framework in which her story is located. One of the most significant themes was the notion of 'home'; both literal and metaphorical. This theme is reflected in the title of the thesis, Writing Ourselves 'Home'.

This study of Zakes Mda's life and sixteen of his plays and seven novels, written from 1966 to the present day, set in South Africa, Lesotho and the United States of America, shows how his life and works interweave, and how his defamiliarisation mode, his magic realism and his juxtaposed timeframes stimulate reader response and self-realisation, bringing about change. Experiences of marginalisation due to early childhood sexual abuse, exile, and being banished from church, and his involvement in political movements outside the mainstream, have caused him to be an astute observer of life. He is sceptical of authority and power, and is as critical of those who seek power, becoming intoxicated thereby, as of those who give away their power and so perpetuate unacceptable institutions and their own victimisation. At all times though, his writing style is creative and entertaining, rooted in the African oral tradition from which he springs, but also portraying international influences to which he has been exposed over the years. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study is an interpretive analysis of Zimbabwean political auto/biographical narratives in contexts of changing culture, race, ethnicity and gender identity images of the self and nation. I used eclectic theories of postcolonialism to explore the fractured nature of both the processes of identity construction and narration, and the contradictions inherent in identity categories of nation and self. The problem of using autobiographical memory to recall the momentous events that formed the contradictory identities of self and nation in the creative imagination of the lives of Ian Smith, Maurice Nyagumbo, Abel Muzorewa, Joshua Nkomo, Doris Lessing, Fay Chung, Judith Garfield Todd, Tendai Westerhof and Lutanga Shaba have been highlighted. The study concluded that there are narrative and ideological disjunctures between experiencing life and narrating those experiences to create approximations of coherent identities of individual selves and those of the nation. The study argued that each of the stories analyzed in this study contributed a version of the multiple Zimbabwean narratives that no one story could ever tell without being contested by others. Thus the study explores how white Rhodesian auto/biographies depend on the imperial repertoire to construct varying, even contradicting, images of white identities and the Rhodesian nation, which are also contested by black nationalist life narratives. The narratives by women writers, both white and black, introduced further instabilities to the male authored narratives by moving beyond the conventional understanding of what is ‘political’ in political auto/biographies. The HIV and AIDS narratives by black women thrust into the public sphere personalized versions of self so that the political consequence of their inclusion was not only to image Zimbabwe as a diseased society, but one desperately in need of political solutions to confront the different pathologies inherited from colonialism and which also have continued in the post-independence period. / English Studies / (D. Litt. et Phil. (English))

Orientador: Haquira Osakabe / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T05:45:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Filizola_Anamaria_D.pdf: 9898200 bytes, checksum: aaf8d5d32f97737dc6bfeb5c08bf8ef4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2000 / Resumo: Este trabalho analisa as cinco biografias escritas pela romancista portuguesa Agustina Bessa-Luís, a saber: Santo António (1973), Florbela Espanca - a vida e a obra (1979), Sebastião José (1981), Longos dias têm cem anos - presença de Vieira da Silva (1982) e Martha Telles - o castelo que irás e não voltarás (1986). O interesse pelo traço biográfico, manifestado em O susto (1958), romance à clefcujos personagens são inspirados nos poetas Teixeira de Pascoaes e Femando Pessoa, vai se tomar mais evidente após a publicação de Santo António. Tal livro marca uma nova fase na obra da Autora, em que predomina a pesquisa histórica para dar conta de um passado mais longínquo, não alcançado pela memória, seja em romances à elef ou não, e em ensaios. A presença do traço biográfico nessa produção, além das próprias biografias, justifica a pesquisa que busca identificar quais as marcas caracterizadoras desse discurso não ficcional. O trabalho se organiza em três partes. A primeira consiste dum estudo abrangente da obra da Autora, incluindo os ensaios, seguido de um levantamento do estado da arte do discurso biográfico, com o objetivo de estabelecer um protocolo de leitura das biografias. A segunda parte aborda os já citados cinco textos na ordem cronológica em que foram publicados, analisando-se o processo criador das biografias, as quais se apresentam com formatos e enfoques diferentes, mas com marcas comuns, entre as quais destacam-se: a) insatisfação com a produção existente a respeito do sujeito biografado, evidenciando-se aí uma falta que deverá ser suprida pela escritura da biografia em causa; b) desobediência a uma ordem cronológica linear da narrativa, em que o mesmo fato é evocado em diferentes momentos da vida narrada e da narração, resultando numa abertura do texto a diferentes interpretações de ações ou fatos acontecidos na vida do sujeito biografado; c) predileção por documentos escritos pelo biografado como cartas, bilhetes, poemas, sermões, discursos, que se apresentam como meios autênticos de expressão do ser. Mais importante, porém, é que a citação desse discurso do Outro dá ensejo à criação do texto agustiniano, de tal modo que aquela produção se toma parte indissolúvel do discurso da Autora. O resultado dado a ler revela o interesse provocado pelo sujeito biográfico, cuja vida se apresenta como um enigma a ser decifrado, ou como adivinha a ser demonstrada pela biógrafa que desempenha um papel de detetive, à procura de pistas que levem a completar o quebra-cabeça a ser resolvido. O desenho formado pelas peças reunidas, no entanto, é mutável, não prevalecendo nenhuma conclusão fechada, de modo que o sujeito biográfico não se apresenta ao leitor como mitificado com complacência ou radicalismo: é a sua condição humana complexa que é dada a conhecer. Assim, não ficam de fora as fraquezas, os vícios, os defeitos, ao lado das realizações que tomaram a pessoa um sujeito biográfico. Nesse sentido, determinados acontecimentos, ou sua falta, são identificados pela Autora como a "prova da existência" desses indivíduos, ou, como o momento em que sua força plástica é reconhecida publicamente. A terceira parte é a conclusão. Reitera-se o processo criativo da escrita das biografias, diferente da criação ficcional, e conclui-se que, se a obra ficcional de Agustina Bessa-Luís é reconhecida pela crítica como ficcionista, o mesmo não acontece com seus trabalhos de cunho ensaístico em geral e biográfico em particular. No entanto, não deixa de haver uma recognição de seu trabalho de biógrafa, pois das cinco biografias, apenas a de Santo António é fruto de sua vontade, as demais lhe são todas encomendadas / Abstract: The present work analyzes the five biographies written by the Portuguese novelist Agustina Bessa-Luís, namely: Santo António (1973), Florbela Espanca - a vida e a obra (1979), Sebastião José (1981), Longos dias têm cem anos - presença de Vieira da Silva (1982) and Martha Telles - o castelo que irás e não voltarás (1986). The interest in the biographical trace manifested in O Susto (1958), an 'à ele! novel whose characters are inspired on the poets Teixeira Soares and Fernando Pessoa, becomes more evident after the publication of Santo António. This book stands as the landmark of a new phase in the Author' s life characterized by the dominance of historical research in order to account for a more distant past, not reached by memory, either in novels - 'à elef' or not - or in essays. The presence of the biographical trace in this production, apart from the biographies themselves, justifies the present research as a step toward the identification of the characterizing marks of this non-fictional discourse. The present work is organized in three parts. The first consists of a comprehensive study of the Author' s work, including her essays, followed by a state of the art research focusing on the biographical discourse aiming at establishing a reading protocol for those biographies. The second part deals with the five above-mentioned texts in chronological order according to their date of publication, analyzing the creative process of biographies, which present themselves in different formats and approaches, nonetheless sharing some marks among which we can point out: a) dissatisfaction with the available production about the biographee, thus evidencing a gap that will be filled in by the writing of the biography in case; b) disregard for a linear chronological order of the narrative, in which the same fact is evoked in different moments of the narrated life and of the narration, leaving the text open to different interpretations of actions or facts that happened in the biographee's life; c) preference for documents written by the biographee such as letters, notes, poems, sermons, speeches, that present themselves as genuine ways of expressing the being. More important, however, is that the citation of this discourse of the Other allows for the creation of the Agustinian text, so much so that that production becomes an indiscerptible part of the Author' s discourse. The result offered for reading reveals the interest raised by the biographee, whose life presents itself as an enigma to be solved, or as a riddle to be demonstrated by the biographer who performs the role of a detective, looking for clues that lead to the completion of a jigsaw puzz1e. The picture formed by the reunited pieces, however, is changeable, not prevailing any closed conclusion, in such a way that the biographee is not presented to the reader as mythicized with complacency or radicalism: it is their complex human condition that is made known. Thus, weaknesses, vices, flaws are not left out and are presented side by side with the achievements that turned the person into a biographee. In this sense, certain events - or the lack of them - are identified by the Author as the 'proof of existence' of these individuaIs or as the moment in which their plastic force is publicly recognized. The third part is the conclusion. The creative process of biography writing is reaffirmed as different from the fictional creation and we conclude that, if the fictional work of Agustina Bessa-Luís is recognized by the critics as fictionist, the same does not happen with her essay-type works in general and her biographic-type works in particular. Nevertheless, this does not invalidate the recognition of her work as a biographer for, out ofthe five biographies, the one of Santo António is a product of her own wish, whereas the others had alI been ordered. / Doutorado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Doutor em Teoria e História Literária

Thesis (MA (African Languages))--Stellenbosch University, 20008. / This study employs the theoretical framework of text construction advanced by Feez and Joyce (1998) and Grabe and Kaplan (1996) for the analysis of Xhosa texts of biographical recounting and consequential explanation. Text-linguistic methods are used to analyse five written biographical recounting texts and five written consequential explanation texts taken from Bona magazine. These text-linguistic methods explore the incorporation of texts in the National Curriculum 2005, in order to equip both teachers and learners with the skills to get to know the Xhosa language – to learn, to teach and to follow the language structure when writing. The analysis facilitates the discovery of the communicative purpose, culture and social elements in written text. In addition, models of writing, text-linguistic construction, properties of written text and elements of text structure are explored in the analysis of the Xhosa texts. Based on these terms, the broad emphasis will be on parameters of the ethnography of writing as proposed by Grabe and Kaplan (1996). These parameters are, among others, as follows: who writes what to whom, for what purpose, why, when, where and how? This study also proves that the theoretical framework advanced by Feez and Joyce (1998) and Grabe and Kaplan (1996) about written texts could result in effective teachers and learners who have acquired skills and become text experts.

Autobiographical writing acquired increasing importance during the apartheid period, with greater numbers of autobiographical texts being published by a more representative range of South Africans across race, class and gender categories. This thesis analyzes the implications of shifts in autobiographical production, in English, during the years 1948-1994 through the examination of selected texts. The readings are informed by poststructuralism, modified by information about indigenous black South African cultural practices, as well as by input supplied by some of the autobiographical texts themselves. This theoretical approach may be referred to as a "pratique de metissage" (Glissant). The texts selected for close reading are from a field of over 120 autobiographical texts. They were chosen for their ability to illustrate important trends in South African autobiographical writing, specifically with regard to the three constituent parts of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. The chapter dealing with the depiction of self interrogates the hierarchized discourses of male-biased humanism in Roy Campbell's Light on a Dark Horse (1951). In Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) I analyze the melding of the conceptual frameworks of indigenous black cultures and Western individualism by which the autobiographical subject is defined. Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) is read as an exploration of the postmodernist decentred self. In the chapter focusing on the portrayal of life experiences, I examine the ways in which the narrator of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go (1962) seeks to secure the reader's approval of his version of recent South African history; while the analysis of the sub-genre referred to here as worker autobiography is principally concerned with the politics of life-writing. In Chapter 5, I look at how Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One (1987) uses the discourses of popular American movies of the 40s and 50s in order to validate a self victimized by racism, and also at the ways in which Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives (1992) probes the limits and possibilities of biography through autobiographical speculation. In general, apartheid autobiography moves away from individualism to contribute, through various means, to social and political change. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.