There has been a change of regime in a place with very different co-ordinates to the real world, and the President and his intimates - his chef, barber and portraitist - are being held accountable for their complicity by the new Commander. Each man in turn speaks of his appetites, the physical, the tactile, the hurt done by him and to him, detailing the intimacies of his particular embodied life. The significant woman in each man's life gives voice to the minutiae of pain, balancing melancholy, farce and horror, until all characters' voices elide in a whirlpool of personal and public reckoning, memory and desire.

Includes abstract.

This MA thesis is divided into three parts. 1) A Preface, which concerns the act of writing this work, with a reflections on the attendant difficulties regarding editing and editorial distance. A placement of the poetry in relation to "South African writing", and to late 20th century poetry. A brief elucidation of the poems' preoccupations and concems. 2) Two Essays, entitled "Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of Course: The Lonely Larkin" and 'William Empson : His Modem Escape". The first concerns Philip Larkin's uncanny ability to create a beauty out of irony, isolation, and desolation, his achievement of transcendence from entrapment. The second essay deals with William Empson's unique poetic position: a truly modem one. The essays puts forward the idea that Empson's poetry can be regarded as a struggle between a wish for escape and a need to engage with an horrendous "objective" reality. In other words, his struggle is between poetry and plain speaking; between art and science. 3) The Poems, which form a group of forty written throughout 1997/8. They have been thoroughly edited several times over, in close consultation with Assoc. Prof. Stephen Watson of the Department of English.

Featherstream is a romantic suspense novel set at the southernmost tip of Africa during the Second World War. Returning to her father's farm at Cape Agulhas for the university holidays, Anna van der Vliet stumbles on a clandestine operation to provision enemy U-boats. Her dilemma of whether to betray family or country is further complicated when she falls in love with German naval commander Thomas von Eisenheim. Anna goes on to uncover a plot by Nazi Germany and the right-wing Ossewabrandwag organisation to blow up the Union's parliament buildings and install a pro-German Afrikaner government. The novel's landscape ranges from the remote fynbos plains of Agulhas in the Southern Cape, through the Moravian hamlet of Elim to Cape Town. Based on extensive historical research, it explores the deep ideological tensions in South Africa between supporters of the pro-war government of General Jan Smuts and Doctor Daniel Malan's Purified National Party, which were mirrored in communities and families across South Africa. The driving force of the story is a young woman's struggle to reconcile divided loyalties and emerge from the emotional stranglehold of her overbearing father.

No description available.

No description available.

Kyne is an outsider: a white, Danish girl, living in a country where the majority are blacks and the few whites are English. Her sentiments of belonging and integration are lost when her family's farms are taken away by the dictatorship government in 2004. The country, Zimbabwe, spirals out of control: murder, starvation and chaos becomes the way of life. Kyne and her family are left with nothing. Kyne travels back in time to the bizarre life of her childhood on their farm in Rhodesia during the war in the 1970s. It is a nostalgic yet often horrifying return to her past as she uncovers the strange, sometimes idyllic lifestyle that was once a very normal way of life to her. The story unfolds in a landscape that is both harsh yet beckoning. Kyne confronts her relationships with all those around her beginning with her Danish parents who are determined to continue farming in a land which they call home, even if war threatens their lives. The reader meets Pencil the Cook who allows Kyne into the silent calm of his kitchen, his family, and the secret, adult world in which Kyne will learn of the terrifying reality of war. She describes the workers on the farm who are pulled between loyalty to their employer and to the blacks who seek independence from white rule. Finally, she describes the other white families nearby who are attacked, tortured and killed for attempting to the only way of life they have ever known.

This dissertation, entitled The Cosmic Tantrum, is presented in two parts: the body of creative work, in the form of a series of art works created over the course of two years of study, and the theoretical work discussed in this document. The creative work is subdivided into two sections: 1) a series of ten figurative mixed-media paintings, organised chronologically; and 2) the lightworks, a suite of fourteen back-lit canvas tapestries entitled The Eternal Carnival. The Eternal Carnival is the centrepiece of my postgraduate work. A set of drawings is also presented as supporting documentation of the artistic process. The theoretical component is the result of two years of research in Postcolonial Theory, Cultural Studies, and scholarship on the artistic and philosophical systems of what is known as the Black Atlantic. I provide an explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the creative work in the form of a possible theory of culture, which I have called an "insurgent ancestral aesthetic", elaborated in Part One. This theory of culture provides an analytical framework and leads into Part Two, in which I offer an exposition of the artwork. As a theory, an insurgent ancestral aesthetic begins with the assertion that the presence of the artistic philosophies of the African Diaspora can be understood as essential to both Postmodern Theory and contemporary global culture. A comparative study of the relationship between Black Atlantic aesthetic philosophy and Postmodernism develops this theory of culture and leads into a discussion of possible applications of an insurgent ancestral aesthetic. The themes and concepts of the theoretical research are played out in the creative work in various ways; I employ aspects of my work in theory to illuminate the art in Part Two. Generally, in the artwork, an improvisational approach to the human form reveals an image of the body as an expression of emotional, psychological, and spiritual content. The paintings generate a sense of the body as a story written over time, a record of all that has befallen it. The Eternal Carnival is the culmination of my work in shadow and silhouette and employs a narrative approach in signifying upon various spiritual characters and artistic principles active in the aesthetic and philosophic systems of the Black Atlantic.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / The objective of this dissertation is to provide a critical examination of poetry translation, using as a framework the notion that translation of poetry is comparable to an act of murder or homicide. Constructs pertaining to detective fiction are used as a basis to expose critical theories and commentary on poetry translation, which validate the comparison, taking into account the integrity of the poetic text, the context in which it exists, and the identity (constructed or real) of the poet. Four published translations, by different authors, into English of Anna Akhmatova’s poem Posledniy tost (‘The Last Toast’) are analysed in detail to demonstrate the validity of the argument and to attempt to review and quantify the loss of a poem’s essential and vital qualities as a result of translation.

This thesis takes as its subject the various public roles and representations of writers, using Said's 1993 Reith lectures on the subject of the intellectual as a starting point. The main questions raised are how writers, in various political and historical contexts, have functioned as public intellectuals, and how they have negotiated the tensions between their various private and public commitments and responsibilities, whether artistic, social, or political. To gain insight into these issues, this thesis turns to the essays, memoirs and lectures of Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian.