This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.

This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.

This study investigates how selected Zimbabwean poets use their poetry to re-imagine and rewrite Zimbabwean history to create new identities. It seeks to achieve this by analyzing the poetry of Musaemura Zimunya, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera, Philip Zhuwao, Freedom Nyamubaya and some other women poets from the anthology A Woman’s Plea and John Eppel’s poetry. The study argues that history and identity are unstable concepts whose meanings and usages are influenced by a variety of factors. It further contends that while the significations of history are generally split between how it is regarded in the academic discipline of history and its meanings outside the academic discipline, the controversies surrounding history are about the ways of representing the past. The study builds its central arguments around this existence of multiple ways of ordering the past, and asserts that poetry is also a form of representing history which utilizes its own rhetoric to authorize its versions of the past and construct identities in its own unique ways. These arguments are raised in Chapter One. The analysis of the selected poets’ texts in Chapters Two, Three, Four, Five and Six links them to the arguments raised in Chapter One. It critiques the versions of histories and the nature of identities that are represented differently by different poets. The study in these chapters reveals that poetic narratives are unstable accounts of both the past and identity, but it is this instability that allows poetry to interrogate narrow concepts of what is ‘real’ in history. There are both similar and dissimilar trends that abound in the selected poets’ texts which reveal that even within the poetic mode of representation, there are layers of understanding of the metaphorical symbols which we use to fix the meanings of Zimbabwean history and identities. The study applies different theoretical approaches to the work of each poet in order to show how each has different contribution to make towards the recovery of Zimbabwe’s past and how it speaks to our present. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / English / unrestricted