Includes bibliographical references. / In this dissertation I examine through a close reading of J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974) the textual dymamic that impels the two narrator-protagonists toward the solipsist position - the ground of the true Cartesian. I show how Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are presented as products of Western print culture and children of René Descartes: literate and acutely self-conscious. I note how each conceives himself according to Descartes' mind-body dualism as primarily a thinking thing. I argue that this self-conception is reinforced by their paradoxical presence-as-absence as figures in a fiction.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-75). / HIV/AIDS is a prominent part of contemporary South African experience that has found expression in many forms, one of which is literature. This thesis analyses the relation between self and community as it is represented in South African HIV/AIDS literature. The argument of the thesis is underpinned by a dual theoretical strand.

This thesis examines individual and societal action and activism in five science fiction and utopian novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, namely, The left hand of darkness, The word for world is forest, The lathe of heaven, The dispossessed, and Always coming home. Le Guin is a politically committed author whose ideological perspective is informed by feminism, Taoism, and anarchism, as well as a strong ecological awareness. These determine the structure of her fictional societies and the actions of her characters. Each novel is approached on its own terms, with the commentary adhering closely to the text. Individuals and their societies are conceived of as embodying different and conflicting ways of being and doing. The author is seen as an activist by virtue of her political commitment, especially in the case of the self-reflexive, self-critical Always coming home. Included in the Introduction are sections on: Tom Moylan's concept of the critical utopia, which tailors the utopian genre to fit modern views; Le Guin's concept of the yin utopia, one possible form of the critical utopia; and a short section on Taoism, familiarising the reader with concepts and terminology used in the thesis.

Bibliography: pages 54-56. / This study of the design of Beowulf examines the possible function of the 'digressions', the poet's concept of time, the nature of the hero and the generic status of the poem. Finally, a suggestion as to the possible intention of the poem is proposed.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-96). / David Attwell, in the interview that prefaces "The Poetics of Reciprocity" section of Doubling the Point, identifies a recurrent concern with the function of reciprocity in the work of J. M Coetzee. 1 "The I-You relation ... connects with larger things in the whole of [Coetzee's] work, what I would like to call broadly the poetics of reciprocity." (Attwell 1992: 58) This dissertation seeks to examine the poetics of reciprocity as an aesthetic-ethical concern of Coetzee' s fiction. By establishing Coetzee's works as an extended critique of reciprocity in their thematic and structural elements, this dissertation presents a notion of reciprocity that acknowledges both an ethical imperative to engage with others and the aesthetic problems of depicting that ethical engagement in art. The aim of the dissertation is therefore to show the use of a poetics of reciprocity in raising and examining particular ethical and aesthetic issues in Coetzee' s work.

The dissertation engages in a postcolonial reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It argues that Frankenstein and the education of Frankenstein's creature are both deeply rooted in colonial discourse, the nature of the colonial other and the place of this other within Western society. By charting how this discourse functions in the construction of physical alterity, this paper argues that through his exposure to language and society Frankenstein's creature becomes complicit in this process of imposition in which he is placed as the object of a discourse which construes him as other.

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William Butler Yeats first came under the thrall of / Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in the Dublin summer of 1902. 0 His friend and patron, the New York lawyer John Quinn, had sent Yeats a modest volume of Nietzsche with the imposing title of Nietzsche as Critic, PhiZosopher, Poet and 'Prophet, containing 'Choice Selections from His Works' compiled by Thomas Common, who was to become a major contributor to the Oscar. Levy English edition of Nietzsche's Werke.