This mini-dissertation aims to examine the way in which Breyten Breytenbach explores the concepts of home and exile in his novel Memory of Snow and of Dust. The author captures and conveys the experience of exile, and envisages through the exile’s double vision a more complicated conception of home. Through the novel one is able to observe the exilic condition and gain access to new insights. The narrative structure comprises of various discourses and illustrates the restless nature of an unsettling and unstable existence. In the Introduction the theoretical framework for this study is outlined: recent developments in postcolonial and postmodern theories, Breytenbach’s oeuvre and literary criticism devoted to his work are discussed. Chapter One examines the distressing journey into a new awareness of what constitutes home. Chapter Two inspects the restless, yet regenerative condition of exile. Chapter Three considers a more fluid response to spatiality and the concept of home through an exploration of fresh perspectives that may emerge from extreme mental suffering. This study concludes with an affirmation of the relevance of Memory of Snow and of Dust, in times in which the overlapping boundaries of home and exile are becoming a global condition. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

This thesis is concerned with the concepts of exile, trauma, and nostalgia and how they all come together to create a sense of culture shock that the subjects of my thesis encountered. Azar Nafisi, Nahid Rachlin, Tara Bahrampour, and Azadeh Moaveni, are all Iranian-American authors, and despite their different life experiences and ages, they all encountered culture shock as it related to male-female relations, Iranian gender norms and issues of sex and sexuality and treatments and views of the female body as it relates to reproduction. / text

Ce travail tente d’une part, d’étudier les origines de la thématique du retour d’exil et ses différentes formes dans la littérature arabe : la forme de retour chez les écrivains arabes contemporains et celle des poètes du Mahğar. Puis, la forme du retour dans la poésie classique, notamment chez les poètes qui sont rentrés chez eux après une longue absence. Enfin, la forme de retour chez les poètes préislamiques, telle qu’elle se manifeste dans « al-Muqaddimaẗ al-ṭalaliyyaẗ » (l’introduction des ruines). D’autre part, notre étude tente d’explorer la thématique de retour dans la littérature palestinienne contemporaine et de montrer la particularité de ce phénomène chez les auteurs palestiniens revenus en Palestine après les Accords d’Oslo en 1993. En effet, plusieurs d’entre eux abordent la thématique du retour dans des œuvres littéraires variées. Ils y expriment souvent l’échec et la déception face à la réalité retrouvée. En outre, cette étude s’intéresse à la complexité du retour dans la littérature palestinienne. En effet, deux problématiques principales émergent : la première est liée au phénomène du retour d’exil et la deuxième est liée au contexte socio-politique particulier de la Palestine. Ces deux problématiques font du cas du retour palestinien un phénomène à part dans la littérature arabe contemporaine. / This research attempts on one hand, to study the origins of the theme of return and its various forms in Arabic literature : as perceived by contemporary arab writers versus by poets of Mahğar. Then, the shape of the return in classical poetry, especially among poets who have returned back home after a long absence. Eventually, the shape it adopted among pre-Islamic poets, as illustrated in « al-muqaddimaẗ ṭalaliyyaẗ » (the introduction of the ruins). On the other hand, our study intents to explore the theme of return in contemporary Palestinian literature and to demonstrate the peculiarity of this phenomenon among Palestinian returnee authors after Oslo agreements in 1993. Indeed, many of them oftently expressed the failure and disappointment facing the newfound reality. Furthermore, this research addresses the return’s complexity in Palestinian literature. Indeed, two main issues were raised : the first one is related to the phenomenon of return from exile and the second one, to the specific political context of Palestine. These two issues render unique the Palestinian return, a phenomenon in contemporary Arabic literature.

Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary, intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African- American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty, enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

Diss. Univ. Zürich, 2004/05. - Ref.: Elisabeth Bronfen. / Im Buchh.: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. Register. Literaturverz.