Includes abstract. / This study examines literature by Zimbabwean women that explores evictions and migrations of people from 2000 to 2009 when the crisis subsided with the enactment of the Global Political Agreement (GPA).

This thesis examines the impact of urbanisation on Zimbabwean culture, particularly the Shona culture as it is represented in Zimbabwean literature. My main argument in this thesis is that Zimbabwean literature suggests that urbanisation is harmful and destructive to the Shona culture and the way of life of the Shona people.

How do emerging black authors write about hope in contemporary Johannesburg, when the horizons of expectation for the present seem to have collapsed? This question informs this dissertation's engagement with Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 and Perfect Hlongwane's Jozi. The dissertation positions itself within the field of Johannesburg studies. It draws from writing which explores the concept of belonging in Johannesburg and the ways in which this is interposed by racisms and narratives of upward mobility. The dissertation places the novels beside one another in order to examine the availability of new scripts about black subjectivities in post-apartheid Johannesburg. It grapples with some of the narratives being drawn upon by emerging black South African fiction writing on the city, and begins to trace connections between the two novels and other texts which have come to define the literary landscape of this field. The novels allow different approaches to these narratives to surface, while enabling the establishment of a trajectory of conceptions of hope. The dissertation first focuses on Room 207 and argues that the novel exposes the limits of the scripts with which it is engaging, but is unwilling to offer an alternative narrative. It then turns to Jozi to argue that the novel presents a new space for hope in Johannesburg as endurance in the city through the work of care. Reading between the two novels, the dissertation seeks to open a space in research on Johannesburg literature for emphasising the concepts of care, community and endurance as alternative modes of being in the post-apartheid city.

My research centers around the representation of traumatic or otherwise extreme human experiences through modes of fictional writing. I am essentially looking into the renderings of unspeakable subject matter that occupies a liminal space in language's functioning. I aim to explore the potentialities of the most irredeemably strange or seemingly incoherent experiences of others, and show that they can be accessed and expressed. Accessing these types of memories or experiences by narrative and the techniques of fictional literature, brings us to a deeper understanding of and engagement with an experience when it is not our own. I believe that looking into the formal techniques of literature can function to provide a point of entry into addressing the integrity and expressibility of experiences and memory's functioning. In my initial section, I aim to give a general sense of the functional definitions and critical influences of the themes of narrative, witness, trauma, and testimony. The difficulties and paradoxes of coherent traumatic witnessing and testimonies are addressed through Laub, Felman, and Agamben - and I suggest that there is a need for something outside the realm of strict nonfiction and memoir in order to keep stories of extreme human experience alive in a cultural consciousness. Ultimately, I posit that the work of imaginative writing benefits and bypasses some of the discrepancies of testimony by means of some of the latitudes allowed by the formal aspects of fiction. The texts whose formal elements are addressed are W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Using Austerlitz, I attend to the themes of alienation through looking specifically at narrative style. Using Michel de Certeau's theory of the everyday, I suggest that the contours of the familiar have a specific capacity for expressing profundity in such a way in that they serve as a place of remembering and forgetting. The world to which most people can relate can be the location of an engagement with an experience that was perhaps beforehand beyond the realm of recognizable language. Through Michaels's text, I explore the value of acknowledging a suspicion of language for its shortcomings for capturing the essence of descriptions. Following this, I also make a case for the value of empathic readings, as they serve the purpose of redemption and of fostering hope and healing in the wake of traumatic memory. My research centers around the representation of traumatic or otherwise extreme human experiences through modes of fictional writing. I am essentially looking into the renderings of unspeakable subject matter that occupies a liminal space in language's functioning. I aim to explore the potentialities of the most irredeemably strange or seemingly incoherent experiences of others, and show that they can be accessed and expressed. Accessing these types of memories or experiences by narrative and the techniques of fictional literature, brings us to a deeper understanding of and engagement with an experience when it is not our own. I believe that looking into the formal techniques of literature can function to provide a point of entry into addressing the integrity and expressibility of experiences and memory's functioning. In my initial section, I aim to give a general sense of the functional definitions and critical influences of the themes of narrative, witness, trauma, and testimony. The difficulties and paradoxes of coherent traumatic witnessing and testimonies are addressed through Laub, Felman, and Agamben - and I suggest that there is a need for something outside the realm of strict nonfiction and memoir in order to keep stories of extreme human experience alive in a cultural consciousness. Ultimately, I posit that the work of imaginative writing benefits and bypasses some of the discrepancies of testimony by means of some of the latitudes allowed by the formal aspects of fiction. The texts whose formal elements are addressed are W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Using Austerlitz, I attend to the themes of alienation through looking specifically at narrative style. Using Michel de Certeau's theory of the everyday, I suggest that the contours of the familiar have a specific capacity for expressing profundity in such a way in that they serve as a place of remembering and forgetting. The world to which most people can relate can be the location of an engagement with an experience that was perhaps beforehand beyond the realm of recognizable language. Through Michaels's text, I explore the value of acknowledging a suspicion of language for its shortcomings for capturing the essence of descriptions. Following this, I also make a case for the value of empathic readings, as they serve the purpose of redemption and of fostering hope and healing in the wake of traumatic memory.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81). / The mystical nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' has intrigued readers for over two centuries. Of these full poems only the "Rime" is complete and yet they all still enjoy the scrutiny of a wide audience. This thesis examines the circumstances surrounding Coleridge's inability to continue writing such poems of imaginative force.

Towards the end of October 2018, news stories surfaced about a targeted crackdown on gay people in Tanzania. Regional Commissioner of Dar es Salam, Paul Makonda, announced plans to form a government taskforce that would be devoted to pursuing and prosecuting LGBTIQ people, or those perceived to be on the spectrum (Amnesty International, “Tanzania”). This current onslaught on LGBTIQ citizens has already seen 10 men arrested, ostensibly for participating in a same-sex wedding (Ibid). While the Tanzanian foreign ministry distanced itself from the Regional Commissioner’s remarks (Burke), others have framed Makonda’s actions as a natural extension of president John Magufuli’s “morality crusade” (Amnesty International, “Tanzania”). After being elected to office in 2015, Magufuli achieved international acclaim for this 'thrift and intolerance for corruption’ (Paget). However, Magufuli’s “morality crusade” quickly spiralled into authoritarianism, with a clampdown on freedom of speech and on opposition to his party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) (Ibid). The party has governed Tanzania since its independence in 1961 (O’Gorman 317). As Ahearne notes, it has become a situation where 'any opposition is seen as “against the nation”’ since it has become 'clear that Magufuli is following a nationalist agenda.’ Homophobic campaigns have been a common feature since Magufuli was elected in 2015, and sodomy still carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years in Tanzania (Burke). The current “morality crusade” is not that unusual, in other words, and it imagines sexual and gender minorities as outside the nation-state, as not quite citizens. This discourse is not new, and simply echoes similar declarations and crackdowns in other African countries that frame sexual and gender minorities as non-citizens.

Includes bibliographical references. / With an eye to the historical situation in which the novel is set, and into which it emerges, I examine the text’s negotiation of the problems of communication and communicability across different languages and cultures. I suggest Greene as, in this sense, occupied with many of the same concerns about the limits of representation of personal experience as are found in the "Modernist" movement. This reading of the text also takes into account an historically contextualised overview of the various colonial interests the novel presents - those of the "old colonial peoples" of Europe as opposed to the new American empire. In this light, I am interested in the text’s depiction of the meeting of characters of different cultural origins - specifically the encounter of the European and the American, and the "Westerner" and the "Oriental" - in order to investigate the pitfalls of communication.