Includes abstract in English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-260). / Of the eighteen films produced by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, five are adaptations of his novels and novellas. In the case of Guelwaar, his sixth and last adaptation, it is the novel which he adapted to the film of the same name. Sembène, who considered himself to be a "modem griot", felt that cinema was a more effective medium to reach his people and deliver his message. Once copies of all six films had been obtained, two with great difficulty as they were never commercially released, the cinematic techniques which Sembène used to convey his ideology were carefully studied and then compared to the literary techniques utilised in his writings.

This dissertation attempts to read Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s fiction and essays as sustained demonstrations of precarity, as theorised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). Though never directly cited by Cole, Butler’s articulation of a shared condition of bodily vulnerability and interdependency offers a generative critical framework through which to read Cole’s representations of black bodies as they move across space. By presenting the ‘black body’, rather than ‘black man’, as the preferred metonym for black people, Cole’s work, which I argue can be read as peculiar travel narratives, foregrounds the bodily dimension of black life, and develops an ambivalent storytelling mode to narrate the experiences of characters who encompass multiple spatialities and subjectivities. Through close analysis of the novels Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007), and essays from the collection Known and Strange Things (2016), principally “Black Body” and “Unmournable Bodies”, I argue that Cole’s work subverts certain tropes in the tradition of black literary cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by James Baldwin, at the same time as Cole self-consciously situates himself within that tradition. It is the insistence on the black body as site of publicity at once desirable and vulnerable, to paraphrase Butler, that allows Cole to make these interventions. A tentative critical consensus on Cole’s work has begun to emerge: his oeuvre is read alongside a cohort of contemporary African and black diasporic writers whose works navigate the tenuous boundary between Western centers and peripheral Africa. It is not my intention in this dissertation to argue against those readings, but rather to offer the concept of precarity as productive framework that allows for readings that other spatio-temporal frameworks may occlude.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-238). / This study is based on the premise that Luo and Luhya children's singing games are creative works that subtly reflect the aesthetics of the two communities. The aim is to critically examine how the performance of the singing games and their texts reflect the aspirations, norms and values of the macro cultures of the two Nilotic and Bantu communities respectively. The sampled singing games include those done in the traditional setting, sung in vernacular and those that are taken from the urban or cosmopolitan settings.

Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis, three of Marlene van Niekerk's novels, translated from Afrikaans into English, are examined, with the focus on the representation of abjection in the texts under discussion.The theoretical point of departure of this study is Julia Kristeva's essay Powers of horror (1982), which addresses, in particular, the notion of abjection and how certain abject elements play a pivotal role in people's everyday lives. From a psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is viewed as a revolt against the mother and foregrounds particularly the influence of the maternal body over the subject. In this instance, the subject desires liberation from the hold of the maternal and seeks to subject the mother to abjection. Bodily fluids seeping out of the body, diseases, viruses, dirt and death (and in particular the corpse) are all elements that are encompassed in the concept of abjection. Manifestations of abjection in the form of the abject mother, abject spaces, abject bodies and the link between abjection and filth are comparatively analysed in the three texts. The thesis concludes by showing that Van Niekerk deliberately inscribes elements of the abject into her texts so as to transgress and deconstruct the norms associated with a patriarchal and racist society in South Africa. Van Niekerk also undermines the norms that underpin such a society: religious indoctrination, gender oppression and Othering. By writing her novel Triomf (1999) in a demotic register, Van Niekerk furthermore questions the prevalent assumptions about what is deemed proper language for writing a novel. Writing, for her, thus serves the purposes of abjecting, of rejecting the impositions of the symbolic order. Following the publication of her first collection of short stories, Die Vrou wat haar verkyker vergeet het [The woman who forgot her binoculars] in 1992, there was general consensus that the baroque nature of the language resulted in reader resistance to the text. This explains why she decided to write her first novel in the crude and obscene language of a low-class family, the Benades of Triomf.

Bibliography: leaves 191-202. / The major object of pursing this study was to understand how oral literature has been used in the communication of change and innovations in Kenya. The study focuses attention on Central Province of Kenya. In the work, oral literature has been studied as a literary media delineating the genre's communicative role in relationship to messages in social-cultural, political and health fields. In this study, we begin from understanding the traditional context and the literary content of the study sample and proceed to analyze and discuss the new and innovative messages communicated by the genre. In the course of the work, oral literature emerges as continually changing and adapting to the social, historical and health challenges that confront the people of the Central Province of Kenya. The primary sources of data used for analysis in this study have been from the Kikuyu people of Central Kenya. Oral texts were recorded and sourced from oral artists, composers and storytellers during fieldwork in this region. Oral narratives, oral poetry in the form of songs, proverbs and oral dramas constitute the main data used for analysis in this study. We have also used in the analysis a few texts from secondary sources. The texts are analyzed as literary genres that are culture-bound. Interviews provided useful collaborative and augmentative data for the study. We have four broad categories of classifying content in our analysis. These include: (i) courtship, marriage and family, (ii) social construction of gender, and (iii) politics and governance and (iv) HIV/AIDS communication. Oral literature among the Kikuyu emerges in this study as a genre that continues to communicate normative values while at the same time exploring new contradictions that have affected the various institutions of courtship, marriage and family. The study also indicates that oral literature continues to play a visible role in gender socialization validating disparate roles for men and women. The genre contributes to the gender debate by extracting a multiplicity of standpoints on gender relations. At the same time, it emerges a medium of contesting not only traditional gender values but also the emerging modernist positions. Over the last century, oral literature also emerges as having played a key role in communicating change and innovations in the politics and governance of Kenya. The resilient nature of the genre is further demonstrated in this study by the way oral literature has responded to HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country. In confronting this relatively new phenomenon, oral literature becomes a tool that helps the people in conceptualizing and protecting themselves against the disease. The conclusions that we draw from this study is that oral literature continues to play a significant role in social communication in spite of various technological and literacy changes that have taken place in Kenya. The genre is constantly being created and recreated to serve specific needs and to respond to the crises of the moment.

There has been a turn to religion in Shakespeare Studies by scholars like Kastan, Swift and Shugar in recent years, and this turn has uncovered a wealth of insight that had previously been obscured. I contribute to this recovery of the spiritual dimension of Shakespeare's work by tackling the question of what prayer does in his plays. I place these performed prayers in their historical and theological contexts, as well as analyse their roles dramatically and thematically within the plays. Prayer as a dramatic form is unique in that it falls between a dialogue and a monologue, pointing to something different in terms of rhetoric and content. Characters evoke an invisible being to whom they bare their souls, and the audience is privy to this conversation but not addressed by it. Awareness is created of something other, something beyond, filling the space of the stage with the suggestion of an alternate reality, another terrain beyond the earthly realm. Prayer is a conduit between characters and this alternate reality, a conduit through which multiple human impulses are conducted. I focus specifically on how filial attachment, erotic desire, violence, and visions of citizenship are conducted via prayer, and what happens when any of these impulses and visions is misdirected. Through the ability of prayer to conduct this array of human impulses, I demonstrate Shakespeare's complex engagement with the metaphysical realm, especially as his plays dramatize characters' move to embrace the divine.

South Africa is one of the countries with high rates of violence in the world. The beginning of high rates of conflict and violence in South Africa can be traced as far back as the 17th century. During this era seven wars were fought in this country. The apartheid that was later experienced in South Africa also contributed to South Africa's high rates of violence. Violence is still a prominent issue in this country. In 2012 violence occurred in Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana and in 2015 foreign nationals also experienced violence in South Africa. Morovere, the rates of violence against women and children remain high even after all the awareness and efforts to reduce it. This thesis deals with the causes of conflict and violence in South Africa particularly and in Africa in general. This is done by analyzing The wrath of the ancestors by A.C Jordan and Hill of fools by R.L Peteni as a case study. The two selected novels are going to be analysed using quantitative research methodology. The study maintains that literature is a reflection of reality and therefore the conflict and violence in the two novels is treated as a true reflection of conflict and violence in South Africa.

Twelve-year-old Ghost lives in Riverborne, an isolated village in the borderlands. Raised by the wood witch Maeve from birth, he grows up with only a dog for company. The villagers mistrust Ghost, because of the pale features that gave him his name. These mark him as Were – one of the wild clansmen that inhabit the lands to the north. But his Were blood is also a gift – granting him the ability to sense the essence of living things. Maeve’s other apprentice is her niece, Nella. After her mother dies, Nella comes to live at the cottage to escape her alcoholic father. When Maeve is called away one rainy night, Nella decides to make a “telling fire” - a binding to glimpse the future. However, something goes horribly wrong and they wake a slumbering evil in the woods. When villagers begin to die under unnatural circumstances, people suspect Maeve. The witch believes a spirit is behind the attacks, as it is powers beyond anything she has seen before. She tells Nella and Ghost of a bone witch in the Wild Wood, who knows how to put the dead to rest. When Maeve is seized by the village mob, Ghost and Nella manage to escape. Together they must find the bone witch to help vanquish the spirit and free Maeve.

This study examines aspects of the creative writing process and some literary statements in Joan Hambidge's novel Kladboek (2008). The possible guidance for beginner-poets present in the metafictional Kladboek is examined with reference to Fourie Botha's collection of poetry titled Blikhoek (included), which came about during work done for a Creative Writing Masters degree from the University of Cape Town

<p>Certain Swiss authors, such as Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and Max Frisch, are more frequently translated into English than others. To this day, Adolf Muschg has belonged to the latter; his texts have been translated, but into Eastern European languages rather than English. I decided to translate him because his prose appeals to a wide audience and deserves to be introduced to English-speaking readers. Muschg has concerned himself with literature and its related fields for many years. Contemporary Swiss and international issues are directly confronted in his writings, where he also analyzes the individual's relationships with culture and society. Not only does he use a variety of themes, but also an array of narrative techniques and structural elements. Diversity is extremely important when considering a text for translation, because the more diverse the author's writing style is, the more interesting and challenging the translation task will be. After having read a selection of Muschg's short prose, the stories "Besuch in der Schweiz II and "Wullschleger Country" caught my interest, because of the similarities In themes. The central figures in both stories come from different backgrounds: Swiss and German in the first; Swiss and Thai in the second. Thus Switzerland is observed from the perspective of natives and foreigners; by employing these opposing points of view Muschg can also voice his criticism of the respective culture and society. Adolf Muschg's texts challenge the translator due to the cultural contexts of his themes and the structural variety of his style; I attempted to consistently incooperate these aspects in my translations. In addition, by discussing the difficulties associated with these aspects in a detailed commentary, it becomes evident how much the translation process has to rely on interpretation, or else not every textual element is accounted for.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)