In this study I attempted to examine the politico-literary strategies of some "Third World" writers. I used the Marxian notions of class and ideology in order to investigate how writers' biographies determined their literary interpretations. Basic writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and the theoretical work of Janet Wolff were used in this respect. I also used the Marxian concept of Historical Materialism in order to distinguish progressive interpretations from reactionary ones. The critical writing of Ernst Fischer was used in order to show that there was no unbridgeable gap between theoretical work in the "Third World" and the development of the aesthetic in Europe. The notion of socialist realism was of particular interest here. Notions of neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism were examined in order to set the context in which "Third World" authors write. The use of the mode of realism by these authors was investigated. The work of Hayden White was used to establish the fact that versions of history depend upon an author's moral purpose. The link was made between authors' moral purposes, their ideologies and their literary strategies. Literary analysis of some works by "Third World" authors was undertaken in order to see whether or not the authors succeeded in their attempts to give progressive interpretations of their historical contexts. Three "Third World" novels, that is, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood, Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude were examined in this regard. It was finally concluded that literary strategies have a material basis which is founded on the authors' life experiences and the historical context in which they write. This material bas is to the creative act is proposed as a way out of the labyrinth of textuality to which a "deconstructionalist" approach leads the critic.

Chapter one of this thesis attempts to explicate and analyze the controversy that has historically surrounded the grotesque. Contention over the grotesque has existed since the earliest known discourses on the subject by Horace and Vitruvius. The indeterminacy and paradoxical nature of the grotesque, which disturbed these men of antiquity, has continued to generate debate among modern theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser whose ideas serve as touchstones throughout this work. Understandably, theorists, who strive to create systems of ideas which attempt to explain and define phenomena, are drawn to the grotesque. However, they are inevitably placed in the paradoxical position of trying to categorize something which ultimately subverts the conventional logic which underlies that process. Furthermore, the standards of mimesis and decorum, from which the grotesque gets its disruptive force, are subject to society. Societies provide the different conventions and assumptions that determine the form of the grotesque. Therefore, the grotesque will always have to be approached in its historically specific contexts of production and reception. What becomes apparent in analysing the grotesque is that attitudes toward its indeterminacy and paradoxical nature, which transgress the monologic binaries and implied hierarchies of Western thought, reflect the position of the observer or producer of the grotesque. If one espouses the cause of the low, as does Balch tin, then the indeterminacy and paradox of the grotesque provides an egalitarian possibility for the marginalized. If one stands with the status quo, as does Kayser, the transgressing of the definitions and distinctions which support the status quo is experienced as frightening and sinister (Harpham, 73). The differences noted between Kayser and Balch tin as observers of the grotesque may also be made between Federico Fellini and Angela Carter as producers of grotesque texts. The following two chapters of the thesis explore how the grotesque is used in Fellini's films (chapter two) and Carter's novels (chapter three). Carter, like Bakhtin, celebrates the grotesque as a means of empowerment, particularly for women and her work seems to employ the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque. Fellini's films also use images of carnival, but Fellini, like Kayser, sees the grotesque as an isolating aspect of the human condition. Fellini uses the grotesque only to show humanity's alienation from a knowable world, whereas Carter uses it to demonstrate the possibilities of a totally new one. Carter appears to take the Fellinian, Kayserian, negative attitude towards the grotesque and turn it around for her feminist cause. She utilizes the emancipatory aspect of the grotesque inherent in its denial of hierarchy without, however, idealizing it as Bakhtin appears to. She is well aware that carnivals, like her novels, are author(ized). In analyzing the continuum of Fellini's and Carter's works, both artists show an increased dependence on the use of the grotesque combined with postmodern strategies to support their intentions. However, the continuum of Fellini's oeuvre suggests the development of a modernist approach which attempts closure, but faced with the impossibility of final determinacy, turns to the quagmire of simulacra where no meaning is possible. Carter, on the other hand, increasingly uses the grotesque and postmodern strategies not only to reveal and deconstruct oppressive representations, but to allow agency for the reconstruction of new subjectivities. As this thesis will demonstrate, the grotesque's indeterminacy may provide a way to understand "reality" or the means to construct a better one.

Bibliography: pages 111-118. / This essay sets out to explore Lukács's views on realism and its polar opposite. anti-realism, in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. As a Marxist, Lukács's views on literature are closely interwoven with his views of society and and social development. This necessitates first looking at Lukács's theory of society and history as expressed in the epochal History and Class Consciousness. The essay firstly attempts to present and criticize the central Lukácsian concept of concrete totality. Totality, for Lukács, is not a static concept but a dynamically evolving, ever-changing idea. However, he tends to view totality as simply a concept of contemplation. Lukács indicates the proletariat as the subject-object of Western European history.

'Popular Romance and the Woman Reader' is divided into three parts. The first is an analysis of theories of reading, of the woman reader and of how we read popular texts. The first section discusses women readers and popular romance in a Western context, with special reference to an American study by Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, and the second looks at how similar issues might apply amongst African women readers. Part II is a textual analysis of several romance texts. The final part is an account of four interviews in which black South African women talk about their romance reading. Although the focus of the study is on popular romance, I also intend it to re-examine the categories of 'woman reader' and 'black woman reader in South Africa'. As new freedoms are opened to the reader in South Africa, it is offered as a contribution to an understanding of how reading, and the construction of subjectivity itself, can be transformed in the future.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 91-95). / Post-colonial translations are located in 'contact zones'. They mediate in the interface of disparate cultures and languages. The multiple determinations and effects of this decisive mediation process are examined in a close reading of the Afrikanissimo-project and the translation of Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions. They represent an attempt to engage 'Africa' through literature from a German perspective. Such dialogue is caught in the aporetic tension between the preservation of linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text and the domestication of the cultural other by dominant values in the target-language culture.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-141). / This dissertation seeks to analyse insubordination and resistance manifested in postcolonial and post-apartheid poetry as ways of subverting dominant Western discourses. More specifically, I focus my analysis on textual strategies of resistance in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Lesego Rampolokeng. The syncretistic quality in the oeuvres of both poets is related to diaspora, hybridity and crealisation as forms of writ[h]ing against (neo)colonially-based hegemonic discourses. Postcolonial critiques at large will frame this analysis of strategies of domination and resistance, but some discussions from the domain of history, sociology and cultural studies may also enter the debate. In this regard there is a great variety of theories and arguments dealing with the contradictions and incongruities in the question of power relations interconnecting domination and resistance. This study is arranged in three pivotal debates. There is firstly an in-depth discussion of underpinning theories that deal with strategies of domination and resistance in the postcolonial domain This is a threefold task carried out by scrutinising (a) the origins of colonial discourse and its binarist tendencies, (b) the pitfalls of anticolonialist resistance based on dualistic opposites, and (c) the hybrid and insubordinate nature of resistance as an efficient alternative to transcend such binaries. Afterwards I seek to investigate how strategies of diasporic resistance and cultural hybridism employed in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson can contribute to moving away from the limitations of dichotomies and also subvert hegemonic power. And finally, I look at crealisation, mockery and insubordination as strategies of resistance in the postapartheid poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng. Besides that, this project is concerned with the increasing importance of academic studies on postcolonial literatures. The present research aims therefore to analyse postcolonial and post-apartheid poems as strategic techniques to decentre dominant Western rhetoric that tries to naturalise inequalities and injustices in the relations between power holders and the powerless in both local and global contexts.

This thesis examines three collections of poetry by Gary Snyder: Regarding Wave, Turtle Island and Axe Handles. It studies these works as an exploration of what I call the sacramental question, namely, "What is it in the nature of reality that can finally sanctify human existence?" I am particularly interested in four aspects of Snyder's treatment of this question: (1) the significance given to epistemological and ideological assumptions; (2) the concept of "woman", and particularly "the Goddess"; (3) the nature of those experiences which are presented in the poetry as "sacramental"; and (4) the poetic forms by which Snyder's approach is articulated. My analysis comprises five chapters and three appendices. The first chapter outlines the questions which the thesis addresses, placing these in the context of work by other critics, and providing a brief account of Snyder's writings as a whole. The three central chapters study one collection of poetry each, in chronological order, referring where appropriate to Snyder's other writings and to the oriental and other sources by which his approach to the sacramental question is informed. The final chapter summarises my conclusions. This is followed by an appended diagrammatic illustration of the structure of two poems, a chronology, and a glossary of foreign terms. In the thesis I refer to Anthony Wilden's model of "oppositional relations" in his critique of an epistemology which he calls "biosocial imperialism". In examining Snyder's use of form, I use two models for metaphor: Roman Jakobsen's account of metaphor and metonymy, and a model of metaphor as semantic transfer proposed by Eva Kittay and Adrienne Lehrer. The title of the thesis points to the conclusions which my work proposes. Snyder's later poetry suggests that our existence may be sanctified in an act of perception where the most everyday object or experience, because seen as it is, "in its thusness.., is acknowledged as a sacrament. Such an act of mind implies a recognition of the self as participant in a system of interdependent things, which in turn requires a critical reassessment of Cartesian dualism, and of its ideological manifestations. "Woman as nature" is Snyder's primary image for the source of sacramental transformation, and for alternatives to the ideology of patriarchal-technological culture. More significantly, however, the image of the feminine simultaneously appears, in the form of the goddesses VAK and GAIA, as a metaphor for the biosphere, the "whole earth", and so for a metaperspective on dualistic oppositions. As such, Snyder's Goddess is more than the reverse image of a patriarchal God. With respect to form, the use of syntax, metaphor, metonymy and open forms seems generally appropriate in articulating these concerns. Unlike some other readers I find that Snyder's use of broadly metaphoric structures is an important aspect of the poetry.

This dissertation investigates the debate between Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, known as the Expressionist Debate and the controversy between Jean-Francais Lyotard and Juergen Habermas. which took place in the 1980s. The two debates. both of which took place among writers of the Left are juxtaposed in order to shed more light on the issues at stake in the Expressionist Debate when looked at in the light of postmodern concerns. The dissertation is based on selected texts by each of the four writers. Bibliography: pages 82-85.

This study is an examination of the development of the quest motif in Alice Walker's novels, from a male quest in the first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, to the female quests which supersede it in the two later novels, Meridian and The Color Purple. In this analysis, brief reference is made to Walker's poetry, essays, and short stories, as well as to texts by black male writers and other Afro-American women writers.

South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile lived in extraordinary times marked by extraordinary challenges and changes. Born in 1938, exactly a decade before the draconian apartheid regime came into power, his life and work emerge from the milieus of British colonial South Africa, apartheid South Africa, civil rights America, anti-apartheid movements, anti-colonial wars in Africa, anti-imperialism in Asia, cold war politics, and the eventual demise of both the Berlin wall and the apartheid regime in South Africa. His poetry responds to these times in illuminating ways. His poetic influences point to his Tswanacentred upbringing, his encounter with Afro-American oral and literary traditions, the styles and poetics of Drum writers, the outpouring of African literature he received from the Makerere conference of Uganda, and anti-colonial critical thinkers from Africa and its diaspora. At age twenty three, post-Sharpeville massacres, he was sent into exile by the leadership of the ANC, and he took with him a corpus of Tswana literature which would in/form his poetic. He readily immersed himself in the oral and written tradition of Afro-America while in exile in the United States of America. His work interweaves the oral and literary traditions of black South Africa and black America, revealing a dynamic and complex relationship between the two geographical sites. Where oral traditions have largely been left out of the broader narrative of modernity, this study demonstrates how oral traditions remain alive and are reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation, rather than left behind to ossify. Kgositsile's prominent presence in black international periodicals and his collaborations with other diasporic cultural, political and musical figures there show that the relationship between the two geographical sites is more complex than its current positioning of Afro-America as a vanguard on which Africans model themselves. Through a reading of Kgositsile's revolutionary poetry, this study also shows how the indigenous resource base enables him to resolve the agonising temporal and spatial tensions presented by modernity's colonialism. He coins concepts that re-enchant the world through a poetic that fosters a dialogue between past and future, and traditional and modern in a simultaneous present he deems the NOW-time.