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Includes bibliographical references. / With the understanding that every generation shares a generational consciousness, which locates individuals not only in a common geographical location, but also a historical one, this study uses social-constructionist accounts of collective identity, narrative inquiry and positioning theory to trace the moral careers of twenty-six young, middle-class activists, based in Cape Town, South Africa. In doing so it explores the relationship between their activism and identities, and how this relationship is contingent on the social and political context of post-apartheid South Africa. The first part of this study provides an account of the dynamics of political community formation amongst this group of activists, how they generate a shared understanding of the world, how they construct borders of belonging and influence, and how these borders sometimes mirror broader social cleavages in post-apartheid in South Africa. The second part examines how participants draw on two major narratives, or morality plays, with which to construct their activist identities. The most significant of these is ‘the Struggle’, the story of the struggle against apartheid. The other is the ‘the TAC Method’, the story of the Treatment Action Campaign’s struggle for the treatment of those living with HIV and AIDS.

Section 1 will be a mostly descriptive engagement with the concept of 'post modern science', and will thus both quote and interpret scientific debate extensively. Although 'chaos' has been constituted as a formal discipline only after the publication of Gravity's Rainbow (GR), it has been included in the overview of postmodern science since it has both direct and indirect bearing on issues included within the scope of the thesis. Section 2 will deal with the use of postmodern science, and the 'scientific discourse' in general, within philosophical and artistic / literary activity. Special attention will be given to both limits and implications of this use. Section 2 will also develop the link with GR and Pynchcon's metaphorical use of the scientific discourse. Section 3 will deal more specifically with GR and will analyze various themes and topics in the light of the preceding discussion in Sections 1 and 2. Section 4 will focus on the broader connotations of GR and on possible avenues of 'escape' from cultural, economic, political and, even more elementary, linguistic processes and systems, in both definition and oppression of (and via) 'self.

Summary in English. / Bibliography: p. [181]-195. / Contemporary life is distinguished by a massive capacity for exchanging information. Increasingly comprehensive, global communication networks allow discrete realities to be linked. These prolific sources of representation generate a "membrane" of mediation, and a formal regime of fragmentation, depthlessness and allusiveness (Chambers, 11). These economic, epistemological and aesthetic conditions constitute postmodernism. This dissertation addresses the theoretical challenge of form by attempting to craft an approach commensurate to such semiotic density (Wollen, 65). Since formalist approaches have been criticised as ahistorical, attention is given to the concept's social dimensions hence the history and production context of communication technology is considered. The inquiry also acknowledges the specificities of its location. The matrix of unfamiliar allusions which characterises the South African experience of American texts, embodies the multi-tiered allusiveness of postmodernist texts. It also illustrates the cult precept that quotation can be appreciated even when its source is not recognized. Cult theorises viewership as active yet ambivalent (Eco, 1988, 454). The initial chapter delineates parameters in postmodernism, narrative, genre and cult theory. Subsequent chapters examine three postmodernist television series: Moonlighting, a detective series, Twin Peaks, a soap opera, and The Simpsons, an animated sitcom. Deploying parody, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, each has a complex relation with genre. Tony Bennett conceives of the latter as zones of sociality which constitute and are constituted by other zones (105). Changes in genre therefore articulate changes in modes of thinking and inscribe different reading strategies.

Bibliography: p. 133-137. / The modern genre of fantasy romance is a relatively recent development in popular literature, and one which is gaining increasing popularity. In its contemporary form, fantasy romance has developed from earlier fantasy and romance forms, and a generic base which includes romance, comedy and pastoral can be identified. Conventional fantasy romance is concerned with the defense of a magical land, characterised in terms of beauty, health and balance, from some destructive threat. This concern with the health of the land reflects modern ecological consciousness and awareness of potential environmental destruction. Ecological awareness can be traced through critical analysis of various works of fantasy romance. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as the text which marked the beginning of the modern fantasy romance form, shows the potential for ecological awareness in the genre, although Tolkien's cultural context of post-war England in some ways inhibits ecological consciousness in the narrative. The development of a more modern ecological consciousness is studied through investigation of the Riddlemaster trilogy of Patricia A. McKillip, which shows a more abstracted sense of environmental destruction expressed through a concern with power and identity. Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant provides a narrative awareness of generic convention which could be construed as postmodern. Derrida's deconstruction of the notion of genre allows an interesting insight into Donaldson's processes of generic mixing, although the narrative's success is ultimately compromised by Donaldson's lack of authorial control. Sheri S. Tepper's True Game series displays a highly contemporary conflation of ecological concerns with those of feminism, as the destructive impulses of largely male competitiveness are contrasted to an organic and intuitive female response to the land. Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, in its depiction of an alternative settler America, integrates ecological concerns with those of racial harmony, while his construction of a messianic hero recalls Card's own Mormon background. Finally, some attention is given to fantasy romance as a potentially escapist genre rather than one which inspires actual ecological awareness, and links are made with popular elements in the ecological movement itself. The thesis concludes by proposing the relevance of fantasy romance's magical land as a regenerative ideal of health and beauty in an increasingly ugly and ecologically deteriorating modern environment.

This thesis examines the relationship between Bessie Head's work as a journalist during the late 1950s and two of her novels: the first written just after she had left formal journalism and the second a decade later. I claim, in this thesis, that early journalistic writing by Head, which has been critically ignored, and even dismissed, not only merits critical attention but, furthermore, that knowledge this work will yield new insights into Head's fictional writing for which she is famous. Between 1959 and 1960, before she left South Africa, Bessie Head wrote two weekly columns for children and teenagers, some book reviews and had a role in the production of "True Romance" stories for Home Post, a tabloid supplement to the Sunday newspaper Golden City Post. Head was involved in the production of these romances for over a year and I provide an analysis of the "True Romance" stories published in Home Post. I maintain that these romances, like all texts in popular romance genre (which I discuss) constructs the feminine in very particular ways. I locate this analysis within wider, but related, discussion about the representation of women in both Golden City Post and Drum magazine as they were both considered to be the authoritative newspapers representing black South African life in the 1950s. Head's columns, I claim, especially the one for teenagers, present constructions of the feminine, as well as the masculine, which are significantly at odds with the dominant representations of the feminine, and masculine, in the media I have mentioned, during the late 1950s. A close reading of the representations of gender which Head set up in this column, together with the book reviews she wrote, will give us new insight into her fictional work, particularly The Cardinals which is an early work written and set during this period but only published posthumously in 1993. Reading this novel against the background of the journalistic work and world Head was engaged in just before she wrote it will enable us to read its complexities, specifically those regarding gender and romance. I claim that Head also gave us what is probably the earliest gender perspective, and critique, of 1950s black journalism - a period generally considered to be a vibrant one for black journalism and writing in South Africa. In The Cardinals, which fictionally recreates the black journalistic milieu of the late 1950s in South Africa, Head suggests that black women journalists (and writers) found themselves facing a very different situation from black male journalists. Finally I suggest that with romance structure and the role which gender plays in the novel. Although critics have persistently read this novel as an idealistic, and unrealistic, romance with a happy ending, I suggest, in this thesis, that one can read the novel, in the light of Head's earlier work, as being a radical subversion of the romance.

This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute.

This thesis grapples with the curious relationship of the metaphors of detection and reading. Detective fiction is often seen as an enactment of reading, while the literary critic is often described in terms of detection, investigation and interrogation. The Introductory section discusses the implications that such a self-reflexive and reflecting involvement has for narrative, the self, logic and the very institution of academic literary criticism itself. The notion of a detective genre, and genre-criticism in general, is put into question by analysing the legal and coercive nature of a literary concept that styles itself as objective, scientific and historical. The power of the critic to construct genre is likened to the legal capacity of the detective and a polemical call is made to re-examine the academy's resulting claims of authority. An analysis of the crime of incest in two films, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Jack Nicholeson's The Two Jakes, is used to further problematise the notion of the law. Claude Levi-Strauss' work on kinship structures helps to point to the aporetic and contradictory position that incest can be seen to occupy in the formation of human society. Criminal anthropology provides an interesting frame for this discussion. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is used to explore the fundamental uncertainty in which the detective/reader necessarily finds herself. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny is introduced to account for the interpreter's state of unease in the face of ambiguity. Finally, a literary essay, Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", is read rather as a form of detective story than as a factual analysis, whether this experiment is successful will be up to the reader. The overriding claim of this thesis is that there is no such thing as perception.

This dissertation outlines the political and social organization of the Icelandic Commonwealth, and analyses the characters of Gunnlaug in Gunnlaugs saga; of Brodd-Helgi, Geitir, Bjami and Thorkel in Vápnfirŏinga saga and of Snorri in Eyrbyggja saga.

Bibliography: p.181-191. / The subject of this essay is Structuralism, and the point of view, that of a student of literature. And this much the title conveys. However, there are points which need to be made by way of a preface in order to clarify what this essay attempts and what it does not. First, there is the problem faced by any writer on Structuralism - definition of his subject. This problem has been sufficiently talked about in the text, along with how a recognition of it generated the essay's form, and no more need be said on this matter here. But, second, it must be stressed that, though this is an essay in criticism of a style of thought, it has no pretensions to being an essay in philosophy. Rather than progressing by way of a rigorous analysis of a set of concepts, its motivating spirit is more justly characterized as that of a critical review. The hope is to illuminate and, as well, to suggest points of weakness which, I believe, deserve the probing for soundness which rigorous analysis provides. However, though this is itself not an essay in philosophy, I have attempted to treat the abstractions I deal with, and the argument-forms I deal with them in, with respect. The same might be said of my treatment of ideas belonging to the other disciplines - mathematics and linguistics - in which I could not be considered a specialist.