I would like to present the latest novel by Said Ahmed Mohamed, Babu alipofofuka (\''When Grandfather came to life again\''), published at the end of the last year. The mine will be only a first, preliminary and very inadequate attempt as, I am sure, this work will challenge us for quite a few years. In fact, after five realistic novels the author has adopted a new technique, turning to magic realism as he himself defines his work, but perhaps it is a too limitative definition. He depicts our world in a near future, when Tanzania and other African countries will have already undergone the process of globalization. The results are disastrous: impoverished and dulled masses are governed by a handful of immensely rich, powerful and arrogant persons mostly of foreign origin, deprived of all human qualities, who have thrown away any inhibition and deliberately sunk in all sorts of physical and moral debasement; nothing embarrasses nor frightens them anymore as they feel unpunishable.

Text in Afrikaans / In hierdie studie word die verbandhoudende teoretiese begrippe van trans-liggaamlikheid, kriptosoölogie en dieresiele ondersoek met verwysing na drie magies-realistiese Afrikaanse romans, naamlik Kikoejoe (Etienne van Heerden, 1996), Die olifantjagters (Piet van Rooyen, 1997) en Dwaalpoort (Alexander Strachan, 2010). Die gewaande dualisme tussen kultuur en natuur word in die tekste bevraagteken en vrye interaksie tussen biologiese, klimatologiese, ekonomiese en politieke magte vind plaas in die onderskeie romanruimtes. Die toenemende druk op die omgewing word uitgebeeld en in hierdie opsig sluit die romans aan by ʼn eietydse tendens in die (Afrikaanse) letterkunde waar die klem op ekologiese kwessies val. Hierdie drie kontemporêre romans reflekteer voorts die komplekse interaksie tussen menslike en niemenslike diere en kan beskou word as dierenarratiewe (met ’n mitiese onderbou) waar tradisionele beskouings oor diere in die samelewing deurentyd ondermyn word. / In this research report, related theoretical concepts such as transcorporeality, cryptozoology and animal souls will be explored with reference to the magic-realistic Afrikaans novels Kikoejoe (Etienne van Heerden, 1996), Die olifantjagters (Piet van Rooyen, 1997) and Dwaalpoort (Alexander Strachan, 2010). The perceived dualism of nature versus culture is undermined in the respective novels and the environment is exposed as a space where the interaction between biological, climatological, economical and political forces takes place freely. The novels portray the increasing demands on the environment and in this respect these texts become representative of a current trend in (Afrikaans) literature to reflect ecological issues. The three contemporary novels further reflect the complex interaction between human and nonhuman animals and can be described as animal narratives (underpinned by myths) where traditional perspectives on animals in society are constantly subverted. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)

Text in Afrikaans / In hierdie studie word die verbandhoudende teoretiese begrippe van trans-liggaamlikheid, kriptosoölogie en dieresiele ondersoek met verwysing na drie magies-realistiese Afrikaanse romans, naamlik Kikoejoe (Etienne van Heerden, 1996), Die olifantjagters (Piet van Rooyen, 1997) en Dwaalpoort (Alexander Strachan, 2010). Die gewaande dualisme tussen kultuur en natuur word in die tekste bevraagteken en vrye interaksie tussen biologiese, klimatologiese, ekonomiese en politieke magte vind plaas in die onderskeie romanruimtes. Die toenemende druk op die omgewing word uitgebeeld en in hierdie opsig sluit die romans aan by ʼn eietydse tendens in die (Afrikaanse) letterkunde waar die klem op ekologiese kwessies val. Hierdie drie kontemporêre romans reflekteer voorts die komplekse interaksie tussen menslike en niemenslike diere en kan beskou word as dierenarratiewe (met ’n mitiese onderbou) waar tradisionele beskouings oor diere in die samelewing deurentyd ondermyn word. / In this research report, related theoretical concepts such as transcorporeality, cryptozoology and animal souls will be explored with reference to the magic-realistic Afrikaans novels Kikoejoe (Etienne van Heerden, 1996), Die olifantjagters (Piet van Rooyen, 1997) and Dwaalpoort (Alexander Strachan, 2010). The perceived dualism of nature versus culture is undermined in the respective novels and the environment is exposed as a space where the interaction between biological, climatological, economical and political forces takes place freely. The novels portray the increasing demands on the environment and in this respect these texts become representative of a current trend in (Afrikaans) literature to reflect ecological issues. The three contemporary novels further reflect the complex interaction between human and nonhuman animals and can be described as animal narratives (underpinned by myths) where traditional perspectives on animals in society are constantly subverted. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)

Je, kuna uhusiano gani kati ya Euphrase Kezilahabi wa Tanzania na Gabriel García Marquez wa Kolombia, au kati ya Kyallo Wadi Wamitila wa Kenya na Juan Rulfo wa Meksiko ama kati ya Günter Grass wa Ujerumani na Said Ahmed Mohamed wa Zanzibar? Waandishi hawa waliotengwa kitaifa na kilugha wanaunganishwa na uamuzi wao wa kuandika riwaya kwenye mtindo usiokuwa wa kawaida, mtindo wa uhalisiamazingaombwe. Kwa kulinganisha na kulinganua riwaya ya Mohamed na ile ya Grass ninakazia nadhari dayolojia ya kina iliyochipuka kati ya fasihi ya Kiswahili na fasihi ya ulimwenguni pote. Ni maoni yangu kwamba riwaya mbili hizi, zinakikabili kizungumkuti cha kuwepo kwa mwanadamu kwa kuutupilia mbali mfumo wa uwakilishi wenye uhalisia kama tunavyoujua. Badala yake riwaya hizi zimezingatia mtindo wa ujumi wa kisasabaadaye (postmodern aesthetics). Kazi hizi za sanaa zinatumia sifa bainifu za uhalisia mazingaombwe kama nyenzo za kuakisi na kuakisi kwa kubirua hali halisi ya udhaifu, kuyumbayumba na ukosefu wa uthabiti na udumifu katika maisha Afrika na Ulaya.

Magical realist fiction is marked by a striking abundance of animals. Analysing magical realist novels from Australia and Canada, as well as exploring the influence of two seminal Latin American magical realist narratives, this thesis focuses on representations of animals and animality. Examining human-animal relationships in the postcolonial context reveals that magical realism embodies and represents an idea of feral animality that critically engages with an inherently imperialist and Cartesian humanism, and that, moreover, accounts for magical realism's elusiveness within systems of genre categorisation and labelling. It is this embodiment and presence of animal agency that animates magical realism and injects it with life and vibrancy. The magical realist writers discussed in this dissertation make use of animal practices inextricably intertwined with imperialism, such as pastoral farming, natural historical collections, the circus, the rodeo, the Wild West show, and the zoo, as well as alternative animal practices inherently incompatible with European ideologies, such as the Aboriginal Dreaming, Native North American animist beliefs, and subsistence hunting, as different ways of positioning themselves in relation to the Cartesian human subject. The circus is a particular influence on the form and style of many magical realist texts, whereby oxymoronically structured circensian spaces form the basis of the narratives‟ realities, and hierarchical imperial structures and hegemonic discourses that are portrayed as natural through Cartesian science and Linnaean taxonomies are revealed as deceptive illusions that perpetuate the self-interests of the powerful.

Ce mémoire est centré sur les caractéristiques fantastiques dans le Spectre large de Gérard Prévot (1975) et par la suite, sur une comparaison avec les caractéristiques d’un autre recueil de Prévot, la Nuit du Nord (1974), étudié par Ricci en 1993. Notre analyse est basée sur la théorie du fantastique de Tzvetan Todorov qui met en avant l’hésitation à savoir si le phénomène énigmatique provient de l’étrange ou du merveilleux.         L’étude de l’œuvre littéraire de Prévot est intéressante car, comparé aux autres fantastiqueurs belges comme Jean Ray ou Thomas Owen, Gérard Prévot reste relativement inconnu et peu étudié.         Pour ce qui est du résultat, nous trouvons que les contes du recueil ont des qualités variées relativement à la théorie fantastique. Les principales caractéristiques fantastiques du Spectre large naissent surtout grâce à une narration à point de vue limité et au narrateur obscur, parfois inconnu. Le fantastique naît aussi grâce à l’intrigue qui fait venir la force perturbatrice, souvent à la toute dernière page.         En comparant nos résultats avec l’étude de Ricci (1993), nous trouvons plusieurs points en commun mais aussi de divergence. Prévot a écrit les deux livres en utilisant un lexique similaire et les contes se déroulent souvent dans des lieux similaires, dans le Nord — un lieu ayant des connotations mystiques. Un fantastique dit « social » se trouve aussi dans les deux recueils. La principale différence entre les deux livres est la narration. Tandis que le narrateur de la Nuit du Nord possède un savoir absolu qui lui donne le statut omniscient, il est clairement limité dans son point de vue et parfois anonyme dans le Spectre large. / This thesis is centred on the fantastic features in Le Spectre Large by Gérard Prévot (1975) and subsequently on a comparison with the features from another collection by Prévot, La Nuit du Nord (1974), studied by Ricci in 1993. The analysis is based on Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, which puts its emphasis on the hesitation whether the enigmatic phenomena has its origins in the natural (uncanny) or the supernatural (marvellous) world.         The research of Prévot’s literary work is interesting given that, compared to other Belgian fantastic writers such as Jean Ray or Thomas Owen, Gérard Prévot is still rather unknown and not much studied.         With regard to the results, it is found that the stories have a mixed qualities in relation to fantastic theory. In the better tales, the fantastic is born out of a narration with a limited point of view and a vague and sometimes unknown narrator. It is also born out of the plot which introduces the disruptive elements at the very last page.         When comparing the corpus with Ricci’s study (1993), several common features are found, but also a few differences. Prévot has written the two books using a similar vocabulary and the stories often take place in related environments – the North, a place with mysterious connotations. A fantastic which Ricci calls “social” can also be found in both collections. The main point of difference between the books is the narration. While the narrator in La Nuit du Nord has an omniscient status, the one in Le Spectre Large is clearly limited and anonymous.

La thèse propose une lecture postcoloniale des romans de Margaret Atwood s'articulant sur le thème du mensonge. A travers l'étude de six aspets communs aux romans (l'intertextualité, le mensonge, le réalisme magique, le "trickster", l'hybridité et la quête), la thèse démontre l'importance du motif du mensonge dans une lecture postcoloniale de l'auteur.<p><p>The thesis produces a postcolonial reading of Margaret Atwood's novels, based on the concept of deception. Articulated on six major elements of analysis (intertextual parody, deception, magic realism, trickster figures, hybridity, and quest pattern, the thesis shows how Margaret Atwood's novels can be read from a postcolonial point of view, within which the motif of deception plays a central role. / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.

Je, kuna uhusiano gani kati ya Euphrase Kezilahabi wa Tanzania na Gabriel García Marquez wa Kolombia, au kati ya Kyallo Wadi Wamitila wa Kenya na Juan Rulfo wa Meksiko ama kati ya Günter Grass wa Ujerumani na Said Ahmed Mohamed wa Zanzibar? Waandishi hawa waliotengwa kitaifa na kilugha wanaunganishwa na uamuzi wao wa kuandika riwaya kwenye mtindo usiokuwa wa kawaida, mtindo wa uhalisiamazingaombwe. Kwa kulinganisha na kulinganua riwaya ya Mohamed na ile ya Grass ninakazia nadhari dayolojia ya kina iliyochipuka kati ya fasihi ya Kiswahili na fasihi ya ulimwenguni pote. Ni maoni yangu kwamba riwaya mbili hizi, zinakikabili kizungumkuti cha kuwepo kwa mwanadamu kwa kuutupilia mbali mfumo wa uwakilishi wenye uhalisia kama tunavyoujua. Badala yake riwaya hizi zimezingatia mtindo wa ujumi wa kisasabaadaye (postmodern aesthetics). Kazi hizi za sanaa zinatumia sifa bainifu za uhalisia mazingaombwe kama nyenzo za kuakisi na kuakisi kwa kubirua hali halisi ya udhaifu, kuyumbayumba na ukosefu wa uthabiti na udumifu katika maisha Afrika na Ulaya.

This thesis explores different genres and modes of writing in short stories of the contemporary Indian author Uday Prakash, such as magical realism, the fantastic, regionalism, postcolonial and postmodern writing. It poses the question: “In which literary genre should Uday Prakash’s writings best be categorised?” The study is based on a reading of Prakash’s collection, 10 Pratinidhi kahāniyāṃ – Ten Representative Stories, consisting of ten stories of the author’s own choice. Critics have often understood Uday Prakash as a writer of magical realism. This thesis, however, argues that the author fits better in the category of the fantastic since his narratives often are characterised by the “hesitation” before the supernatural, a central feature of this literary mode. The thesis further suggests that regionalism is present in his writings in the portrayal of both the rural and urban landscapes of India. Above all, Prakash portrays a “public landscape,” in which India as a whole is reflected in the local—rural or urban—regions he depicts and in which any Indian can identify himself. The postmodern perspective is also prevalent in his writings, evident through literary tropes such as metafiction, historiographic metafiction, intertextuality, self-reflexivity and extended use of metaphor. Central to his writing is a social or postcolonial critique. Together his stories write an alternative national history of India, focusing on the subaltern and the downtrodden, depicting how the old colonial structure and oppression have now re-emerged among the elite and political leadership of independent India. I have, in this thesis, understood Uday Prakash as a postcolonial experimentalist (uttaropaniveśvādī prayogvādī), standing in the tradition of the prayogvād of the 20th-century Hindi literary field since the characteristics of his authorship are the concoction of multiple literary modes or genres, the breaking with traditional forms of narration and the formation of creative and original narratives, all in the service of social and civilisational criticism.