The psychoanalytic fixation in seeking to validate 'the real' has long overlooked various key components in theories of the uncanny as they relate to literature. The goal of the present study is to reaffirm the roles of uncertainty, ambiguity, and the purposeful lack of closure in the experience of the uncanny, features which will come to form an integral part of a new theory.

The brutal history of slavery in America makes literary engagement with slave experience a potent exercise. Contemporary writers seeking to engage with this history face many difficulties, writing in the wake of the traditional slave narrative which was characterised by limited perspective and reliance on externally verifiable factors. This dissertation considers two works, Beloved and The Color Purple, by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker respectively, authors who write against the template of slave narratives by offering intimate and subjective points of view to inform the story-making process. Drawing on visual theory, I consider the politics of visibility, that is to say, the privilege and disempowerment manifest in visual relations. I examine the ways in which visuality extends the efficacy of Morrison and Walker's fictional project, by contributing to a narrative form which privileges the interior life of its characters. Through their story-making process, the novels of my study offer the opportunity both to challenge and to extend an understanding of the politics of visuality. I examine how the novels encourage alternative lines of sight which, by means of their investment in an interior perspective, unsettle a disempowering visual binary and suggest a way for contemporary authors to write into the narrative gaps of history. An alternative perspective offers insight into the imagined lives of obscured or marginalised people and, ultimately, brings a fraught history into view in a way that is life-affirming and empowering.

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.

Derek Attridge’s insight that, ‘Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility towards the Other?’ (Attridge 2005: JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, xii), is conceptually rooted in Attridge’s tour de force on the theory of literary invention, The Singularity of Literature. In it he spins a complex, nuanced and powerful idea about the nature of literature as event in which the notion of otherness, or alterity, plays a primordial part in the advent of the literary. In this thesis, I develop a critique of the way in which a particular strand of literary criticism, which has blossomed in the field of Coetzee Studies, appropriates the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in its creation of an ethics-based, theme-reliant interpretive framework. While Derek Attridge, Mike Marais and Stefan Helgesson have each contributed greatly to this critical outlook, which I abbreviate as the ‘Levinasian Approach’, I choose to focus my research on the work produced by Attridge. My argument unfolds across two main sections. Section 1 contains a disquisition on pertinent aspects of Levinas’s ethical philosophy to literary aesthetics (Chapter 1). Section 2 consists of two chapters where the first (Chapter 2) is a study of the interface of Levinasian ethics with Attridge’s theory of literature in the event. There, I begin with an exposition of Attridge’s theory of literature, exploring its conceptual bearing on Levinas’s ethics. I make apparent the extent of his indebtedness to Levinas’s ethics by closely examining how and where, in the gestation of his theory, he borrows from Levinas’s ethical writings to develop a discourse on the nature of literature. This I follow up with a look at the nodes of divergence, unveiling the ways in which Attridge departs from Levinasian conceptions in his deployment of Levinasian terms. In conscripting the pseudo-phenomenological and transcendental ethics developed by Levinas into a hermeneutics of aesthetic evaluation and literary judgment, Attridge’s position diverges with undesirable consequence from Levinasian ethics. In the second chapter of Section 2 (Chapter 3) I reveal how Attridge’s method of textual analysis in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading goes against the grain of the theory of literary invention he elucidates in The Singularity of Literature. Furthermore, I argue that, in converting ethics into an applicative analytic for the audit of texts, with a view to exploring their literariness, he responds irresponsibly in Levinasian terms to Levinasian ethics. If his position is regarded as Levinasian, certain conceptual problems arise for his critical method. Should Levinas’s ethics be regarded as the source of Attridges’s notion of otherness and alterity, then Attridge’s selective appropriation is methodologically at odds with the source of its possibility, with Levinasian ethics.

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.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind.

This essay takes the novel Sundown (1934), written by Native American writer John Joseph Mathews in the context of the Osage oil boom, as a literary source in order to address the question of how oil projects expectations of a glorious future, but actually prevents development in a colonial context. In this paper modernity is seen as a process of creation and destruction, able to create new ways of living and destroying the previous order, able to cause problems, but also find solutions in its never-ending movement. Oil-capitalism is one of the main reasons why modernity as we know it is possible, but it is also the cause of many modern problems. This essay examines negative impact of modernity outside the European and Euro-American cultures, and raises the possibility of an alternative to Western modernity, where development would be fair not only on the economic level, but also on the social and environmental one. In the first part the essay analyses the social effects of oil, such as the destabilization of the Osage culture and their exclusion from the system, which leads to stagnation and personal frustration; in the second part it interprets Sundown as a modernist anti-developmental novel, arguing that the stunted main character and plot are direct reflections of the context of impossible development. The paper concludes with an ecocritical discussion about the possibility of a post-oil future of human and environmental justice, and by extension, about an alternative to the Western modernity.

This dissertation studies the writing of fiction in modern China from 1937 to 1949 in the three politically-divided areas: the Nationalist-controlled area, the Communist-dominated region, and the Japanese-occupied districts (before 1945), under the framework of “contested modernities” (the capitalist, the colonialist, and the socialist). Works of fiction here are explored as fundamentally cultural responses to the social, political, and historical experience. Therefore, it appreciates the dialectics of the content-form of these works as expressions, manifestations, and articulations of the contending modernities that competed against each other during that era. Methodologically, this project combines the application of the theory of “field of cultural production” promoted by Pierre Bourdieu, with the approach of historical/political hermeneutics as advocated by Fredric Jameson. The three areas set the stage for cultural productions of differing ideological tendencies. In this context, fiction is a testing ground for various versions and visions of “new cultures” of Chinese modernities. Here, we treat “1940s China” as a social-cultural space and “fiction” as a literary and intellectual institution in which various visions of “new cultures” expressed themselves. “Style” or “form” then becomes a socially symbolic, political action in which writers’ search for social and symbolic certainty was incarnated. Part I, “Negotiating with the Nightmarish Modern,” explores writers from the Japanese-occupied areas. The first chapter studies the relationship between the experience of exile and Xiao Hong’s war-time diasporic literature. The second chapter explores the middle-brow boudoir literature from Shanghai. In particular, it studies the works by Zhang Ailing. Part II, “Rethinking the Disjointed Modern,” investigates the Nationalist-controlled regions. The so-called “neo-romanticist” writers Wumingshi and Xu Xu, as well as the famed writer of the “July School” Lu Ling, are its objects of study. The third part, “Contending for a New Modern,” takes as its object of research writings from the Communist-controlled area. It looks into the “peasant writer” Zhao Shuli’s stories and the works by the May-Fourth-writer-turned-Communist-intellectual, Ding Ling. The study not only substantiates the argument that in modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was undertaken through conquering the identity crisis of the “new man” and “new woman,” but also testifies to the fact that this “control of the form” was simultaneously a symbolic action that articulated the anxiety of the intellectuals about becoming a new, modern Chinese. Put in other way, this search for a new identity is premised upon the establishment of a new subjectivity, which was an integral part of the project of building various “new cultures.” Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social-historical subtexts, this dissertation shows that social modernity and literary modernity intertwined and interacted with each other in the development of modern Chinese literature / text