Thesis (MA (English))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This dissertation rests on the assumption that the literary text is fundamentally part of the world from which it emerges. Following Heidegger's understanding of the work of art as a form of unconcealment, it argues that Michael Ondaatje's fictional work Anil's Ghost discloses the particular, historically contingent conditions that determine the ethical relations people are cast into during a time of war in the present era of globalization. The novel interrogates the idea of truth in its meta-fictional discourse and stakes out the grounds of its own fictional truth in contra-distinction to truth as fact offered by Western empiricism. Alongside the implicit criticism of Western epistemology, the novel mounts a critique of the universal human rights discourse and suggests that an ethical approach to the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka is preferable to a political solution imposed from the outside. War is presented as a radically embodying event in which the body is made vulnerable to death and injury: and the ethical imperative to alleviate physical suffering is identified as the most immediate and appropriate response to the crisis of war. Following Levinas, ethics is understood to transpire in the corporeal relation between individuals. By attending in detail to the embodied experience of being in the world, the novel prepares the ground for an ethics of the body that is closely aligned to the ethics as first philosophy espoused by Levinas. The dissertation argues throughout that the novel discloses the nature of ethical relations between people in the world by means of its aesthetic forms of language. The domain of the ethical and aesthetics are thus commensurate.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In re-imagining the relationship between words and life, or alternately between self and world, the novelist is in a unique position not merely to reproduce these interlinked relationships through the practice of writing, but to use the unique possibilities extended by the form and content of the novel as literary genre to reveal this interpenetration of ontological and epistemological domains; to render visible what is normally regarded as separate. To disclose how the imaginative domain of fiction writing mirrors the novelistic character of material reality, this dissertation discusses three Michael Ondaatje works, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero. Through a careful close reading it explores the manner in which Ondaatje‘s form of philosophical thought juxtaposes many genres and expressive forms into a highly complex, playful and self-referential metafictional whole. With a focus on close reading supplemented rather than determined by critical theory, this dissertation then sets out to demonstrate how the author‘s work advances the provocative central thesis that fictional texts not only reflect upon events, thoughts and emotions, but that philosophical works of literature and art are necessarily performative and interrogative, able to question aspects of the self, and ultimately able to present ethical ways of being and therapeutic escape to readers. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Deur die voorstelling van die verhouding tussen woorde en die lewe, of alternatiewelik tussen self en wêreld, is die outeur uniek geposisioneer om nie net hierdie verwikkelde verhoudings deur die skryfproses weer te gee nie, maar ook om die unieke moontlikhede wat die roman as literêre genre bied, te ontgin. Eenvoudig gestel, die vorm en inhoud van die roman maak dit moontlik om hierdie wisselwerking van ontologiese en epistomologiese gebiede oop te vlek, om wat gewoonlik as afsonderlik beskou word, te beklemtoon en op die voorgrond te plaas. Om dan ten toon te stel hoe die verbeeldingryke gebied van fiksieskryfwerk die romankarakter van die materiële werklikheid weërspieel, fokus hierdie studie op ‘n bespreking van drie werke van Michael Ondaatje, naamlik The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost en Divisadero. Deur kritiese stiplees ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die wyse waarop Ondaatje se konkretisering van abstrakte en filosofiese idees teenoor verskeie ander genres en beeldende denkvorme geplaas word, en sodoende ‘n self-verwysende, uiters komplekse metafiktiewe geheel skep. Hierdie studie fokus op stiplees van die tekste, maar word ook aangevul deur literêre en filosofiese teorie. Uiteindelik poog hierdie studie om uit te beeld hoe die outeur se werk die uitdagende argument dat fiksie nie net gebeurtenisse, denke en emosies bepeins nie, maar dat filosofiese en literêre tekste en kunsvorme noodwendig dramatiserend en ondersoekend is. Tekste soos dié van Ondaatje beskik dan oor die vermoëns om eienskappe van die self te bevraagteken, en om eindelik etiese vorme van menswees en terapeutiese ontvlugting aan lesers te bied.