Thesis (doctoral)--Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1980. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 751-779).

Magister Artium - MA / The minithesis provides a detailed socio-political and literary analysis of A Walk in the Night: Seven stories from the streets of Cape Town. It investigates and systematically compares each short story to the novella or compares the short stories with each other and shows their thematic and formal similarities and differences. The results of the study will provide a valuable contribution to the study of African literature. It will complete what other critics have left out. No one among La Guma’s scholars has analysed the anthology as a single entity; most critics have analysed the novella and have not analysed the accompanying short stories. As a result, the relationships between the novella and the short stories are unknown to many readers. I argue that this needs to be corrected. In order to situate the thesis, the study also presents a selected list of critics who have studied the novella and the short stories, and indicates their achievements and their shortcomings. The study will be carried out from a Marxist perspective, and will explore the use of realist and naturalist literary styles. Marxism will provide the socio-political and theoretical framework. Naturalism and realism are the two main literary genres that occur in the anthology. / South Africa

The traditional notion of Western liberal democracy has in recent years been met with a barrage of negative criticism. Liberal democracy from both a minimalist and substantive position appears to be backsliding, and once more falling into what Samuel P. Huntington (1991) termed a reverse wave. The analysis which Huntington (1991) presented ended in an era in which liberal democracy once more dominated the political landscape for a third consecutive wave, without any indication that it was going to relapse. In light of Huntington’s (1991) closure, this study has attempted to continue with his analysis and point to the possible existence of a third wave reversal. In order to do so, this study has meticulously used the same methodological approach as Huntington (1991) did to highlight previous wave reversals. This has been done by critically discussing, with examples, the existence of those factors that lead to a global decline in liberal democratic practice as prescribed by Huntington (1991). This study attempts not only to point to the possible existence of a third wave reversal, but also to explain the contextual reasons behind such an increase in anti-democratic rhetoric. The application of Huntington’s (1991) wave theory does not explain the subjective reasoning behind the contemporary deterioration of liberal democracy, as his factors leading to wave reversals may be too pragmatic for this study. It is in this light that a second argument as brought forward by Huntington in 1996, serves as the contextual layer for the decrease in democratic support as it provides the basis for the application of a critical discourse analysis. Therefore, this study serves not only as an investigation of the possible existence of a current third wave reversal, but also as an analysis into the discursive nature of liberal democracy’s historical and future trajectory.

No description available.

In this thesis I explore instances of literary engagement with the major transitions in national political formation in Malawi and South Africa; both countries moved from a totalitarian regime to democratic government, brought in by multi-party elections, in 1994. Most analyses of the wave of democratic transitions in Southern Africa are either historical, political or economic in their approach. The shift of political power from one constituency to another also requires another kind of study, of the impact of the political changes on lived experience through an analysis of people's creative expression. The artistic expressions of the experi nce of change are at times strikingly similar in the two countries, especially how artists imagine newness and simultaneously negotiate a past which was subject to repression. Literature is important in this political process, for it has a licence to reinterpret conventional representations and dominant narratives, often through fictionalising and creating new imaginative possibilities. I consider whether literary production in Malawi and South Africa is comparable in the light of this idea, despite the obvious differences in political configuration, geographic factors and levels of industrialisation and urbanisation, and ask whether political transition is a legitimate point of departure for interpreting literature. In the process I seek to identify similarities, and even overt influences or alliances between the literary practices in Malawi and South Africa during and since the transition. I analyse a wide variety of literary forms, some of which may transgress conventional definitions of 'literature'. Examples include the reader-contributions sent in to a newspaper's literary pages by its readers and the two historical accounts of women's experience. I discuss the porous distinction between fiction and history, realism and magic realism, as well as the subjective distinctions between formal and popular literature. The ambiguity of the title of my thesis therefore conveys the fact that the more established modes of literary interpretation are themselves also currently in transition. My intention here is not to argue what kind of literature is good or bad, valuable or trivial, but to discuss and interpret contextually the kinds of literature which are being produced and published. Chapter 1 of my thesis discussesth e work of JackM apanje and Nadine Gordimer, two 'veterans' of censorship under their respective regimes, suggesting how their writing has changed with freedom of expression. With the transition came experimentation and a wave of writing on fantastical, magical and irrational subjects. The writers discussed in Chapter 2 serve as a contrast to the engaged realism of Gordimer and to some extent, Mapanje. Steve Chimombo, Lesego Rampolokeng, Seitlhamo Motsapi and Zakes Mda convey a burlesque, transgressive style, which I discuss, drawing on Bakhtin, under the eading 'carnivalesque'. Chapter 3's emphasis on newspaper literature from Malawi reflects the importance of the form in contrast to South Africa where popular writing largely finds its main outlet in literary journals and magazines rather than in daily newspapers. Chapters 4 and 5 are related in their considerations of memory and searches for truth. In Chapter 4 Antjie Krog and Emily Mkamanga challenge the distinction between literary and factual chronicle in their woman-centred accounts of the past. The final chapter discusses two texts that are overtly literary, yet function in a mode of mourning and reflection, returning from the bustle of the present moment to a continuing, necessary reflection of the past which defines the new present. I conclude by suggesting that the comparative analysis is viable and enriching and that this study of literature from societies in transition demonstrates how poetry and fiction tell stories of history.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-193).

No description available.

LD2668 .T4 1966 S83 / Master of Science

The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular. My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s. Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature). In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented. In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another. In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create. In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, June 2016 / The study explores the ways in which the self and other are constructed and represented in a wide range of Zimbabwean political autobiographical narratives from 1972 to 2011. In particular, it focuses on the machinery of autobiography and the various narrative strategies deployed by autobiographers of different races, gender, ethnic origins and political persuasions to construct the self and other. It also considers how these representations of the self and other, combined with the narrative strategies used, bear upon the history and politics of Zimbabwe. The argument is advanced that through strategic and careful deployment of narrative in transforming lives lived to lives told, the selected narratives not only reconstruct the self and other but also narrate the history and politics of the nation. Therefore, the deployment of different narrative strategies, which include the uses of: authentication, patronage of authorship, historical recurrence and narcissistic rage, erasure, palimpsest and collaborative voices, and hauntology has resulted in the emergence of a seemingly minor genre into a competing narrative that is threatening to take over the place of hegemonic grand narratives and histories of Zimbabwe. These have all along been largely nativist and based on racial, ethnic and patriarchal prejudices, especially in the manner in which they narrated the political history of Zimbabwe. The study thus argues that the machinery of autobiographies has been deployed as political weaponry to present bleached images of the self and other. This situates Zimbabwe’s political autobiographies as literary and political projects and archives that narrate the nation through the story of the self and other. / MT2017