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Storytelling and social commentary in a comparison of Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) and Black Diamond (2009)Thackwray, Sarah January 2017 (has links)
In a comparison of two novels, Ways of Dying (1995) and Black Diamond (2009), this dissertation examines Zakes Mda's ongoing use of fiction in presenting incisive social commentary in the post-apartheid literary context. Mda's debut novel is a complex magic realist tale of Toloki, the professional mourner, who journeys from the village to the urban township. It is markedly different from his post-millennial satire, which invokes the social realist form, constructing a rapidly unfolding plot of urban gangsters, crime and sex, in which the characters are more representational than well-developed. While Ways of Dying has been praised as Mda's thought-provoking novel of the transition, Black Diamond has sometimes been criticised as being less able to comment significantly on the state of post-millennial South Africa. Subsequently, this dissertation evaluates the potential of Mda's most recent fictional portrayal of post-apartheid society to provide a meaningful interpretation of and commentary on post-apartheid South Africa, alongside his earlier novel.
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Invention or reflection? - tradition and orality in the works of Bessie HeadCastrillon, Gloria Ledger January 1993 (has links)
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in
fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master
of Arts. Johannesburg, 1993. / This dissertation examines the work of Bessie Head with
a view to sophisticating prevailing understandings of her
texts which tend to concentrate on Head's place in a
tradition of African women writers. Current critical
works emphasise selected aspects, of Head's biography and
assume her presentation of the 'tradition' and 'orality'
of Serowe to be accurate. We argue in this dissertation
that Head has constructed and manipulated concepts of
'tradition' and 'orality' in her texts to suit both her
intellectual concerns and her fictional intentions.
Broadly these are to present her works as the recorded
history of an 'oral African' society. Head's six novels
as well as aspects of her letters and interviews are
examined in order to demonstrate this assertion. / AC2017
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An investigation into the nature and function of prescribed literature in schools and a comparative study of the required reading in English literature in school syllabuses in South Africa, Rhodesia and the ex-High Commission Territories from 1945-1980Marzo, Patricia Beatrice January 1981 (has links)
From preface: The original purpose of this thesis was to make a comparative study of all the English literature which had been prescribed from 1945 to 1980 for study by all high school pupils in the Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe and the ex-High Commission Territories. This proved to be a formidable task. However, most of the material collected, including all the individual poems prescribed, was recorded in table form. This proved too bulky a system for comparative purposes and the field was narrowed to include only that English literature which had been prescribed for candidates writing Matriculation or Senior Certificate examinations on the higher grade as part of the English Language syllabus. From time to time, however, reference will be made in this thesis to prescriptions for the lower grades and for the lower standards.
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Prison experience in the work of some South African writers from Lessing to CroninAarons, Michelle Sandra 20 February 2014 (has links)
Thesis (M.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Arts, 1988.
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Reconstructing identity in post-colonial black South African literature from selected novels of Sindiwe Magona and Kopano MatlwaMontle, Malesela Edward January 2018 (has links)
Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / This study seeks to examine the concept of identity in the post-colonial South Africa. Like
any other African state, South Africa was governed by a colonial strategy called apartheid
which meted out harsh conditions on black people. However, the indomitable system of
apartheid was subdued by the leadership of the people, which is democracy in 1994.
Notwithstanding the dispensation of democracy, colonial legacies such as inequality,
racial discrimination and poverty are still yet to be addressed. As mirrored in Sindiwe
Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) and Mother to Mother (1998) and Kopano Matlwa’s
Coconut (2008) and Spilt Milk (2010), the colonial past perhaps paved a way for social
issues to warm their way into the democratic South Africa. This study will use the
aforementioned novels penned in the post-colonial period to present an evocation of
identity-crisis in South Africa. It will then employ these methodological approaches;
Afrocentricity, Feminism, Historical-biographical and Post-Colonial Theory to assert and
re-assert the identity that South Africans have acquired subsequent to the political
transition from apartheid to democracy.
KEY WORDS: Apartheid, Colonialism, Democracy, Identity, Post-Colonialism
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Protest in fiction : an approach to Alex la GumaCornwell, Gareth January 1979 (has links)
From Introduction: Thus for the black South African, the act of creative writing is inescapably a form of political action, and unless he turns his back on the reality which confronts him and retreats into a private imaginary world, it is also a form of social action, Yet Ezekiel Mphahlele has rightly cautioned that "creating an imaginary world" can never be an effective substitute for social act ion . Composing fictions about social and political problems is an indubitably oblique way of seeking a solution to them, and even the tendentious recreation of reality is only a metaphor for its actual transformation. Protest writing in South Africa is paradoxically a form of social action which is also only a parasitical imitation of social action, and therefore its avoidance . The freedom of literary creation described above is ambiguously not only a freedom to express reality, but also a freedom from the constraints of reality. And this suggests why the outlaw was such an important symbol to an earlier generation of rather more self-conscious writers.
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The environmental imagination in Arthur Nortje’s poetryKaze, Douglas Eric January 2018 (has links)
This thesis seeks to contribute to the conversations in the humanities about the treatment of the physical environment in the context of a global ecological fragility and increased scholarly interest in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, a South African poet who wrote in the 1960s. While previous studies on Nortje concentrate on the political, psychic and technical aspects of his poetry, this study particularly explores the representations of the environment in Nortj e’s poetic imagination. Writing in the dark period of apartheid in South Africa’s history, Nortje’s poetry articulates a strong interest in the physical environment against the backdrop of official racialization of space and his personal nomadic life and exile. The poetry abounds with constant intersections of nature and culture (industrialism, urbanity and the quotidian), a sense of place and a deep sense of dislocation. The poems, therefore, present a platform from which to reevaluate conventional ecocritical ideas about nature, place-attachment and environmental consciousness. Drawing mainly on Felix Guattari’s ideas of three ecologies and transversality along with other theories, I conduct the study through what I call a transversal postcolonial environmental criticism, which considers the ecological value of the kind of assemblages that Nortje’s works represent. The first chapter focuses on conceptualizing a postcolonial approach to the environment based on Guattari’s concept of transversality to lay the theoretical foundation for the whole work. The second chapter analyses Nortje’s poetic imagination of place and displacement through his treatment of the private-public tension and the motif of exile. While the third chapter examines Nortje’s depiction of nature as both an everyday and urban phenomenon, the fourth chapter turns to his direct treatment of environmental crises handled through his imagination of the Canadian urban spaces, exile memory of apartheid geography, war and ecocide and the human body as a subject of environmental degradation. The fifth chapter, which is the conclusion, takes a brief look at the implication of Nortje’s complex treatment of the environment on postcolonial environmentalism.
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Interpreting redness: a literary biography of Zakes MdaSteele, Dorothy Winifred 30 November 2007 (has links)
This study of Zakes Mda's life and sixteen of his plays and seven novels, written
from 1966 to the present day, set in South Africa, Lesotho and the United States
of America, shows how his life and works interweave, and how his
defamiliarisation mode, his magic realism and his juxtaposed timeframes
stimulate reader response and self-realisation, bringing about change.
Experiences of marginalisation due to early childhood sexual abuse, exile,
and being banished from church, and his involvement in political movements
outside the mainstream, have caused him to be an astute observer of life. He is
sceptical of authority and power, and is as critical of those who seek power,
becoming intoxicated thereby, as of those who give away their power and so
perpetuate unacceptable institutions and their own victimisation. At all times
though, his writing style is creative and entertaining, rooted in the African oral
tradition from which he springs, but also portraying international influences to
which he has been exposed over the years. / English Studies / M.A. (English)
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Theorising the counterhegemonic : a critical study of Black South African autobiography from 1954-1963Gilfillan, Lynda, 1948- 11 1900 (has links)
In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African
autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these
autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the
hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose
that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new
South African nationhood.
Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the
intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the
imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest
that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist,
conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of
grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to
lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the
relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony.
In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves
are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African
Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely
in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid
I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms
the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which
focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as
in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I". / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)
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Changing social consciousness in the South African English novel after World War II, with special reference to Peter Abrahams, Alan Paton, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine GordimerPaasche, Karin Ilona Mary 11 1900 (has links)
The changing social consciousness in South Africa during the twentieth century falls within a
political-historical framework of events: amongst others, World Wars I and II; the institution of the
Apartheid Laws in 1948; the declaration of a South African Republic in 1960; Nelson Mandela's release in
1992. The literary social consciousness of Abrahams, Paton, Mphahlele and Gordimer spans the time
before and after 1948. Their novels reflect the changing reality of a country whose racial and social
problems both pre-date and will outlive the apartheid ideology. These and other novelists' changing social
consciousness is an indication of the development of attitudes and reactions to issues which have their
roots in the human and in the economic spheres, as well as in the political, cultural and religious. Their
work interprets the history and the change in the South African social consciousness, and also gives some
indication of a possible future vision. / English Studies / M.A. (English)
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