Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of African Languages in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2003. / Storytelling plays a very significant role in the daily activities of human beings. With regard to the significance of storytelling, Compton's Encyclopedia (1994:636) explains: Storytelling is as old as man. People were telling stories to one another, around campfires and waterholes long before written language developed. Like many nations around the world, Zulus are renowned for their storytelling abilities that date back to time immemorial. A look at their folktales, riddles, praises, songs, etc, reveals a rich heritage of unsurpassed storytelling techniques. In this chapter we are going to illustrate why we feel that there is need for an evaluation of how Zulu artists use music and poetry as a platform for communicating messages through stories. We are going to define some concepts that will be used in this study and indicate their relevance in elucidating the storytelling aspect of Zulu music and poetry. We are also going to look at some studies that have been undertaken in Zulu music and poetry and clarify how we intend to tackle this study.

Upon being announced as one of the winners of the 1973 National Book Award, John Williams’ novel Augustus (1972) was classified as a book of a supposedly more traditional form compared to John Barth’s experimental work Chimera (1972) that Augustus shared the prize with that year. This essay will examine John Williams’ novel Augustus, with the purpose of analysing two of the novel’s main characters, Augustus and his daughter Julia. To define both of the characters, this essay will be looking in-depth into how Williams showcases the various ways both characters go about using the power that is bestowed upon them. This essay will be employing Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) to establish the environment of nihilism present in the Roman Empire that nears the “waning of affect” and exhaustion Jameson states occurs with the coming of postmodernism. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) will be placed in dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) to showcase the varying masculine and feminine practices of language both characters employ and the consequences these forms of expression bring with the duplicitous ways of the Roman Empire looming in the background behind both Augustus and Julia.

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