Space can be read through text. Space is also constructed through text. Literary and critical theory has, however, emphasised time over space. However, space, place and location are crucial determining factors in any literary study. Through reference to theories of construction of place as well as writings on spatial history and the city I will discuss how place is created through text and how the urban environment affects literary production. Using the work of Michel Foucault (1986, 2002) on space and power, Michel de Certeau's approach to cities (2002) and WaIter Benjamin's (2002) theories on space, time and the city, as well as South African theoretical approaches to space and the city, I will attempt an analysis of place in chosen pieces of literature set in the postapartheid city by selected writers. I have chosen to focus on the cities of Durban and Johannesburg, and in particular the innercities, because it is here that major transformation in the use and representation of space has occurred. By looking at selected apartheid and postapartheid texts I will be able to analyse how the representation of literary space has altered with political and socio-economic changes. The time period I will look at primarily will be the postapartheid period. The interdisciplinary nature of this project means I will draw from literary criticism, critical theory, geography, sociology and economic history as well as elements of postcolonial and postmodem theory. The South African city today is a post-city; postcolonial and postapartheid. So too, the texts I have selected are post-texts, postmodem and post-struggle and I will conduct my analysis with this in mind. The concept of 'city' in literature is much more than just buildings and streets. It exists also in social relationships and links between people, both in the city and places outside of the city. The city is a set of social, political and cultural conditions that manifests itself in space and it is this aspect of 'city' which is represented in these texts that I will investigate. Through focusing on the autobiography Man Bitch (2001) by Johan van Wyk together with Never Been At Home (2001) by Zazah P. Khuzwayo and No Way Out (2001) by Zinhle Carol Mdakane all set in Durban, and Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) by Phaswane Mpe and the short story "Autopsy" (1996) by Ivan Vladislavic set in Johannesburg, I will investigate the representation of urban space in these texts of postapartheid literature. By way of introduction, I will examine relevant selected apartheid texts that deal with the cities of Durban (Lewis Nkosi's novel Mating Birds (1987)) and Johannesburg (selected poems of Mongane Wally Serote) and I will attempt to construct a literary image of the space of these cities under apartheid. A close reading of the texts selected will construct a clear picture of the current (and past) urban space through the medium of literature. It will be seen that major issues affecting South Africa's city inhabitants emerge as themes: AIDS, crime, migration and architectural degradation drive these narratives as does access to once restricted space. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

This thesis posits that the "observers" attendant in Eliot's poems The Love Song of Alfred Prurock, Portrait of a Lady, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night can be considered quintessential figures of modernity. Against a backdrop of more than 200 years of thought on the concept of modernity - a notion that in recent decades has been much under siege - French sociologist Alain Touraine, in his Critique of Modernity, offers a reinterpretation of the modern. I chose to hold this text against the four poems by Eliot because Eliot himself has been described as "emphatically modem". Recalling the initial triumph of the rationalist vision of modernity, Touraine calls for modernity to be redefined as a continuous and reflexive relationship between Subject and Reason, subjectivation and rationalisation. Using this idea of the modem subject having two faces (subjectivation and rationalisation) as a model of a quintessential figure of modernity I have attempted to match the "observers" to this blueprint offered by Touraine. I hope to show that these figures, wandering the streets of the rational and increasingly industrial and alienating world of the city and sitting drinking tea in its parlours, can be seen as both casualties of "classical" modernity and as the vanguard of Touraine's "new modernity". Almost drowning in the rationalism of metropolitan existence these figures are at once sensing their absorption by this rationalism and fighting to free their intense subjectivity the very struggle that characterises Touraine's modern subject. Finally, I hope to show that combination of rationalisation and subjectivation within the modern subject, while seemingly at odds with Eliot's theories (especially regarding the "objective correlative" and "inner voice") is not as far from his practice of poetry and criticism as may be assumed at first glance. The figures he has created in these four chosen poems testify to this. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2000.

This study concerns the writing of Geoffrey Hugh Durrant. Durrant’s writing is to a large extent academic in nature, but he also comments on the broader South African society during the course of the 1940s and 1950s. The study has two interrelated objectives, the first archival in nature and the second more theoretical. The archival objective entails bringing to attention Durrant’s writing produced during the period he spent in South Africa. At present this archive remains largely unexplored. The second objective is to relate this body of writing to current thinking regarding the mission of university English Studies in South Africa. The study of languages and literatures in South Africa today finds itself in a complex situation of ongoing changes within the university as an institution, the broader system of education, and a society which in many respects can still be described as becoming a “New South Africa”. This is also true for university English Studies. It will be argued that in this process of transition Durrant’s writing, informed by the challenge to university English Studies to define itself as an independent academic discipline with an essential educational and social function, offers a valuable perspective. In defining the task of English Studies at the university Durrant aligns himself with the critical tradition which at a conceptual level originated in the writing of Matthew Arnold by the middle of the nineteenth century, but came to full fruition only after 1917 in the Cambridge English School. Durrant has to be credited for a measure of original thought and for making a personal contribution to this critical framework in for instance his definition of the concept “practical criticism”. He also has to be credited for including politics into the cultural analysis implicit in this critical framework, something which was never done by the Cambridge critics. This, for Durrant, means that his duty as citizen is not to be separated from his duty as university teacher. Durrant believes that indifference and failure to judge unacceptable political developments will ultimately endanger the values of society and make a self-respecting existence impossible. For university teachers an attitude of indifference will eventually leave the universities with no authority, unable to fulfil their essential task. Durrant sees the university as guardian of a specific type of intellectual activity and therefore as indispensable to society. The essential duty of the university is to cultivate an ability of critical discernment, and it is in this realm that the task of the university and that of English Studies coincide. For Durrant the social mission of English Studies depends on the fostering of a critical ability through engagement with the particular form of language use unique to the literary text. The standards of thought and understanding set by the literary text function as touchstones for life in all its various aspects, and mastery of this type of text affords the level of critical discernment necessary as foundation for a civil self capable of critical judgement. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

The thesis provides a feminist analysis of the Zimbabwean women writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), reading the novel as a critique of African patriarchy. The thesis examines the different ways in which African patriarchy broadly manifests itself regarding the subaltern position of women. It then analyses a range of feminist theories, extracting from them concepts useful to an understanding of the novel. Finally, the thesis analyses in detail Dangarembga’s novel in the light of an understanding of African patriarchy and feminist theories. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

Herman Charles Bosman's Oom Schalk stories have made him one of the most popular writers in South Africa, and the rural Marico District in which the stories are set a popular tourist destination. This popularity is largely due to the storytelling figure of Oom Schalk, the likeable old boer raconteur, who tells the stories and ironically pokes fun at his Marico community. This image of Oom Schalk and the Oom Schalk stories is one which was created and nurtured by Lionel Abrahams who was almost single-handedly responsible for the collection and republication of many of these stories after Bosman's death. The image of Schalk, and therefore the intention of Bosman in creating this fictional narrator, as a benign figure has been contested by some literary critics and defended by others. The debate has revolved around the extent to which Bosman's use of irony in the stories addresses the explicitly racist attitudes of Schalk and the Marico community. Unfortunately the debates around irony have been hampered by a lack of attention to the nature and functioning of irony. In my introduction I look at the problems that many critics have in trying to define the diverse body of writing that Bosman produced and the way in which this has defined a particular critical approach to Bosman. In Chapter 1 I discuss how the history of publication of Bosman's Oom Schalk stories and literary criticism has defined an approach to these stories which is often inappropriate. I also discuss some of the literary critical implications of the recent recollection and republication of Bosman's work in The Anniversary Edition. In Chapter 2 I address the issue of irony in the Oom Schalk stories. I deal with the way in which irony is constructed in the Oom Schalk stories. This discussion includes an analysis of the narrative structure of the short stories and the way in which the figure of Oom Schalk is used to create different levels of irony. In Chapter 3 I examine some of the Oom Schalk stories in detail in order to demonstrate the way in which Bosman's deployment of irony produces an identifiable pattern which establishes a basis for a discussion of Bosman's ironic intent in writing these stories. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2003.

In this article I examine the representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the Twilight and Shamim Sarif's the world unseen. My contention is that each author chooses a different mode of representation and that certain features of these representations suggest both the different relationship each author has with South Africa and the differences in the times of production of the novels. Thus while both novels are set in the 1950s, Karodia, whose site of enunciation is the 'interregnum' in the 1980s, imagines the agency of her women quite differently from Sarif, who writes from a 'post-anti-apartheid' site of enunciation in the late 1990s. I analyse and compare the relationships between characters (men and women; women and women) and look at the cultural and political significance of mixed-race figures, concentrating on uncovering the mechanisms of power and their effects. I read these against a politico-historical context of the setting and that of the times and places of production. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

In this dissertation, I argue that there is a pressing need in post-apartheid KwaZulu-Natal to re-assess the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of the region from the perspectives of people whose ancestry was dispossessed and/or displaced in the wars that took place in that period, particularly those that elevated Shaka to dominance. I suggest that because of their retrospective manipulation by the vested interests of power politics, historical processes over the past two centuries, and in the last century in particular, have invested the figure of King Shaka and 'Zulu' ethnic identities with unitary meanings that have made them close to inescapable for most people who are considered 'Zulu'. I argue that there is, therefore, a need to recuperate the histories of the clans which were defeated by the Zulu and welded into the Zulu 'nation'. Following British-Jamaican novelist Caryl Phillips' strategy, I begin to conduct this recuperation through a process of subverting history by writing back into historical records people and events that have been written and spoken out of them. I argue that literary texts, izibongo ('personal' praises) and izithakazelo (clan praises) in this case, offer a useful starting point in recovering the suppressed or marginalised histories of some of the once-significant clans in the region. In the three chapters of this dissertation, I examine the izibongo of three late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century amakhosi (kings) in the present KwaZulu-Natal region, Shaka kaSenzangakhona of the Zulu clan, Phungashe kaNgwane of the Buthelezi and Zwide kaLanga of the Ndwandwe. In the first chapter, I read Shaka's izibongo as an instance of empire-building discourse in which I trace the belittling representations granted Phungashe and Zwide. In the second and third chapters, I set Phungashe's and Zwide's izibongo, respectively, as well as the histories carried in and alluded to by these texts, and the clans' izithakazelo, alongside Shaka's and examine the extent to which the two amakhosi's izibongo talk back to Shaka's imperialism. I also follow the later histories of the two amakhosi's clans to determine which individuals became prominent in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and after, as well as point to the revisions of the past that are being conducted in the present by people of the two clans. The versions of the izibongo I study and the hypotheses of history I present are drawn from sources that include the James Stuart Archive, A.T. Bryant, and oral historical accounts from several people I interviewed. Given the present imperatives in South Africa of bringing justice to the various peoples who were dispossessed under colonial and apartheid domination, I argue that recuperating the histories of the clans that were conquered by the Zulu under Shaka's leadership problematises questions of justice in KwaZulu-Natal: if it is legitimate to claim reparation for colonialism and apartheid, then the Zulu kingdom should be viewed under the same spotlight because of the similar suffering it visited on many inhabitants of the region. In that way, we can transcend divisive colonial, apartheid and Zulu nationalist histories that continue to have strong, often negative, effects on the crossing of identity boundaries constructed under those systems of domination. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

Female identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection (first published in 1965) is a complex site of being and becoming within a 1950s culture of performance. From a twenty-first century perspective, this dissertation bridges traditional and contemporary readings of Plath and the Plath archive through a referencing of motifs such as celebrity, ‘the gaze’, ventriloquism and clothing. The inter-discursive approach used – literary, psychoanalytic, cultural – attempts to underline the ongoing significance of Plath’s place as a woman poet in literary studies. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

This study places the poetry of Ingrid de Kok in a critical context that is strongly influenced by the political climate. Unlike political rhetoric, the nature of the lyrical poem is personal and complex, arguably rendering it defunct in a democracy that seeks to serve majority interests. De Kok’s challenge is to be a lyrical poet in the public sphere, to contain and represent the public interest within the personal form. I will examine how she rises to the historical occasion and extends her medium to incorporate the public event. At the same time, if she is to retain her voice as a lyrical poet, she must guard the privacy of its expression and the intimate spaces it seeks to delineate. In this way she asserts the validity of every-day concerns and of spaces traditionally designated as female. By interrogating the categories of personal and public I hope to project a complex vision of the possibilities of the lyric within contemporary South Africa. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

In this thesis I attempt to examine the way that rural women in Natal, from the early 1950s to the 1980s, were relegated to the periphery of both white society and black traditional society. Lauretta Ngcobo's second novel And They Didn't Die is therefore a very useful resource as it takes a look at the interplay of traditional black patriarchy, white patriarchy, and the way rural women were affected by these oppressive institutions. And They Didn't Die examines the way that apartheid affected rural communities and the individual. It investigates the various struggles faced by rural women; how women have to negotiate their own identities within different systems. And They Didn't Die focuses on the political, economic, and traditional struggles of rural women in Natal at the end of the 1950s, but unlike other novels, And They Didn't Die also focuses on the sexual identities of rural women, and how they mobilised themselves through political activities such as the struggle against the dreaded pass laws, and the protests against the beer halls. And They Didn't Die is a novel which explores political, traditional, economic, sexual, and communal aspects of rural life. Ngcobo foregrounds the communal, political, economic, and traditional problems that the women in the novel have to face. Ngcobo recreates the various political protests that were happening at this time, to demonstrate the construction of the black woman as political subject. She carefully demonstrates how agency has to be negotiated with both the white authorities and black patriarchy. Black South African women were forced to fight double political battles on the domestic and national fronts. The split structure of the political and traditional struggle is at the center of Ngcobo's work. And They Didn't Die shows that the struggle for female subjectivity is a dynamic process. In South Africa, rural black women had to negotiate numerous subject positions. Forging a sense of selfhood was difficult, especially when confronted with dual patriarchies, apartheid, and the constant negotiation with tradition. Ngcobo's novel is an interesting fictional account that draws on various historical events that offers the reader a sense of what women had to go through in order to survive the atrocities of apartheid. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.