published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

In this dissertation, research is aimed at the multifaceted concepts of tolerance and abjection, which are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide. The way in which these terms are integrated into literary works is analysed with reference to two novels, namely Santa Gamka (2009) by Eben Venter and Een schitterend gebrek (2003) by Arthur Japin. Both novels include tolerance and abjection as a significant part of their narratives, yet they originate from two different parts of the world, are set in two different periods of time and also differ at historical, social-political and individual levels. In this study, the most signification similarity between the novels is how tolerance and abjection take effect, both independently and together In both novels, tolerance and abjection are, for various reasons, problematised. These reasons include: skin colour, beauty, space and borders. When compared to reality, the manifestation of tolerance and abjection in the novels is also illuminating, because it reflects the actual situations in their respective countries, namely South Africa and The Netherlands. The history and views of tolerance in these two countries can be seen as opposite: South African intolerance is characterised by apartheid, while the praised tolerance of The Netherlands is known worldwide. The analysis of the novels focuses on the influence of tolerance and abjection on the main characters, with the emphasis on the body – not only in terms of physical appearance, but also sexual practises. The study demonstrates that specific spaces, as well as spatial displacement, can be linked directly to tolerance and abjection. In accordance with their spatial migration, the novels show that borders, boundaries and overstepping boundaries are of the utmost importance to the protagonists. Borders that are experienced as limiting and result in rejection and intolerance are often simultaneously a passage to acceptance and tolerance. / MA (Afrikaans en Nederlands), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

In Orientalism, Edward Said identified how the Westerner “spoke for” and represented the silent Orient. Today with the burgeoning call-center business with India, it seems that the West now wants the Orient to speak for it. But is the voice that Western business requires in India a truly Indian voice? Or is it a manipulation which is a new form of the silencing of the Indian voice? This dissertation identifies how several Postcolonial Indian writers challenge the silence of Orientalism and the power issues of the West through various “speaking voices” of narratives representative of Indian life. Using Julie Kristeva’s abjection theory as a lens, this dissertation reveals Arundhati Roy as “speaking abjection” in The God of Small Things. Even Roy’s novelistic setting suffers abjection through neocolonialism. Salman Rushdie’s narrative method of magic realism allows “speaking trauma” as his character Saleem in Midnight’s Children suffers the traumas of Partition and Emergency as an allegorical representation of India. Using magic realism Saleem is able to speak the unspeakable. Other Indian voices, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and Rohinton Mistry “speak history” as their novels carry the weight of conveying an often-absent official history of Partition and the Emergency, history verified by Partition surviror interviews. In Such a Long Journey, Mistry uses an anthrozoological theme in portraying issues of power over innocence. Recognizing the choices and negotiations of immigrant life through the coining of the word (dis)assimilation, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings are analyzed in terms of a “speaking voice” of (dis)assimilation for Indian immigrants in the United States, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “speaks (dis)assimilation” as a voice of multiple ethnicites negotiating immigrant life in the United Kingdom. Together these various “speaking voices” show the power of Indian writers in challenging the silence of Orientalism through narrative.

Nature is everywhere. Every day we have contact with it. Still, many of us do not realize how important it is for our survival. Descriptions of nature have always been present in novels. However, recently the aspect of nature in literature, as well as in other disciplines, has been dealt with in a slightly different way. As a result, an ecocritical approach to literature has been favoured. This essay shows nature's impact on the characters in Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers. Using this novel as an example, I start by studying how the concept of nature is often constructed through opposition. I then move on to show how stereotypical boundaries between nature and human beings may be challenged. Finally I study how nature function as a healing agent in The Stone Carvers. In my studies I combine the theories of ecocriticism with a psychoanalytical perspective through the concept of abjection.

In this dissertation, research is aimed at the multifaceted concepts of tolerance and abjection, which are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide. The way in which these terms are integrated into literary works is analysed with reference to two novels, namely Santa Gamka (2009) by Eben Venter and Een schitterend gebrek (2003) by Arthur Japin. Both novels include tolerance and abjection as a significant part of their narratives, yet they originate from two different parts of the world, are set in two different periods of time and also differ at historical, social-political and individual levels. In this study, the most signification similarity between the novels is how tolerance and abjection take effect, both independently and together In both novels, tolerance and abjection are, for various reasons, problematised. These reasons include: skin colour, beauty, space and borders. When compared to reality, the manifestation of tolerance and abjection in the novels is also illuminating, because it reflects the actual situations in their respective countries, namely South Africa and The Netherlands. The history and views of tolerance in these two countries can be seen as opposite: South African intolerance is characterised by apartheid, while the praised tolerance of The Netherlands is known worldwide. The analysis of the novels focuses on the influence of tolerance and abjection on the main characters, with the emphasis on the body – not only in terms of physical appearance, but also sexual practises. The study demonstrates that specific spaces, as well as spatial displacement, can be linked directly to tolerance and abjection. In accordance with their spatial migration, the novels show that borders, boundaries and overstepping boundaries are of the utmost importance to the protagonists. Borders that are experienced as limiting and result in rejection and intolerance are often simultaneously a passage to acceptance and tolerance. / MA (Afrikaans en Nederlands), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003. / Bibliography: p. 250-270.

A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naïve mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject’s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic, subjective level. Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristeva’s the “deadmost,” successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger. Moreover, Plath’s psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the “inside” and the “outside” of her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables Plath to develop the unique “Siren Voice of the Other.” In comparison, Sexton, the “dead/less,” evades any confrontation with the maternal and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the dynamism of transgression, Sexton’s work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate transformation and jouissance. Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.

In writing/trauma, I address the association of trauma with knowledge, language, and writing. My discussion first works to establish the relationship between trauma and knowledge. I argue that trauma does not fit into the traditional Enlightenment model of scientific knowledge or the ontological model of what Michele Foucault calls the ‘truth-event.’ Rather, I contend that trauma is unique embodied knowledge, different from that of praxis and normal memory. In general, embodied knowledge is a matter of prenoetic and intentional operations. The body schema and body image maintain a power of plasticity and adjust to new motilities in order to re-establish an equilibrium when disrupted or threatened. In line with this, embodiment involves a sense of temporality, agency, and subjectivity. But in the case of extreme disruption, such as trauma, these fundamental aspects of embodiment are compromised to the point that there is a corruption of the “embodied feeling of being alive.” Physical pain, to some extent, produces this phenomenon. However, the distinctive function of the repetition compulsion within trauma distinguishes it as an exceptional embodied experience unlike physical pain or analogous phenomena. In the case of trauma, an equilibrium is not maintained, similar to the ontology of the accident. Instead, at best, we can say that what takes place is a destructive plasticity, in which the individual is transformed to the point of being a whole new ontological subject. This phenomenon of destructive plasticity is significant in establishing the relationship of language to trauma-knowledge as trauma is the precise point at which language is ruptured. That is to say, purported within psychanalytic discourse, traumatic experience is observed in a break within the symbolic order. As opposed to physical pain, then, trauma is more akin to the abject, sharing the same resistance to narrative language. Traumatic experience is expressed through semiotic compulsions in the body as a revolt of being. In light of this, I argue that trauma, rather than being treated as a pathology, is a specific embodied knowledge which can be captured in semiotic, poetic language. Moreover, fragmentary writing, the interface of fragmented knowledge and language, captures the disruptive force of traumatic experience. In conclusion, I assert that writing-trauma is valuable, not because it allows for a ‘working through’ of the traumatic experience, but because it is an expression of a distinctly human experience. My work canvases nineteenth century to contemporary literature on trauma such as Bessel van der Kolk in the neurobiological discipline, literary critics including Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Dominick LaCapra, et al, and the psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I draw from such literature to analyze the ambiguous impossible-possibility of witnessing and giving testimony of traumatic experience in history and writing, as well as the concern with trauma and language specific to the repetition compulsion and the unconscious. Yet, my primary focus is on the contribution of philosophy to the ongoing discourse of trauma. I look to philosophical thinkers such as Michele Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche to depict the types of epistemological models traditionally addressed within the history of philosophy. My analysis of phenomenology and embodiment is mainly informed by the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Shaun Gallagher. Additionally, Catharine Malabou’s work on destructive plasticity provides an understanding of the ontology of the accident, one of the most critical pieces to my work. Additionally, the works of Elaine Scarry and Julia Kristeva help to disclose the intimate relationship between language and trauma. I also incorporate the work of Gloria Anzalúa along with Julia Kristeva to describe the multi-dimensionality of poetic language and how this is what allows for an articulation of embodied trauma-knowledge. Finally, Maurice Blanchot’s depiction of the disaster and fragmentary writing best captures writing-trauma as it is, like trauma, a process of fragmenting language and meaning. My purpose is to make clear the value of poetic language and fragmentary writing in regard to knowing and writing trauma. The significance to philosophy is that my discussion bridges the phenomenological and epistemological perspectives with that of the literary in order to engage in philosophical discussion on the implications and value of traumatic experience for understanding the human condition. It is my observation that the more we experience trauma, the more valuable artistic expression becomes, and the more we are pressed within the philosophical tradition to account for an experience so many individuals suffer.

No description available.

No description available.