Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Queensland, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

MA, Translation, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 1993

Doct. Th.--Uppsala--Uppsala university, 1995.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The purpose of this essay is to describe and examine differences in social behavior and social interactions in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s people. Specifically, attention will be given to the interim order that occurs after the collapse of the former South African regime and before a new regime has been established. In short, the essay attempts to answer the question how power is redistributed after the black revolution that occurs in the narrative. Antonio Gramsci’s Neo-Marxist theory is used to examine who dominates and who is subordinated among the novel’s main characters.

Thesis (Dip. Lib.)--University of the Witwatersrand.

The aim of this study is to suggest, by selective example, a method of interpreting Gordimer's fiction from a 'post-Apartheid' perspective. My hypothesis is that Gordimer's own comments in her key lecture of 1982, "Living in the Interregnum", reflect not only her practice in the years of struggle politics, but suggest a yearning for a time beyond struggle, when the civil imaginary might again become a major subject. She claims that she has continually felt a tension in her practice as writer between her responsibility to 'national' testimony, her "necessary gesture" to the history of which she was indelibly a part, and her responsibility to the integrity of the individual experience, her "essential gesture" to novelistic truth. In arguing for a modification of what has almost become the standard political evaluation of Gordimer, my study returns the emphasis to a revindicated humanism, a critical approach that, by implication, questions the continuing appropriateness of anti-humanist ideology critique at a time in South Africa that requires reconstitutions of people's lives. The shift in reading for which I argue, in consequence, validates the 'individual' above the 'typical', the 'meditative' above the ideologically-detennined 'statement', 'showing' above 'telling'. I do not wish to deny the value of a previous decade's readings of the novels as conditioned by their specific historical context. The philosophical concept of social psychology and the stylistic accent on neo-thematism employed in this thesis are not meant to separate the personal conviction from the public demand. Rather, I intend to return attention to a contemplative field of human process and choice that, I shall suggest, has remained a constant feature of Gordimer's achievement. My return to the text does not attempt to establish textual autonomy; the act of interpretation acknowledges that meaning changes in different conditions of critical reception. My study is not a comprehensive survey of Gordimer' s oeuvre. It focuses on certain works as illustrative of the overall argument. After an Introduction of general principles, Chapter One focuses on two novels from politically ' overdetermined' times to show that even in the 'years of emergency', Gordimer's commitment to personal lives and destinies had significantly informed her national narratives. Chapter Two turns to two novels from less 'determined' times as further evidence of Gordimer' s abiding interest in the inner landscapes behind social terrains. Having proposed a critical return to the 'ordinary' concerns of the 'civil imaginary', the study concludes by suggesting that the times in the 1990s are ready for a new look at the most intensely lyrical aspects of Gordimer' s art: her short stories. The specific examples culminate, at the end of each chapter, in brief observations as to how the reading strategy might apply to other works in Gordimer's achievement, as well as to an 'interior' as opposed to an 'exterior' accent in South African fiction as a whole. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.

Thesis (Dip. Lib.)--University of the Witwatersrand.

L’essai lie la prétention scientifique du discours de savoir à la dimension ludique de l’écritlittéraire. Dans le contexte colonial, où le savoir est un important enjeu de pouvoir, l’essaipermet aux écrivains colonisés de jouer sur les règles de légitimité du discours et de prendre laparole, devenant un des modes d’expression privilégié de la pensée anticoloniale. Les tensionsentre le champ culturel et académique et le champ politique dans les sociétés décoloniséesréactivent sa vocation à construire un savoir en se situant à la marge des discours établis, àsubvertir l’ordre des discours.Cette analyse du positionnement de l’essayiste postcolonial conduit alors à préciser sadémarche d’écriture. Porté sur l’analyse plutôt que sur la synthèse, celui-ci se défie des théoriesglobalisantes pour leur préférer une description d’un lieu précis qu’il ramifie progressivementau reste du monde. Cette démarche est sous-tendue par une attitude de suspicion et de mise enquestion à l’égard de tout processus de représentation. Le discours théorique impose auxessayistes postcoloniaux de naviguer entre plusieurs contextes et plusieurs cultures sur unmode critique. Ils doivent se livrer à un travail de « double critique » (A. Khatibi) culturelle : illeur faut d’une part réfléchir à l’héritage endogène et à l’héritage européen et d’autre part à lafois remettre en question ce double héritage et poser les bases d’un renouveau culturel à partirde lui. Cette « double critique » nécessite un travail de réécriture qui vise à l’élaboration d’unnouveau savoir. Les essayistes empruntent les discours des sciences sociales, de l’histoire, de laphilosophie et de la science politique et ils les transforment : en mêlant ces discours à un travailde création, leurs textes deviennent des textes littéraires, prenant parfois les voies de la fictionet de la poésie. / The essay binds scientific will to formulate a truth to the shakiness and the playfull dimensionof literary writing. This ambivalence makes it particularly interesting to analyse scholars’relationship to political field. In the colonial context, knowledge is a power issue and the essay,with its literary aspects, allows number of colonized people circumvent rules of scientificlegitimacy: it is one of the essential tools of their speaking. It becomes gradually one of thepreferred modes of expression of anticolonial thinking. Tensions between cultural andacademical field on the one hand and political field on the other hand reactivate its vocation tobe located at the margin of established discourses and to subvert the order of knowledge.Social positioning of the postcolonial essayist in the Caribbean societies, Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries determines his writingprocess. Focused on analysis rather than synthesis, he distrusts global theories and prefers todescribe a specific place and make links with the whole world from this base. Doing this, hechallenges all kind of representation. Theoretical discourses make postcolonial essayistsnavigate between multiple contexts and multiple cultures in a critical mode. They have to use acultural “double critique” (A. Khatibi): they must firstly consider the endogenous heritage andEuropean heritage and secondly both challenge this double heritage and lay the foundations fora cultural revival from him. This “double critique” requires a rewriting of the scientific andliterary heritage in order to create a new knowledge. Postcolonial essayists borrow discoursesof social science, history, philosophy and politics and they change them: they mix thesediscourses to creative work and their texts become literary texts, including sometimes fictionand poetry.

Thesis--Uppsala university, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 209-219.