This project surveys representations of the African city in contemporary Nigerian and South African narratives by focusing on how they employ Gothic techniques as a means of drawing the African urban landscape into being. The texts that comprise my objects of study are South African author Henrietta Rose-Innes's Nineveh (2011), which takes as its setting contemporary Cape Town; Lagoon (2014) by American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, who sets her tale in present-day Lagos; and Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, another South African author who locates her narrative in a near-future version of Johannesburg. I find that these fictions are bound by a shared investment in mobilising the apparatus of the Gothic genre to provide readers with a unique imagining of contemporary African urbanity. I argue that the Gothic urbanism which these texts unfold enables the ascendance of generative, anti-dualist modes of reading the contemporary African city that are simultaneously real and imagined, old and new, global and local, dark and light - modes that perform as much a discourse of the past as a dialogue on the future. The study concludes by making some reflections on the future-visions that these Gothic urban-texts elicit, imaginings that I argue engender useful reflection on the relationship between culture and environment, and thus prompt the contemporary reader to consider the global future - and, as such, situate Africa at the forefront of planetary discourse. I suggest that Nineveh, Lagoon and Zoo City produce not simply a Gothic envisioning of Africa's metropolitan centres, but also a budding Gothic aesthetic of the African Anthropocene. In contrast to the 1980's tradition of Gothic writing in Africa, these novels are opening up into the twenty-first century to reflect on the future of the African city - but also on the futures that lie beyond the urban, beyond culture, beyond the human.

Bibliography: pages 153-158. / Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855) and D. F. Malherbe's Hans-die-Skipper (1929) can both be read as reactions to early industrial capitalism, although neither text refers directly to this phenomenon. This dissertation attempts to show that both novels display a similar, ambivalent attitude, whilst defending the "logic of the market" against proponents of the moribund semi-feudal system, they pre-empt the moral indifference of the market by positing a "new" value in absolute terms. In either case, this value is "industry", in both the economical and the moral sense of the term. This aspect of both texts is analysed in terms of the literary theory of Peter V. Zima. On closer inspection, it is found that both authors attribute the moral value of "industry" exclusively to one social group, namely the group whose interests they hope to advance. In Freytag' s case, this is the conservative, pre-industrial German bourgeoisie; in Malherbe's case, the impoverished, Afrikaans-speaking rural population of the early 20th century. However, in translating their "ideological projects" into a literary "figuration" (in the sense of Pierre Macherey), both authors encounter certain problems, which only appear in the "absences" and the "silences" of their texts. These are analyzed in terms of the literary theory of Pierre Macherey. Finally, in both texts, the moral value of "industry", and the social hierarchy established in its name, are subliminally or temporarily threatened by the "pleasure principle". This aspect is analyzed- in terms of Klaus Theweleit's findings gained from "pre-fascist" texts of the early 20th century.

In this thesis, I attempt to show how the concept of reading as literary interpretation has been influenced by the insights of the psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Broadly speaking, I call for a revised view of the role of the reader and the act of reading in the light of arguments such as the following: firstly, that the linguistic subject is "split" rather than "autonomous"; secondly, that since language is a representational rather than transparent medium, "truth" can only ever be regarded as partial and irreducibly open to revision; and thirdly, that reading as an interpretive activity arises from the unconscious Desire to resolve the sense of incompleteness which language acquisition produces in the linguistic subject. Following the lead of various interpreters of Lacan's theory and psychoanalytic procedure, I offer an introductory outline of his thought and its relevance to literary theory and criticism. Then in the four chapters which follow, I attempt to demonstrate this relevance through readings of a selection of novels. In the first chapter, I come to the conclusion that reading should be viewed less as a quest after "the truth" of the text, than a quest to discover what "the truth" must disregard in order to be "the truth." In the second chapter, I conclude that narration is an effect of reading, that the relationship of the narrator and the reader is therefore supplementary, and that the notion of literary "truth" is established by consensus. In the third chapter, I conclude that the attempt to satisfy Desire by an attainment of a "full disclosure" of "truth" or "meaning" must result in a loss of meaning per se. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I attempt to synthesize the conclusions of the earlier chapters in the argument that the reader is potentially both the unveiler of the authorial unconscious and the unwitting performer of the conflict of meaning dramatized in the discourse of narrative.

Includes bibliographical references. / The so-called 'hard-boiled' detective story is probably one of the most successful formulaic fictive patterns to be developed this century; and has been translated very effectively into popular film and television drama. Its founding fathers are normally deemed to be Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. A study of their works should provide a valuable insight into the structure of their patterns and how they are made to work to the public's satisfaction. After all, the one indisputable and verifiable matter in the whole business is that these sort of texts appeal to great numbers of people who read them because they enjoy reading them. Some of the interesting questions thus revolve around the issue of why these fictions are so well liked. However, a study of literary formulas assumes the necessity of demonstrating what those particular formulas are. There are three predominating structures which, to my mind, build this kind of fiction into its finished shape. Firstly, there are the comfort factors which offer the reader a sense of security. Secondly, there is their sense of moral fantasy which allows the reader to escape from the confines of their everyday lives. And thirdly, in the best of these works, there is some element of the new and/or the unconventional, often in the form of social and political criticism encapsulated within the safe formulas of the text. This adds the necessary spice to the life of the construct.

This thesis explores various aspects of contemporary American drama by women. The study is facilitated by examining one work by each of seven playwrights and two performance artists who have transcribed their work, namely, Miriam's Flowers by Migdalia Cruz, Abundance by Beth Henley, Bitter Cane by Genny Lim, Traveler in the Dark by Marsha Norman, The Death of the Last BlackMan in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks, spell # 7 by Ntozake Shange, The Sisters Rosensweig by Wendy Wasserstein, The Constant State of Desire by Karen Finley, and World Without End by Holly Hughes. The works chosen, first performed between 1976 (spell #7) and 1992 (The Sisters Rosensweig), include an array of the vast variety of work being done in contemporary theatre. All of the writers are still living and actively working and were selected to provide a sampling of women from the various subcultures in the United States. Neither the works nor the writers are meant to be inclusive or representational of the diversity of American theatre. The thesis briefly discusses each work and then considers several breaches within the American feminist movement and how the plays reflect the issues of each conflict. The areas of contention within the feminist movement that are considered are: the strengths and shortcomings of liberal feminism, the most visible face of contemporary American feminism; whether pornography or its censorship is ultimately more harmful to women; how a binary division of gender, which can be understood as fundamental to the concept of feminism, is simultaneously oppressive; should feminists as a whole and within various racial, religious, and sexual subgroups attempt to find common ground or embrace the diversity of difference; how does the contemporary political rhetoric of family fit into a feminist vision; can there be a feminist style or is the search for one inherently essentialist; and, finally, how to account for the failure of the movement evident in the success of women who appear to imitate the work of male writers. The thesis concludes that feminist playwrights and their work, like the feminist movement itself must negotiate between efficacious unity and inclusive diversity. Similarly, plays that seek to alter the status quo must walk a fine line between transgression and commercial appeal. Each of the women considered navigates these paths differently, with diverse styles and goals.

In this essay I examine the political implications of the shifts in definition of the term, "magic realism". Magic realism as it was originally employed in the Latin-American context signified a concept different to what it is currently held to suggest in metropolitan literary discourse. Magic realism in the first world has come to be regarded as a third world reflection of its own cultural dominant, postmodernism, without an acknowledgement of the alternative material realities which inform it. I investigate these ideas through an analysis of the work of two novelists, namely, the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the American, John Barth. In a well-known essay titled "The Literature of Replenishment", Barth names Garcia Marquez as the foremost postmodern writer. This is deceptive, I argue, since although in the essay Barth presents postmodernist fiction as a political advance on the earlier styles of realism and modernism, his own fictional practice contradicts his claim. While in the essay Barth presents postmodernism as politically significant by virtue of its "democratic impulse", his novel, Chimera, seeks to avoid the political through a flawed understanding of textuality. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude stands in stark contrast with Chimera since it underscores the political consideration central to discourse through stressing the text's material, historical context. This distinction between the two novels is brought to light particularly through the incremental differences in their use of the techniques of "narrative circularity" and repetition. I argue, furthermore, that Garcia Marquez's emphasis on language as a material practice is, at least in part, owing to the specifics of the style of magic realism. While postmodernist fiction, one of the cultural effects of an advanced capitalism, may slide ineluctably into notions of pure textuality, magic realism, constituted as it is at the interface of pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, compels an acknowledgement of the material world.

Bibliography: leaves 72-75. / Through a selection of material written by Italians in South Africa, this study aims to discuss the difficulties and challenges faced by Italian emigrant writers in representing their identity. The study places itself in the context of other studies in the field of i/emigrant, minority and ethnic studies in as much as the body of work, similarly to i/emigrant texts written in other parts of the world, has been to date considered of marginal significance or has not been examined at all. This study instead considers the opportunities of analysis that texts such as these represent and offers motivations for the need to engage with them. To analyse these texts offers the possibility to observe the relative status of the reader/critic and also to be open to the process of identity creation which does not exist in a vacuum but rather through the exchange and relations held between people of different linguistic, socio-political, historical and cultural backgrounds. With specific regard to material written by Italians in South Africa, an area in which research has up to now been fairly limited, it is argued that the tendency is for writers to emphasise a nationalistic and patriotic definition of Italian identity. This is in part as a result of the pressure emigrants face when confronted by their new cultural, linguistic and geographic setting. The tendency towards patriotic and nationalistic sentiment has also been encouraged during specific moments of Italy's history, and that is, the years leading up to Italy's unification and declaration of its nationhood status (the Risorgimento) and during fascism. The texts analysed are a letter (dated 1833) of a settler to the Cape, one Rocco Catoggio; the war time diary (published in a literary and political Italian newspaper in 1901) by a certain Camillo Ricchiardi, a volunteer and Boer sympathiser during the South African War (1889 - 1902); newspaper articles published by Italian Prisoners of War in the Zonderwater Camp during the Second World War and the biography and chronology by Adolfo G. Bini on the history of Italians in South Africa.

Bibliography: pages 124-132. / This study explores the symptoms of alienation witnessed in Indian characters and the healing they achieve through myth in three contemporary American Indian novels. In James Welch's historical novel, Fools Crow, I explore the methods through which Welch tells the story of Fools Crow. I draw comparisons between oppositions such as oral and written language, oral and written history, and history and narrative. I examine the ideas of many theorists, including Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy and Hayden White's inquiry into historiography in Tropics of DiscouT'Se. My conclusions suggest that myth is the foundation of history and that Welch effectively uses myth to rehabilitate Fools Crow. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony presents its main character, Tayo, as alienated. He operates in a confusing world of dualities whereby the hegemonic culture brutalizes a feminine universe, and the counter-culture embraces a feminine universe. This study of Ceremony necessitates exploring the differences between Indian and Euro-American perceptions of landscape. Greta Gaard's studies on ecofeminism and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality help to focus the theories v presented in this chapter. In addition, I consider the opposition between European patriarchal and American Indian matriarchal cultures, a difference that may affect the way the two cultures perceive the landscape. Finally I look at the Laguna captivity narrative that heals Tayo and compare the Laguna captivity genre to Euro-American captivity tales. The juxtaposition of cultural captivity narrative types reveals further differences in Laguna and Euro-American perceptions of the land. Annette Kolodny's theories on landscape and feminism prove useful in focusing my conclusions. N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child explores the parameters of representation and struggles with the question of how an Indian author can effectively describe the condition of an alienated American Indian to an audience who is, for the most part, Euro-American. This novel ties together many of the themes explored in Fools Crow and Ceremony. Momaday shows myth as originating in oral language and oral language as invented by vision: The story's main character, Set, has to overcome his alienation by understanding the origin of a myth which exists in his 'racial memory.' As an Indian, Set must discover the importance of non-textual spatiality and not the spaces contained within and influenced by written texts such as the very one Momaday creates to depict this character. The term non-textual spatiality refers to the imaginative space created by oral language and myth and the notion of non-textual spatiality opens a path for Set's healing. W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory and Nelson Goodman's Languages of A rt are the main critical studies I use to amplify theories that grow out of The Ancient Child.

Bibliography: leaves 103-108. / Were the social activity that most defines late capitalism to be named consumption would be nominated as the predominant leisure pastime of the current period. Since the well-being of a society is measured along material co-ordinates, high rates of consumption are taken as signs of an overall prosperity wherein individuals are not only economically empowered but also endowed with the putative right to express their multifarious subjectivities. Yet the reality of consumption despite consolidated efforts to assert the contrary effects a far more degraded picture than the phantasmagorical one that is widely propagated. Often treated as a neutral sphere isolated from a productionist context, consumption is a spectacle which is reflective of but hides a subterranean structure of capital accumulation. This dissertation will consequently address the manner in which capitalism has shaped the arena of consumption exemplified through the changes undergone by the commodity and argue that consumption is best understood within a framework of the political economy.

Bibliography: pages 112-114. / In the following dissertation, I have undertaken to explore the very wide-ranging yet largely unexplored territory of Irish cinema. I have confined my study to the 1990s (other than a brief overview of the Irish film industry in my Introduction) in an attempt to express the revolutionary global success that all aspects of Irish culture have experienced in this decade. The central point, which I reiterate throughout the dissertation, is that, while Irish filmmakers are increasingly concerned with defining "Irishness" for themselves and the world, they inevitably encounter much confusion and ambivalence, and are often criticised for it. For this reason, I have uncovered many ambiguities in the films I have watched, which defy strict categorisation, other than in terms of their settings, which I describe in terms of "war-torn Belfast", modern Dublin and "the rural idyll". Nonetheless, I have divided the essay into three main sections, other than the Introduction and Conclusion, which themselves contain subsections, and which encompass the major themes which recur in Irish films. Section Two is a broad study of those films which deal with the political violence, known as the Troubles, that defines Northern Ireland. This includes a stereotyped American portrayals as well as a more recent IRA bias, beginning with Neil Jordan's attempt to put a new version of history on film in Michael Collins. The conclusion I come to is that filmmakers are ultimately trying to provide a balanced view of the situation and one that condemns violence. Section Three deals with the intertwined themes of women, family, sexuality and the Catholic Church. The traditional conservatism in Ireland is outlined before I show how recent films reflect the changes in moral attitudes and the new freedoms of sexuality that the younger generation is experiencing. Lastly I look at the special situation of women in the North, where they and their families are the long-suffering victims of the violence. Section Four continues the theme of the changes which are sweeping over "Modern Ireland", largely due to its opening-up to outside influences, particularly those of America. The dichotomies of this newly-modernised society are still evident, as I discuss in the section on the historical importance of land, which is expressed not only in the "rural idyll" films, but in those which deal with the move to the urban lure and squalor of Dublin. Finally I look at how the traditional and mythical still exist in modern Ireland, and how the combination of these aspects of the past and present is shown to suggest a positive way into the future.