"The Prism" is a magical-girl-themed fantasy light novel series about four best friends who finally graduated junior high school. Miya, Teresa, Liana, and Destiny are anxious to start their new high school lives (for better or worse) in their rough, monotone, and corrupt urban town of Quaint Village. Their plans are interrupted, however, by the opening of a brand new private school. Then, for the first time ever, all four girls end up in the same program. They're ready to make great memories together and spend much more time with each other. Unbeknownst to them, their new school is nothing like the academically inclined programs they always had. They are no longer students carrying books, homework, and planners, scribbling and speed reading. They become soldiers, traveling subconsciously to another world. Their duty is to help Vita Mundi's Vice Sovereign and her family protect their people from criminals and life-sentence-serving convicts called Umbrans. In only a month, this tight posse goes from being a quartet of normal students in Quaint Village, to lady soldiers fighting and risking themselves for a parallel world. They will train under the mentorship of the Vice Sovereign and her family, steadily growing stronger in body, mind, heart, and spirit as they face harder and more powerful enemies.

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In this study, D.P.S. Monyaise’s Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Zakes Mda’s Black Diamond are analysed in relation to narrative perspectives on female characters. The main aim of this study is to show how cultural narrative perspectives apply in the comparative study in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Black Diamond, to determine how female characters, particularly Diarona in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Tumi in Black Diamond, are portrayed. The argument maintained in this study is that, although Monyaise in his Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka gives his female characters an exceptionally strong voice, the social and literary perspectives in his novel still draw very sturdily on traditional frameworks. Monyaise’s narrative style and his narrative investigation of his main themes are evidently influenced by views informed by a traditional frame within which women occupy a culturally marginalized position. Mda, on the other hand, controversially challenges dominant views and consequent modes of behaviour, while also expanding the boundaries of creative writing. Research on the portrayal of female characters in Batswana literature is still lacking. This study makes a contribution in the sense that it is an explorative investigation from the perspective of postclassical cognitive narratology, which therefore attempts to approach Batswana literature from a fresh theoretical point of view. The intention is also to enrich the field of Batswana literature by adopting a comparative approach. In achieving this aim, this work adopts the following structure. Chapter one provides the aim and focus of the study. Chapter two discusses the theoretical framework and crucial key terms. Chapter three establishes a background with regard to traditional Batswana cultural views on Batswana women, with emphasis on stereotypical perspectives on women identified through the application of theoretical insights with regard to frames and scripts. The analysis of these traditional perspectives is carried out with reference to traditional Batswana women and the following: the work place; family life; legislation and leadership roles; education; religious belief; and traditional marriage. Chapter four is a comparative analysis with specific attention to the portrayal of the main female characters, that is Diarona in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Tumi in Black Diamond, through application of the theoretical and cultural framework constructed in chapter two and three respectively. Chapter five provides concluding remarks. / MA (Setswana), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

In this study, D.P.S. Monyaise’s Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Zakes Mda’s Black Diamond are analysed in relation to narrative perspectives on female characters. The main aim of this study is to show how cultural narrative perspectives apply in the comparative study in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Black Diamond, to determine how female characters, particularly Diarona in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Tumi in Black Diamond, are portrayed. The argument maintained in this study is that, although Monyaise in his Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka gives his female characters an exceptionally strong voice, the social and literary perspectives in his novel still draw very sturdily on traditional frameworks. Monyaise’s narrative style and his narrative investigation of his main themes are evidently influenced by views informed by a traditional frame within which women occupy a culturally marginalized position. Mda, on the other hand, controversially challenges dominant views and consequent modes of behaviour, while also expanding the boundaries of creative writing. Research on the portrayal of female characters in Batswana literature is still lacking. This study makes a contribution in the sense that it is an explorative investigation from the perspective of postclassical cognitive narratology, which therefore attempts to approach Batswana literature from a fresh theoretical point of view. The intention is also to enrich the field of Batswana literature by adopting a comparative approach. In achieving this aim, this work adopts the following structure. Chapter one provides the aim and focus of the study. Chapter two discusses the theoretical framework and crucial key terms. Chapter three establishes a background with regard to traditional Batswana cultural views on Batswana women, with emphasis on stereotypical perspectives on women identified through the application of theoretical insights with regard to frames and scripts. The analysis of these traditional perspectives is carried out with reference to traditional Batswana women and the following: the work place; family life; legislation and leadership roles; education; religious belief; and traditional marriage. Chapter four is a comparative analysis with specific attention to the portrayal of the main female characters, that is Diarona in Ngaka, Mosadi Mooka and Tumi in Black Diamond, through application of the theoretical and cultural framework constructed in chapter two and three respectively. Chapter five provides concluding remarks. / MA (Setswana), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

This thesis examines representations of sensation within modernist novels alongside contemporary philosophical debates over the concept of qualia. Concentrating on the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett, it confronts a longstanding critical tradition that has tended to obscure or misunderstand the implications of arguments made by philosophers of mind in relation to literary descriptions of sensation. That the mind is a thing, and that modernist narrative fiction is particularly successful at representing that thing, has become a critical commonplace. In this thesis I argue that interpretations of modernism’s supposed ‘inward turn’ are founded on a mistaken notion of ‘cognitive realism’, a critical position endorsing the idea that it is both possible and desirable to describe the mind (conceived of as a stable and unchanging object) without loss through the development and judicial deployment of new literary techniques. The myth of the inward turn in its various incarnations – the psychologised modernism described by many literary critics in the 50s and 60s, and the neuromodernism subscribed to by many contemporary critics – is, I argue, largely the result of a set of inter-linked misconceptions which attend the cognitive realist paradigm. The notion of qualia is central to my thesis. Defined as the ineffable, irreducible, and subjective properties of conscious experience, qualia emerge concomitantly with modernism, developing out of G. E. Moore’s definition of ‘sense-data’ and Bertrand Russell’s category of ‘sensibilia’. Though still disputed within contemporary philosophy, qualia create huge problems for materialist theories of consciousness, threatening to undermine critical approaches to literature which contend that formal literary strategies can ever hope to transcend the limitations of symbolic language in conveying sensation. The ‘problem’ of qualia referred to in this thesis, therefore, is the problem the concept poses for symbolic descriptions (either mathematic, psychological, or literary) of mental states, especially when those descriptions make special claims (or are interpreted as making special claims) of mimetic veracity. The problem emerged within philosophy at precisely the point at which the representative claims of literature came under direct attack. This thesis argues, therefore, that it is a profoundly literary problem, and that the absence of ‘sensation’ from the written is simply a manifestation of the inherent limitations of language. A critical tendency to re-insert sensory experience into the process of reading – through phenomenological interpretations of modernism, or in contemporary ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literature – thus point to a general anxiety that manifests itself most forcefully in relation to modernist fiction’s ability to ‘write’ sensation. This thesis employs the concept of qualia as a way of contextualising narratives of the mind – philosophical, literary and scientific – from the period. In doing so it seeks to historicise modernism’s ‘crisis of the senses’; locating this argument in a broader theoretical space and questioning the relevance (and novelty) of contemporary approaches to reading the senses in modernism.

This project relates the theme of material consumption in novels of the long eighteenth century to the development of the novel genre. Functioning as more than just a reflection of societal concerns, novels shape perceptions of consumption, which in turn inform our understanding of the novel’s development. These perceptions are informed and complicated by a variety of issues presented in eighteenth-century novels including form, nation and national identity, sexuality, labour, commerce, credit and debt, and, in particular, gender. Chapter one looks at Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and the use of consumption imagery and metaphors as a way of playing with form and genre adaptation; the novel’s awareness of its own status as consumable commodity relates to the metaphoric and physical consumption within the novel’s plot, establishing a relationship between the problematic generic status of Tom Jones and the theme of physical consumption. Through Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, chapter two examines eighteenth-century concerns regarding women’s consumption through the largely neglected figure of Tabitha Bramble and her reclamation of the corrupting influence of the foreign through her marriage to Lismahago. More than just a critique of the effects of foreign luxury on British society, I argue that Humphry Clinker makes room for the produce of empire through the union of Tabitha and Lismahago. Chapter three analyses Frances Burney’s novel Camilla in relation to its treatment of the commodifying effects of commerce, particularly shopping; drawing parallels between the experience of shopping in the eighteenth century and the marriage market, specifically as relates to the male gaze, the chapter argues that there is a connection between the novel as commodity, created by Burney in order to create profit, and the commodification of Camilla through the male gaze. Chapter four discusses the ways in which Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee utilise Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as a roadmap for Irish economic and social development but argues that this is problematised through the absence of politics in Smith, which inadvertently complicates Edgeworth’s message of economic

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life. The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: To write a life story the auto/biographer must reflect upon the past that was once experienced. When presented with this task of depending on memory and narrative, the auto/biographer often finds himself/herself in the position of creating and imagining, rather than reflecting or presenting the past as it was lived. Fragmentation, forgetfulness, selection, (re)construction and imagination are often inextricably connected to Memory which results in the reliance on an unstable memory to access the past. This dissertation explores how postmodern auto/biographies, specifically the (auto/bio)graphic novel, acknowledges the difficulty of writing about the past when concerned with truth. The (auto/bio)graphic novel disrupts the notion of truth by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, resulting in a hybrid form where text and image, reality and imagination co-exist to create new, and often more significant pasts (that can serve the present). / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Om ‘n lewensverhaal te skryf, reflekteer die outo/biograaf op dít wat eens geleef was in die verlede. Deur hierdie proses, wat ‘n afhanklikheid van die geheue behels, vind die outo/biograaf homself/haarself gereeld in ‘n situasie waar hy/sy ontwerp en verbeel, eerder as om die verlede weer te gee soos dit beleef was. Fragmentasie, vergeetagtigheid, selektering, (her)konstruering en verbeelding is soms onskeibaar van Geheue wat dui op die afhanklikheid van ‘n onstabiele geheue in die skryf- en illustreer-prosesse van ‘n outo/biografie. Hierdie verhandeling ondersoek hoe postmoderne outo/biografieë, spesifiek die (outo/bio)grafiese roman, bewus is van die kwessies rondom die skryf van die verlede in verhouding tot waarheid. Die (outo/bio)grafiese roman ontwrig die idee van waarheid deur die grense tussen feit en fiksie te ondermyn. Gevolglik onstaan ‘n hibriede vorm van outo/biografie waar teks en beeld, realiteit en verbeelding gekombineer word om nuwe en meer beduidende verledes te skep (wat so ook die hede op nuwe maniere kan dien). / mlb2013

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to clarify and analyze alienation, as a social phenomenon described in two teenage books. The study will also examine the creation of sympathy towards main characters and what impact the novel as a whole could have on it. The intention is also to uncover the role of the Other, as well as to visualize the creation of distance between different ethnic groups. Method: The study is based on a qualitative text-analysis. It includes four different dimensions, including the author’s background and the researcher´s interpretation. Conclusion: The study demonstrates that it´s possible to find values in both of the novels, and therefore makes it possible to create opinions and statements that may contribute to alienation. It also demonstrates that alienation can appear in different forms based on the characters different background. Question formulation: What attitudes and values towards immigration, ethnicity and alienation can be found in the two novels? How are they conveyed in the two novels? What differences and similarities could be found in the characters' ethnic alienation?