Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 27, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

My thesis is concerned with Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), the Frankfurt School theorist, and the implications of his philosophy for literary studies. I show that Adorno's thought may offer a valid contribution to the analysis of literary texts, even texts with which he is not historically associated. More specifically, I link Adorno with texts that emerge out of situations of political extremity but are not necessarily understood as "political" protest literature. Drawing on a variety of Adorno's texts, I assert that key concepts within Adorno's thought - truth content, immanence, the non-identical - allow us a way of understanding literary texts that appear apolitical, but in fact are speaking to the social and material relations of their specific (political) context. Adorno's exposition on the interface between the artwork and history usefully engages authors that problematise or dismantle our traditional conception of what constitutes the "political" - overt manifest content that aligns itself with a particular ideological position. I have chosen three twentieth-century authors (J.M. Coetzee; Margarita Karapanou; Michael Ondaatje) whose literature bear the burden of political extremity (respectively, South African apartheid, the 1970s Greek military junta, and the Sri Lankan civil war), and is at loggerheads with the literature of political commitment emerging from each of those situations. Each of these authors asserts his or her aesthetic autonomy over prescriptive understandings of literature as a vehicle actively espousing a particular nationalist, political, ideological or even aesthetically formalist position. The work of these authors, I argue, embodies an alternative Adornian version of engaged literature. In short, my thesis operates as a two way conversation asking: "What can Adorno's concepts give to certain literary texts?", and reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our traditional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This thesis is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the 'restorying‘ of British settler colonialism in a range of texts that negotiate the intricacies of post-settler afterlives in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In this, I do not undertake a sustained, programmatic comparative reading in order to deliver a set of answers based on insights achieved into the current state of post-settler colonial identities. Rather, I approach the study as an open-ended exploration by reading a combination of texts of various kinds – novels, poetry, drama, films and installation art – from and about these different geographical and historical contexts, structured as a sequence of four chapters, each with a distinct theoretical ensemble specific to the (pre)occupations of the settler colonial past and the linked senses of (dis)location in the present that emerge from the primary texts combined in each case. Since this project is informed by my location as a South African researcher, the cluster of primary texts in every chapter always includes one or more South African texts as pivotal to the juxtapositional dynamics such a reading attempts. By placing this study of the textual afterlives of settler colonialism undertaken from a South African perspective within the ambit of neo-Victorian studies, it is my intention to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work emerging from this interdisciplinary field and to introduce to it a set of primary texts that will extend the parameters of its productive intersections with colonial and postcolonial studies. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis bestudeer die 'restorying' van Britse setlaar-kolonialisme in ‘n groep tekste wat die verwikkeldheid van post-setlaar 'afterlives' in the post-koloniale kontekste van Suid Afrika, Kanada, Australië en Aotearoa Nieu-Seeland vervat. Hiermee onderneem ek nie ‘n volgehoue, programmatiese vergelykende interpretasie met die oog daarop om die huidige stand van post-setlaar koloniale identiteite tot ‘n stel antwoorde te reduseer nie. Ek benader die studie eerder as ‘n verkenning van moontlikhede gegenereer deur die lees van ‘n kombinasie van verskillende tekste – romans, gedigte, drama, films en installasie kuns – wat hulle oorsprong in hierdie verkillende geografiese en historiese kontekste het, asook daaroor handel. Gevolglik bestaan die studie uit vier hoofstukke wat elkeen die (pre)okkupasies van die setlaar-koloniale verlede en die gepaardgaande gevoel van (dis)lokasie in die hede, soos tevoorskyn gebring deur die kombinasie van primere tekste, aan die hand van ‘n toepaslike teoretiese ensemble bespreek. Aangesien die projek uit my posisie as Suid Afrikaanse navorser spruit, en ‘n jukstaposisionele dinamiek grondliggend aan my leesbenadering is, betrek ek telkens een of meer Suid Afrikaanse tekste by die groep primere tekste wat die basis van elke hoofstuk vorm. Deur hierdie studie van die tekstuele 'afterlives' van setlaar-kolonialisme, wat vanuit ‘n Suid Afrikaanse perspektief onderneem word, binne die raamwerk van neo-Viktoriaanse studies te plaas, beoog ek om by te dra tot die korpus van kritiese en teoretiese werk van hierdie interdisiplinere veld. Deur die toevoeging van die betrokke groep primere tekste word die area waar hierdie veld met koloniale en post-koloniale studies oorvleuel verbreed.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Translation Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 2015 / This study presents an argument for considering the works of Nuruddin Farah translated into Italian as core texts in the body of postcolonial Italian literature. The study focusses on Farah’s first two trilogies: Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun. It is shown in this study that the translated versions of the novels making up these two trilogies, the former in particular, provide rare and unique narrative content capable of directly challenging the myths and misconceptions that have come to characterise the memory of the Italian colonial period. These works are read contrapuntally against historical narrative tropes that were used to represent Africa and Africans in Italian colonial literature. Farah’s work is also compared with the writing of contemporary writers of African descent whose work is at the forefront of interest in postcolonial studies in Italy. This study shows how Farah’s work complements and enhances this emerging literary tradition. It is then shown that, despite this obvious potential, the status of Farah’s work in the Italian literary system has been limited by an unwelcoming publishing climate for African literature in Italy. The study then provides an analysis of the translations themselves focussing on three texts: Maps, Gifts and Sweet and Sour Milk. This analysis takes the form of a descriptive comparative analysis aimed at establishing the extent to which the three different Italian translators of these texts handled the translation of stylistic features of the texts which signal their postcoloniality and their heritage of Somali oral poetry. It is concluded that, in the main, the translations are somewhat domesticated which has certain negative consequences in terms of their ability as texts to speak on behalf of the colonized people they represent. It is however noted that one text exhibits a greater tendency towards foreignization. By no means coincidentally, this text was produced by a translator with theoretical and practical experience in the field of postcolonial literature. The study concludes by conceiving of the trajectory of Nuruddin Farah’s work through the Italian literary system as a narrative of violence, resistance and retribution on either side of the colonial divide.

This dissertation is intended primarily as a contribution to postcolonial criticism and theory and the rhetorical analysis of epidemic writing as they undergo various crises and sublimations in the geopolitical landscape that has come into focus since the multilateral undertaking of the War on Terror in 2001. I begin with a set of questions about representation: when, how, and why are extra-legal, insurgent, anti-colonial, and terrorist forms of violence figured as epidemics in literature and connected discursive forms? What events in colonial history and scientific practice make such representations possible? And how do these representational patterns and their corollary modes of interpretation both reflect and transform discourse and policy? Although the figure is ubiquitous, it is far from simple. I argue that the discourse of the late colonial era is crucial to an understanding of how epidemiological science arises and converges with colonial management technologies, binding the British response to the 1857 mutiny and a growing Indian nationalism to the development of surveillance and quarantine programs to eradicate the threat of the great nineteenth century epidemic, the so-called Indian or Asiatic cholera. Through a constellation of readings of key texts in the British and French colonial and postcolonial traditions, including selected works of Bram Stoker (Dracula, "The Invisible Giant"), Albert Camus (La Peste, Chronique Algérienne) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Joseph Anton), I demonstrate how epidemics have played a complex representational role in relationship to violence, enabling us to imagine specific kinds of actors as absolute, powerful enemies of biological and social life, while also recoding violent political action as an organic affliction in order to efface or suppress the possibility of agency. There are two crucial aspects of this story that run throughout the histories and texts I engage with in this project. The first is that the figure of insurgent violence as epidemic has two opposing, yet interrelated faces. One looks to the promise of scientism, data collection and rational study as a means of eradicating the threat of irregular warfare. This is the function of the figure embedded in the practices and progress of epidemiology. On the other hand, the mythopoetics of infectious disease also point toward the occult and the unknowable, and code natural forces of destruction as sublime and inevitable. This is the function of the figure embedded the literary and political history of the term terror, which encompasses both natural and political events and the structures of feeling to which they give rise. The result of this duality is the persistent epistemic collapse of data-driven rational scientism and irrational sublimity in texts where epidemic and terror are at issue. The second crucial aspect of this story is that the dissolution of a colonial world system changes the shape of thinking about both epidemics and violence by displacing a binary architecture of antinomy in both public health and politics. The broadened view of epidemic since the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, has moved us away from metaphors of bellicosity to a more multi-factorial view of bacteriology and virology in temporal, geographic, and demographic space. One of the main goals of this project is to examine the relationship between these shifting epistemologies, narrative form, and imperial strategy. A connected through-line in the dissertation attempts to map what becomes of the biologistic and organicist conception of the state--which are already a matter of representation and imagination--as the very notions of biotoic life and the purview of the organism undergo no less radical redefinitions than the concept of the nation itself, providing the conceptual underpinnings for a subsequent biomorphic conception of the globe.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-192).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-192).

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study examines the relationship between father and son in the novel Indische duinen (1994, 2002) by Adriaan van Dis within the context of post-war and postcolonial Dutch society. It relates the process by which an adult son, 36 years after the death of his father, comes to terms with the memory of a man whom he has always seen as unreasonably strict, violent and even cruel. During this process the son discovers the effects of colonialism, war, the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (subsequently Indonesia) and the process of rapid decolonisation and repatriation to the Netherlands upon his father. For the father the latter experiences amount to what Kaja Silverman (1992: 55) refers to as "historical trauma". The experiences that shaped his father and influenced his behaviour towards his son are linked to what Paul Ricoeur (1992: 121) would refer to as the father's "narrative identity" and his sense of masculinity (Cormell, 1995: 77 - 81) which have both been marginalised within the "dominant fiction" (Silverman, 1992: 54) of the postcolonial society in which he has been forced to live. As the son discovers the father through a process of retelling both his father's story and the story of their relationship he is able to gain sense of understanding and closure. Regarding issues of race and gender in Dutch colonialism and the trauma of postcolonial alienation this study draws upon the insights of E.M. Beekman (1988 and 1998), Frances Gouda (1998), Elsbeth Locher-SchoIten (1995), Rob Nieuwenhuys (1982), Edy Seriese (1995), Ann Laura Stoler (1992, 1995 and 1997) and Peter van Zonneveld (1995, 2002 and 2003). / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.