published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die depicts the lives of rural African women who lived under apartheid rule in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The dissertation examines Ngcobo’s representation of African women’s participation and their agency in the resistance struggles against colonialism, settler colonialism (apartheid), racial supremacy, African patriarchy, and literary and the dominant language systems. The primary method of analysis involves an examination of the novel which is located in the political context of the resistance struggles, the social context of patriarchy and the theoretical context of postcolonial African feminist criticism. By drawing on a range of feminist theories, the dissertation examines the specificity of African women’s lives in terms of race, class and gender roles. The dissertation will also examine the different strategies that women have used to survive and to resist race, class and gender oppressions. Ngcobo’s novel provides an apposite framework to explore women’s experiences of subordination and how they challenged and even overcame the political and social forces that worked against them. Women’s agency in the liberation struggle has been largely ignored and undocumented in literary and even in many feminist projects, which leaves an under-researched gap in African literary studies. The dissertation examines Ngcobo’s work as a literary activist articulating the challenges of representation and voice. Representation is understood to mean speaking or acting for oneself and/or others, while voice is the capacity to speak. It is the key issue reflecting empowerment and agency. These concepts form the basis for analysis and the construction of arguments. It is used to examine the challenges faced by women who have been marginalized in literary discourse, as women and writers. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

The portrayal of the middle eastern woman in Le voyage en Orient of Nerval and Les notes de voyage en Orient of Flaubert is the written representation of a personal experience. The transposition of observations to literary images is subject to cultural and personal constraints that the present thesis aims at deciphering and analysing. / We have entitled Informational intent the first section of our research, in which we have discovered that intelligible descriptions tend to the fragmentation and the categorization of the middle eastern woman. This approach has led us to find that the authors' perceptions are often limited to appearances. Moreover, our literary analysis have confirmed that the representations follow the laws and patterns established by centuries of oriental studies. / The second section, entitled The narrative organization shows that the episodes where women are involved have been organized into quasi-autonomous narrative entities reflecting the rhythm of the travel. On the other hand, the autobiographical expression serves as a unifying element. / In the last section, The woman as part of a global interpretation of the Middle East, we have realized that her representations are influenced by the attitudes and cultural context of the time as well as the specific poetic world of the authors.

This study explores how we may read silence in dramatic works as a rhetorical strategy. Silence is usually equated with absence, oppression, or passivity. Speech is usually equated with presence, expression, and action. While silence can be imposed to prevent articulation, my study suggests that we re-read women's discourse, including their use of silence, as an empowering tool. By examining silence as strategic we allow for individual agency. Part One of the thesis demonstrates how the rhetoric of silence functions as a tool to communicate, persuade, and generate knowledge for women protagonists. The study of silence on the stage explores how choosing to employ a non-verbal form of communication challenges the logocentric tendency that privileges assertation and speech over silence. For this reason, Shakespeare's Cordelia serves as the paradigmatic silent rhetor. Cordelia demonstrates how silence, employed by choice, affirms authenticity. In Part Two, twentieth-century interpretations of female protagonists---Salome, Antigone and Philomele---are examined to show how we may read them as strategic rhetors who employ silence in order to recreate themselves as agents.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Feb. 22, 2008). PDF text: 218 p. ; 464 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3275067. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis--Princeton University. / Issued also in microfilm form. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Allahabad University. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [1]-5 (last group)).

Autho's Thesis (doctoral)--Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-309).

Thesis (M. English and Comparative Literature)--Murdoch University, 2009. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Education. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-55)