Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/11159 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Holtzhausen, Janita |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | application/pdf |
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