- Title
- “Something past provoked by something to come”: the dystopian complex in selected texts by Lauren Beukes
- Creator
- Forrest, Catherine
- ThesisAdvisor
- Dass, Minesh
- Subject
- Beukes, Lauren -- Moxyland
- Subject
- Beukes, Lauren -- Zoo City
- Subject
- Dystopias in literature
- Subject
- Science fiction -- History and criticism
- Subject
- South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/18604
- Identifier
- vital:22360
- Description
- This thesis examines Lauren Beukes’s novels, Moxyland and Zoo City, in relation to spectral theory, a tool of critique which enables an inspection of the author’s fictional societies, by looking at the return of that which has previously been repressed. It will be argued that, by portraying the country’s future imaginaries in a dystopian light, Beukes predicts the dissatisfaction that continues to be felt in the urbanised present as having extended into the near-future. Such discontent results not solely from the country’s history of apartheid and the poverty-stricken period of recovery that has followed, but in the lack of agency found in the future subject. The concerns of this thesis lie with the programmed conditions placed on the societies depicted in Beukes’s novels and the citizens that are made to inhabit these predetermined spaces. Arising from these fixed conditions are spectral subjectivities, protagonists who, having been denied recognition by the hegemonic powers at hand, are made inherently aware of the discourse of othering imposed upon them. Constructed from the writings of Jacques Derrida and contemporary spectral theorists, I present a framework capable of dealing with the popularity of ghosts/spectres, and the propensity for haunting, within post-transitional literature. Spectrality, then, is understood as a conceptual metaphor and a mode of characterisation that Beukes employs in her writing to highlight various inconsistencies about the spectralised subject and the future. By working with a theory capable of blurring the divide between the living and the dead, the self and other, it is possible to read Beukes’s fiction as possessing the potential to destabilise supposedly secure positions on otherness and alterity. Furthermore, it will be argued that, by tracking the spectre’s capacity to haunt and the multiplicity of responses which it invokes, it is possible to conceive of alterity, and the response which it generates, as responsible for determining the conditions for the coming of a radically unknowable and therefore open future.
- Format
- 115 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, English
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Forrest, Catherine
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RU Department of Literary Studies in English
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