"Let loose in the unthinkable unspeakable": waiting and alterity in Samuel Beckett's trilogy
- Authors: Marais, Jessica
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3917 , vital:20557
- Description: In this thesis, I examine the interrelated roles of waiting and alterity in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The conventional understanding of waiting is as an intentional relationship between a waiting subject and an awaited object. This kind of waiting is end-directed, and, in order for it to be worthwhile, the awaited must, at some point, arrive. In the trilogy, however, the awaited never does arrive, and it is my contention that the novels are concerned with an unconventional kind of waiting, which, being without object or end, takes the form of a non-intentional relationship between waiter and awaited. Significantly, through the non-intentional wait, the subject awaits the unawaited. She or he thereby encounters the radically other, or that which cannot be rendered familiar or assimilated in any way – an unthinkable, unspeakable, ungraspable excess that overflows the limits of thought and language. The texts foreground the vexed question of response to such alterity: how can one approach the ungraspable as ungraspable, when it is in the nature of any approach to attempt to grasp? I argue that the texts explore a paradoxical form of "incurious seeking" as an avenue to accommodate the absolutely other.
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- Authors: Marais, Jessica
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3917 , vital:20557
- Description: In this thesis, I examine the interrelated roles of waiting and alterity in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The conventional understanding of waiting is as an intentional relationship between a waiting subject and an awaited object. This kind of waiting is end-directed, and, in order for it to be worthwhile, the awaited must, at some point, arrive. In the trilogy, however, the awaited never does arrive, and it is my contention that the novels are concerned with an unconventional kind of waiting, which, being without object or end, takes the form of a non-intentional relationship between waiter and awaited. Significantly, through the non-intentional wait, the subject awaits the unawaited. She or he thereby encounters the radically other, or that which cannot be rendered familiar or assimilated in any way – an unthinkable, unspeakable, ungraspable excess that overflows the limits of thought and language. The texts foreground the vexed question of response to such alterity: how can one approach the ungraspable as ungraspable, when it is in the nature of any approach to attempt to grasp? I argue that the texts explore a paradoxical form of "incurious seeking" as an avenue to accommodate the absolutely other.
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A case for contemporary third literature: the black experience in the postmillennial fiction of three Kwela authors
- Authors: Mthembu, Lumumba
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3322 , vital:20480
- Description: This study seeks to uncover the manner in which the young black experience is constructed in three novels by Sifiso Mzobe, Kgebetli Moele and K. Sello Duiker. Young Blood, Untitled and Thirteen Cents all feature teenage narrators navigating the social milieu of South Africa in the twenty-first century. My analysis is informed by Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theory because South Africa’s socio-economic landscape conforms to the divisions laid out in The Wretched of the Earth. I contend that post-apartheid South Africa is developing in a manner that is symptomatic of the Fanonian post-independence African state. My close reading of the novels teases out the conditions under which young black subjects must survive and express themselves. I look into the roles of the community, the government, the family, and the school in shaping this experience. Naturally, my discussion segues into questions of sexuality and gender as they intersect with race. I demonstrate how these texts fail and succeed as works of Third Literature, a genre derived from Third Cinema, which I have adapted due to its Fanonian ideological underpinning. Third Literature is a fundamentally revolutionary and activistic genre which seeks to pave the way for social change. In this regard, I concern myself with the recommendations these three authors may have for the readers of their texts. In conclusion, these texts demonstrate that racialized identities are social constructs with measurable experiential effects. However, there are ways of actively resisting or even
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- Authors: Mthembu, Lumumba
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3322 , vital:20480
- Description: This study seeks to uncover the manner in which the young black experience is constructed in three novels by Sifiso Mzobe, Kgebetli Moele and K. Sello Duiker. Young Blood, Untitled and Thirteen Cents all feature teenage narrators navigating the social milieu of South Africa in the twenty-first century. My analysis is informed by Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theory because South Africa’s socio-economic landscape conforms to the divisions laid out in The Wretched of the Earth. I contend that post-apartheid South Africa is developing in a manner that is symptomatic of the Fanonian post-independence African state. My close reading of the novels teases out the conditions under which young black subjects must survive and express themselves. I look into the roles of the community, the government, the family, and the school in shaping this experience. Naturally, my discussion segues into questions of sexuality and gender as they intersect with race. I demonstrate how these texts fail and succeed as works of Third Literature, a genre derived from Third Cinema, which I have adapted due to its Fanonian ideological underpinning. Third Literature is a fundamentally revolutionary and activistic genre which seeks to pave the way for social change. In this regard, I concern myself with the recommendations these three authors may have for the readers of their texts. In conclusion, these texts demonstrate that racialized identities are social constructs with measurable experiential effects. However, there are ways of actively resisting or even
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Being for the Other: Surveillance and Depictions of Race, Gender, and Animals in Contemporary South African Fiction
- Authors: Laue, Kharys Ateh
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3848 , vital:20549
- Description: This thesis examines the depiction, in contemporary South African fiction, of irresponsibility and responsibility in relation to the raced, gendered, and animal Other. Through a close analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison and Michel Foucault’s study of this design, I establish the notion of disciplinary surveillance or panopticism. This I take to be a mode of power that seeks, by means of an invisible gaze, to render its subjects docile. In my readings of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning, and selected short stories from Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away, I demonstrate that oppressive authoritarian regimes are rooted in Benthamic principles of hyper-visibility and concealment. Disciplinary power, I contend, is effective precisely because it places an individual in a constant state of Being-for-Others, a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the experience of objectification through another’s look. Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of black double consciousness frame my examination of, respectively, gender and racial oppression, while my discussion of animals appeals to Jacques Derrida’s work on the non-human. I show how surveillance, in each of the selected texts, functions through a racist and/or sexist and/or speciesist gaze that facilitates violent, irresponsible relationships with the human and non-human Other. The texts under discussion, however, also depict ways in which the Other actively resists and subverts regimes of oppression, often by means of a counter gaze that compels the protagonist, or the reader, to take up responsibility for Others. Ultimately, my study concludes that the fictional works of Coetzee, Wicomb, and Cartwright offer an ethics of empathetic responsibility, which I term Being for the Other, in opposition to mechanisms of disciplinary surveillance that seek to oppress, conceal, and dominate.
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- Authors: Laue, Kharys Ateh
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3848 , vital:20549
- Description: This thesis examines the depiction, in contemporary South African fiction, of irresponsibility and responsibility in relation to the raced, gendered, and animal Other. Through a close analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison and Michel Foucault’s study of this design, I establish the notion of disciplinary surveillance or panopticism. This I take to be a mode of power that seeks, by means of an invisible gaze, to render its subjects docile. In my readings of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning, and selected short stories from Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away, I demonstrate that oppressive authoritarian regimes are rooted in Benthamic principles of hyper-visibility and concealment. Disciplinary power, I contend, is effective precisely because it places an individual in a constant state of Being-for-Others, a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the experience of objectification through another’s look. Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of black double consciousness frame my examination of, respectively, gender and racial oppression, while my discussion of animals appeals to Jacques Derrida’s work on the non-human. I show how surveillance, in each of the selected texts, functions through a racist and/or sexist and/or speciesist gaze that facilitates violent, irresponsible relationships with the human and non-human Other. The texts under discussion, however, also depict ways in which the Other actively resists and subverts regimes of oppression, often by means of a counter gaze that compels the protagonist, or the reader, to take up responsibility for Others. Ultimately, my study concludes that the fictional works of Coetzee, Wicomb, and Cartwright offer an ethics of empathetic responsibility, which I term Being for the Other, in opposition to mechanisms of disciplinary surveillance that seek to oppress, conceal, and dominate.
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Selfhood, identity and madness in the works of Milan Kundera and Peter Carey
- Authors: Graven, Ashley Holm
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3904 , vital:20554
- Description: Despite all the critical attention Milan Kundera’s and Peter Carey’s fiction has received, relatively little has been said about the way in which these authors problematise selfhood. In this study, I argue that these two writers share a preoccupation with the strictures placed on the individual by his/her location in language and discourse. I show that they deconstruct subjectivity with a view to intimating the possibility of momentarily transcending discursive control, and thereby inhabiting authentic selfhood. In addition, I demonstrate that both authors draw attention to the nature of language through their thematisation of madness, and I then trace the implications of this nexus between language and madness for the reader, who of course is a subject in language. My contention in this regard is that Carey and Kundera seek to instil in the reader a self-reflexive awareness of the ways in which his/her location in language shapes his/her perception of others. In turn, this awareness charges the reader with the responsibility of questioning his/her judgements, and thereby enables him/her to negotiate a measure of authenticity from his/her position in language.
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- Authors: Graven, Ashley Holm
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/3904 , vital:20554
- Description: Despite all the critical attention Milan Kundera’s and Peter Carey’s fiction has received, relatively little has been said about the way in which these authors problematise selfhood. In this study, I argue that these two writers share a preoccupation with the strictures placed on the individual by his/her location in language and discourse. I show that they deconstruct subjectivity with a view to intimating the possibility of momentarily transcending discursive control, and thereby inhabiting authentic selfhood. In addition, I demonstrate that both authors draw attention to the nature of language through their thematisation of madness, and I then trace the implications of this nexus between language and madness for the reader, who of course is a subject in language. My contention in this regard is that Carey and Kundera seek to instil in the reader a self-reflexive awareness of the ways in which his/her location in language shapes his/her perception of others. In turn, this awareness charges the reader with the responsibility of questioning his/her judgements, and thereby enables him/her to negotiate a measure of authenticity from his/her position in language.
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