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“A thousand mad things before breakfast”: the interplay of reason and imagination in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

  • Authors: Dingle, Teresa Anne
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Potter, Harry (Fictitious character) , Rowling, J. K. -- Characters -- Harry Potter , Rowling, J. K. -- Criticism and interpretation , Fantasy fiction, English -- History and criticism , Magic in literature , Wizards in literature , Rationalism in literature , Imagination in literature , Prejudices in literature
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/118065 , vital:34592
  • Description: Realism and imagination serve roles in J.K. Rowling’s world creation in the Harry Potter series and thus will be traced through this thesis. Both rational and imaginative thinking are modes of thought and play roles in characters’ responses to issues. Further, reason and imagination are used in Harry Potter as modes of resistance against the prejudice which shapes much of the society of the magical world and so will be examined. In the Harry Potter series, Rowling combines fantasy traditions with realism and in so doing ensures her wizarding world mirrors the world of the reader. Rowling enacts a re-creation of the real world of the reader through a recombination of realistic and fantasy elements. This thesis will call on fantasy theorists Rosemary Jackson and Dimitra Fimi as well as the fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin to examine how Rowling conforms to and expands on the fantasy tradition in which she writes in her creation of the magical world. It is made evident through Rowling’s treatment of Harry’s friends Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood that combining reason and imagination is more beneficial than choosing one over the other. The girls’ ways of thinking, seeing and interacting with those around them are complex and he learns from their combined wisdom how to navigate challenges and trials. Criticism focusing primarily on the secondary character of Luna is relatively scarce, despite her impact on Harry’s views regarding death and the afterlife. This thesis offers a new perspective on the importance to Rowling’s narrative of this open-minded, idiosyncratic figure. Rational and imaginative ways of thinking are necessary modes to use in the resistance to prejudice in wizarding society since this pervasive privileging of wizards over other magical beings espoused by the magical government inspires Lord Voldemort to kill or subjugate those whose magical heritage falls short of pure-blooded wizarding ancestry. In analysing the ostensibly conflicting rational and imaginative modes of thought, I examine Rowling’s unconscious use of shadow theory through her treatment of Harry’s dreams and visions – a direct connection between Harry and Lord Voldemort. Harry confronts his antagonist – and addresses the prejudices pervading wizarding society – through making rational decisions that require imaginative action.
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“Don’t be alarmed. It’s to do with sex.” Sherlock Holmes fanfiction and freedom of the imaginary domain

  • Authors: van der Nest, Megan
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Fan fiction , Fans (Persons) -- Fiction , Holmes, Sherlock , Literature and the internet , Sex in literature
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124208 , vital:35576
  • Description: In this thesis I argue that, for the individual fan, reading and writing fanfiction texts, and engaging with the online fandom communities within which these texts are produced, is a potentially valuable experience. This is because the kind of social and creative spaces found in these communities allow for, and celebrate, the free imaginative play with romantic and sexual desires, identities, and relationships. To articulate the importance of these spaces, I draw on Drucilla Cornell’s concept of the imaginary domain, defined as the psychic space each individual uses to explore different sexual desires and personae, which exploration is necessary for the development of full personhood. I also argue that the growing visibility and influence of fandom in modern society means that it could serve as a mechanism for social change, particularly in the acceptance and support of multiple sexual identities and forms of love. Selected texts, drawn from the Sherlock fandom, are discussed as representative of the approach taken within fanfiction communities towards various aspects of sexuality and sexual ethics. This approach combines the enthusiastic exploration of sexual desires without shame or fear of judgment with an ongoing, critical interrogation of sexual ethics.
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“How can you build a nation without telling its stories?”: Transgressive, Testimonial Fiction in Post-TRC South Africa

  • Authors: Collett, Keenan
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: South African fiction (English) , Violence in literature , South Africa -- In literature , AIDS (Disease) in literature , Duiker, K Sello -- Thirteen cents , Moele, Kgebetli -- The book of the dead , Staggie, Jason -- Risk
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147092 , vital:38592
  • Description: Transgressive fiction refers to works of literature that are fundamentally concerned with the provocation of their reader. This effect is typically accomplished by authors crafting novels that feature upsetting content: extreme violence, taboo sex acts, and drug abuse – often narrated by protagonists who are either the recipients or enactors of violence and trauma. Given their rootedness in familiar social settings, these works of fiction manage to relay critiques of their particular societies. Over the past three decades, transgressive fiction has amassed a small critical reception with focus predominantly directed toward texts from the United States and the United Kingdom. In an attempt to build on existing scholarship, this thesis explores recent and disturbing works of South African literature in order to gauge whether the markers of transgressive fiction are as easily applicable in a new national setting. K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, Kgebetli Moele’s The Book of the Dead and Jason Staggie’s Risk form the basis of the discussion. Each novel exposes a concern with social developments within a ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, and codes its respective critique in narratives concerned with the violation of consent, as depicted in profoundly unsettling ways. The spread of publication dates across the three novels also allows for an examination of morphing social critique from 2000-2013.
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“I just want to live”: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of separation abuse in South African heterosexual relationships

  • Authors: Johnson, Samantha-Sue
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Phenomenological psychology , Family violence -- South Africa -- Case studies , Women -- Violence against -- South Africa -- Case studies , Intimate partner violence -- South Africa -- Case studies
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/164626 , vital:41149
  • Description: A key strategy for ending IPV, would be to make it possible for potential victims to safely leave their abusers. However, the abuse may persist, often with devastating consequences. The current literature on separation a buse primarily makes use of quantitative research to explain the phenomenon as is visible in the large amounts of quantitative research that was cit ed throughout this research project. Therefore, the aim of this research was to qualitatively explore the lived experiences of South African women who had experienced separation a buse . The Power and Control Wheel, located within Feminis t Theory, was used as the theoretical framework as it offers an illustrative understanding of the types of abuse that exists within a relationship and was adjusted to suit post - separation a buse . The research was conducted in Makhanda (formerly known as Grah amstown ) , Eastern Cape with the assistance of the local Families South Africa (FAMSA) office. Four participants were interviewed using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach. IPA was chosen as it involves a detailed exploration of how p articipants make sense of their personal and social worlds as well as determining the meanings that participants relate to their personal experiences and events in their lives. Data was collected through semi - structured interviews which were conducted by t he researcher with the assistance of a translator for the participants who preferred to speak Isi - Xhosa. Each participant initially participated in a screening interview conducted by a FAMSA staff member before being interviewed to minimize harm that could be caused through speaking about their experience before they were ready. The interviews were analysed through the use of IPA techniques where themes were extracted from the data. Five superordinate themes emerged from the analysis, namely “types of abuse experienced post-separation”, “children and abusive relationships”, “drinking and substance SEPARATION ABUSE IN SOUTH AFRICA ii abuse”, “protection order” and “hope for the future”. The findings revealed the ways in which the abusers continued their abuse during the separation period, the participant’s experiences of separation abuse as well as the experiences they believed their children had throughout the process. Two of the participant’s also revealed they feared for their lives, which resulted in them applying for protection orders. Despite the years of abuse suffered at the hands of their ex -partners, all four participants remained hopeful that they could become independent enough to provide for their children and themselves. While there have been South African studies which look at stalking victimization, the IPV female mortality rate and power and powerlessness experienced by women leaving abusive relationships, there is currently no published study in South Africa that explicitly focuses on separation abuse in heterosexual relationships in South Africa. Therefore, it was be neficial to conduct this research as the need exists to conduct research that not only focuses on the homicide rates of females at the hands of their partners but also the types of separation abuse that exists.
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“Investigating the negative impact of emotional labour on full-time permanent academic staff in the Social Sciences Departments at Rhodes University”

“Savage” hair and mothers’ hearts: a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of intersectional identities in two South African school setworks

  • Authors: Hubbard, Beatrice Elizabeth Anne
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Women in literature , Women, Black in literature , Critical discourse analysis , Magona, Sindiwe -- Mother to mother , Bulbring, Edyth -- The Mark
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141770 , vital:38003
  • Description: This thesis reports on the discursive construal of intersectional physical identities, with particular reference to ‘black’ female characters, in two novels: Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, and Edyth Bulbring’s The Mark. These novels are prescribed for Grade 10 English Home Language learners in all South African public schools. Gendered identity construction in texts has been widely discussed in critical linguistics, with some research showing that the ways in which bodies are construed reveal the hegemonic and stereotypical gendering of men and women. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the intersectional nature of identity construction. This thesis employs Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate the complex physical identities of, especially, ‘black’ female characters in these two novels. The inclusion of Corpus Linguistics is essential for uncovering hidden patterns of language choice, while the analytical techniques and theoretical notions from Critical Discourse Analysis provide the explanatory power that underpins the qualitative analysis. The uses to which nine key body parts are put reveal discourse prosodies showing different intersectional realisations for intimacy, power, violence, emotion, and racial marking. These discourse prosodies are most starkly realised in the two body parts, one from each novel, that are statistically most clearly linked to ‘black’ female characters. HAIR in The Mark is used variously as a racial marker, a target for racism, and a symbol for racial pride. HEART in Mother to Mother is used almost exclusively to symbolise the emotional pain of a mother’s love, and how empathy for another mother’s pain can bridge racial divides. Principal findings reveal that both novels provide very necessary lessons in cross-racial empathy, pride in ‘blackness,’ and interracial relationships. However, it is of concern that these novels also exhibit an over-valorisation of motherhood, largely stereotypical depictions of gender roles, and ableist language. In sum, both novels promote some of the transformative principles of the national curriculum, and are shown to have a bearing on nation building.
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“When the rainbow is enuf”: black postgraduate women’s experiences and perceptions of higher education and institutional culture – a case study of Rhodes University

  • Authors: Gamedze, Ayanda
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Rhodes University , College students, Black -- South Afrca , Women college students, Black -- South Africa
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147215 , vital:38605
  • Description: This thesis sets out to investigate the perceptions which Black postgraduate students hold of the present-day toward Historically White Universities (hereafter referred to as HWUs) in South Africa as unique sites from which to investigate institutional culture and the legacy of educational marginalisation. Black women are of particular focus because of the interlocking nature of social inequalities that uniquely influence their comparable experience in the academy. Rhodes University, a top-ranked traditional university provides the institutional site for this investigation into HWUs. This thesis seeks to further explore the suggestion that desegregation of South Africa's institutions of higher learning have meant access, but not always acceptance. The paper explores what Black women students perceive to be Rhodes University's institutional culture and its impact on their lived realities. Subsequently, these women have learned who they are, and what place they occupy in South Africa today, through navigating a space not necessarily accommodating to Blackness and difference. There exists a plethora of literature on the issues which Black women scholars systematically encounter daily in the academy, in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Nonetheless, there needs to be a further inquiry on the question of belonging of Black womanhood in HWU post the student-led movements of the past few years that have renewed the challenge to South Africa's colonial past, its neoliberal present, and its scourge of gender-based violence. This paper captures an ongoing conversation around the role of Black women in addressing transformation in HWU. As a Black woman in an HWU, I found myself wondering whether there are certain experiences students like me have in common – realities with nuances we call to identify with to some extent. I collected data from six Black women with whom I conducted interviews, and used it to compile this report and its analysis. I believe that the social significance of this study speaks to the importance of hearing the stories of subaltern groups that are positioned in spaces of privilege, yet continue to be defined by the disadvantage of their gender, race, and various other factors.
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“Why me, Lord?”: some social factors associated with the receipt of a donor heart in South Africa

  • Authors: Hartle, Raymond
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Heart -- Transplantation -- Social aspects , Heart -- Transplantation -- Recipients -- Psychology , Heart -- Transplantation -- South Africa , Chronic diseases -- Psychological aspects
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MSocSci
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146265 , vital:38510
  • Description: Since the first human-to-human heart transplant in the world was performed by Prof Chris Barnard in Cape Town in 1967, heart transplantation has become the gold standard to treat people suffering from end stage heart failure. This thesis explores heart recipients’ perceptions and experiences of their chronic heart illness before and after transplantation. It examines the medical experience in terms of the clinical diagnosis, the standard of communication about the illness and the proposed treatment, and the post-transplant regime. It also reflects how recipients make sense of heart disease and learn to live with a transplanted heart. The thesis also shows the extent to which the recipients’ culture and individual identity impact such complex medical issues as end stage heart failure and transplantation. Qualitative research was undertaken in private sector heart transplant programmes in South Africa. The study is underpinned by Mishel’s (1990) uncertainty theory as well as by social constructionism.
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“Womxn like me are made”: politics and poetics in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

  • Authors: Wilken, Chelsey
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: Rankine, Claudia, 1963- Citizen , Putuma, Koleka -- Collective amnesia , Black people -- Race identity , Black people in literature
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/145735 , vital:38462
  • Description: This thesis utilises an interdisciplinary approach to understand the political significance of the experimental poetics used by Claudia Rankine in Citizen: An American Lyric and Koleka Putuma in Collective Amnesia. Rankine and Putuma offer contemporary reflections on what it means to occupy marginalised spaces in society. These artists experiment with formal and conventional aspects of literature to explore and create new definitions of what it means to be Black in society. Their works and techniques allow for thinking outside of dominant ideologies of race and posit alternative Black identities that are not found within canonical theory on Blackness. This project reflects on existing theories of Black subjectivity as evident in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook on the Return to My Native Land. While these theorists did not reject the role of Black women in Western civilisation, they should be read as a moment in a series of counter-discourse to the Black Other rather than the finite canon of Black subjectivity. The emergence of Rankine and Putuma’s experimental poetics works to disrupt the conflation of the Black subject with the Black heteronormative male. Using Michelle M. Wright’s Physics of Blackness as its primary theoretical framework, this project advocates alternative and disruptive readings of Blackness that potentially shift Blackness away from its conflation with nationalism, masculinity and heteronormativity. This thesis uses a dialogical approach between political theory and literature which allows for Citizen and Collective Amnesia to be read as acts of resistance to epistemological erasure and as articulations of the politics relevant to the poets’ lived experiences. Both the United States and South Africa have a history of institutionalised racial segregation, which allows Rankine and Putuma to be read in relation to one another. Where the Civil Rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle were both foregrounded as male-lead liberation movements contemporary social movements including #blacklivesmatter and #feesmustfall have initiated a return to the androcentric philosophies of Malcom X and Steve Biko, for example. As such Rankine and Putuma’s literature and art marks a reclamation of female empowerment and visibility in the face of a political rhetoric that continues to be masculine and nationalist in nature. In the absence of a space where Black female and queer bodies are adequately recognised, the poetry they write creates a space of self-representation and recognition.
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“Workers’ strikes and collective bargaining: a study of the SAMWU municipal worker strike of 2018, Port Elizabeth, South Africa”

  • Authors: Gumbo, Eugene
  • Date: 2020
  • Subjects: South African Municipal Workers Union , Strikes and lockouts -- Municipal government -- South Africa -- Port Elizabeth , Collective bargaining -- Municipal employees -- South Africa -- Port Elizabeth , Philosophy, Marxist , Labor unions -- South Africa , Labor unions -- Law and legislation -- South Africa , Industrial relations -- South Africa -- Port Elizabeth
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146916 , vital:38576
  • Description: The focus of this study centered on investigating the perceptions and opinions surrounding the eruption of strike action and its effectiveness during a collective bargaining process. The case study employed was the 2018 municipal strike in Port Elizabeth, organised by the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU). A Marxist theoretical framework was chosen for this study. It argues that strike action is a means through which workers communicate their dissatisfaction or enforce particular demands, with trade unions playing a protagonist’s role. Strike action, generally, is caused by a plethora of reasons ranging from disciplinary issues and conditions and hours of work, to be mention a few. However, the major force behind strike eruption is the wage agenda, as workers are always striving to get better wages while employers, on the other hand, attempt to reduce them so as to increase profits. South Africa has had its fair share of municipal strike action ever since the apartheid period, the early stages of democracy up to the contemporary times of the 21st century with various strategies, successes and losses being experienced. Democracy in South Africa also saw some developments in the labour sphere in relation to statutes surrounding strike action. The LRA and the Constitution of South Africa inform the right to strike and offer guidelines as well as consequences that steer strike action in a direction that does not jeopardize the workers, employers and the general public. The research found that workers do understand what strike action is, its causes and its various implications. Furthermore, it was discovered that this worker tool has been successful in putting pressure on the negotiation process as well as luring employers back to the negotiation table, for example. However, it was also uncovered that there are present, factors that hampered the impact of strike action during the bargaining procedure in focus. These are namely, the political institutionalization of trade unions, ill-equipped union leaders, a reluctance to implement strike agreements by employers, the use of violence by municipal workers during the strike, to mention but a few. Therefore, when looking at the strike in question, the effectiveness of strike action during the collective bargaining process was found to be easily contestable.
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