A sea is brewing
- Authors: Mama, Sibongakonke
- Date: 2022-10-14
- Subjects: Creative writing (Higher education) South Africa , Xhosa poetry 21st century , South African poetry (English) 21st century , Psychic trauma in literature , Women in literature , Diaries -- Authorship , Books Reviews
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/406281 , vital:70255
- Description: My thesis is a collection of poems that draws on the complexity of not belonging in places, with people, or within families. I engage my own alienation as well as that of my parents, black people generally, and women in particular. I take inspiration from Uruguayan poet Fabián Severo’s autobiographical long poem, Night in the North, which chronicles the poet’s experience of growing up in linguistic and cultural borderlands. I am also influenced by Chilean poet Carmen García’s ability to move between the concrete and the abstract in translations of her poems from the collection Gotas sobre loza fría. As much as my poems traverse a metaphysical space, they are also set in concrete places – Tutura, Gcuwa, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. Like Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s Spit Temple, I move between the physical and spiritual realms for a better understanding of my estrangement. I also draw on South African poet Mangaliso Buzani’s book, a naked bone, for its fluid combination of line and prose poetry. I write in isiXhosa and English as a reflection of my mixed cultural and linguistic existence. I seek to harness rhythm and harmony, as well as the quiet, between words. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, School of Languages and Literatures, 2022
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- Date Issued: 2022-10-14
Enabling violence: the ethics of writing and reading rape in South Africa
- Authors: Lloyd, Dylan Reumen
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Rape -- South Africa , Rape -- Fiction , Rape in literature , Rape in literature -- South Africa , Psychic trauma in literature , Post-traumatic stress disorder in literature , Dystopias in literature , Coetzee, J. M., 1940- Disgrace , South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/166173 , vital:41335
- Description: This thesis is concerned with describing the stakes of reading, writing and criticising fictional depictions of rape in a country plagued by high levels of sexual violence. I consider the capacity of rape representations to cause harm to women and rape survivors, and worsen the various injuries suffered by survivors as a direct or indirect consequence of rape. The possibility of such harm prompts me to examine the role and responsibilities of readers and critics in facilitating or preventing such harm. I further discuss the potential strategies of harm prevention that readers of novelistic portrayals of rape might adopt as well as the positive outcomes that such reading strategies make possible, and which might balance out the risks that accompany them. My description of the potential harm of rape representations combines postmodern critical feminist analysis with Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic justice and Judith Herman’s work on trauma in order to illustrate the way that these representations shape our conception of rape in a manner that affects everything from how it is enacted to our treatment of survivors to the possibility of their recovery from posttraumatic stress disorder. In order to situate my analysis in the context of South African literature and to explore the notion of responsibility in relation to the writing of scenes of rape, I utilise a close reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Furthermore, I discuss the utility and limits of the critical feminist strategy of using a normative critical approach to rape representations in order to prevent harm. Ultimately, I argue that the use of such a strategy, along with the development of a purpose-honed adaptive critical style, is essential to the fulfilment of our responsibilities as readers and to the prevention of further suffering.
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- Date Issued: 2020