Doctoral Degrees (English)

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C. Louis Leipoldt and the making of a South African modernism
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Oppelt, Riaan; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: C. Louis Leipoldt had, in his lifetime and after his death, a celebrated reputation as an important Afrikaans poet in South Africa. He remains most remembered for his contribution to the growth of Afrikaans literature and for the significance of his poetry in helping to establish Afrikaans literature in the early part of the twentieth century in South Africa. He is also mostly remembered for his recipe books and food and wine guides, as well as his career as a paediatrician. Between 1980 and 2001, scholarly work was done to offer a reappraisal of Leipoldt’s literary works. During this period, previously unpublished material written by Leipoldt was made publicly available. Three novels by Leipoldt, written in English, were published at irregular intervals between 1980 and 2001. The novels cast Leipoldt in a different light, suggesting that as an English-language writer he was against many of the ideas he was associated with when viewed as an Afrikaans-language writer. These ideas, for the most part, linked Leipoldt to the Afrikaner nationalist project of the twentieth century and co-opted him to Afrikaner nationalist policies of racial segregation based on the campaigning for group identity. The three English-language novels, collectively making up the Valley trilogy, not only reveal Leipoldt’s opposition to the nationalist project but also draw attention to some of his other work in Afrikaans, in which this same ideological opposition may be noted. In this thesis I argue that Leipoldt’s Valley trilogy, as well as some of his other, Afrikaans works, not only refute the nationalist project but offer a reading of South African modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This reading of historical events in South Africa that reveals the trajectory of the country’s modernity is strongly indicative of a unique literary modernism. It is my argument that Leipoldt’s Valley trilogy shows a modernist critique of the historical events it presents. Because the concept of a South African modernism in literature has not yet been fully defined, it is also an aim of this thesis to propose that Leipoldt’s works contribute a broad but sustained literary outlook that covers his own lifespan (1880-1947) as well as the historical period he examines in the Valley trilogy (the late 1830s -the late 1920s/early 1930s). This literary outlook, I argue, is a modernist outlook, but also a transplantation of a Western understanding of what modernism is to the South African context in which there are crucial differences. This thesis hopes to arrive at an outcome that binds Leipoldt’s anti-nationalism to his literary critique of the modernity he explores in the Valley trilogy, thereby proving that Leipoldt could be read as a South African literary modernist.
Ecocriticism and the oil encounter : readings from the Niger Delta
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Aghoghovwia, Philip Onoriode; Green, Louise; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study seeks to understand the ways that environmental concerns and the phenomenon of oil production in the Niger Delta are captured in contemporary literary representations. In the thesis, I enlist several works, five poetry collections and a Nollywood video film, produced between 1998 and 2010, to investigate and analyse the different ways they engage with the effects of oil extraction as a form of violence that is not immediately apparent. Amitav Ghosh argues that representing something of such magnitude as oil modernity can only be done adequately through narratives of epic quality such as realist fiction or the historical novel. I move away from Ghosh’s assumptions to argue that the texts, poetry and video film have adequately captured the oil encounter, but not on a grand scale or through realist fiction. I situate Niger Delta representations of the oil encounter within the intellectual frame of petrocultures, a recent field of global study which explores the representational and critical domain within which oil is framed and imagined in culture. In their signification of what I call the “oil ontology”, that is, the very nature and existence of oil in the Delta, lived-experience in its actual quotidian specificity, takes precedence in the imagination of the writers that I study. I propose that the texts, in very different ways, articulate these experiences by concatenating social and environmental concerns with representations of the oil encounter to produce a petro-literary form which inflects and critiques the ways in which oil extraction, in all its social and environmental manifestations, inscribes a form of violence upon the landscape and human population in the oil sites of the Delta. I suggest that the texts articulate a place-based, place-specific form of petroculture. They emphasis the notion that the oil encounter in the Delta is not the official encounter at the point of extraction but rather the unofficial encounter with the side-effects of the oil extraction. The texts, in very different ways address similar concerns of violence as an intricate feature in the Delta, both as a physical, spectacular phenomenon and as a subtle, unseen category. They conceive of violence as a consequence of the various forms of intrusion and disruption that the logic of oil extraction instigates in the Niger Delta. I suggest that the form of eco-poetics that is articulated gives expression to environmental concerns which are marked off by an oily topos in the Delta. I maintain that in projecting an artistic vision that is sensitive to environmental and sociocultural questions, the writings that we encounter from this region also make critical commentary on the ontology of oil. The texts conceive the Niger Delta as one that provides the spatial and material template for envisioning the oil encounter and staging a critique of the essentially globalised space that is the site of oil production.
Films by Kenyan women directors as national allegories
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Ojiambo, Jacqueline Kubasu; Green, Louise; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines how selected Kenyan fiction films directed by women filmmakers intervene in national politics. To achieve this, I employ Frederic Jameson’s concept of ‘national allegory’ to understand how within the context of the Kenyan political situation, the private stories of individuals can be read allegorically to refer beyond their immediate circumstances to wider political concerns. Although these films are predominantly realist in narrative form, I propose that reading them as national allegories allows their wider political implications to emerge. The films also draw on local traditions of allegory as a complex didactic form. I critically analyse the films to explore the different allegorical shapes each film takes and how these allegorical shapes, in turn, resonate with the larger national story. I complexify Jameson’s theory, which suggests that all third world texts are to be read as national allegories, and demonstrate that they can, in fact, be interpreted at both a realist and allegorical level. The early films Saikati and The Battle of The Sacred Tree investigate the idea of returning to the past. This discussion contributes to African cinema’s ‘return to the source’ movement, which did not account for the complications women face on their return to the past. I argue that for women, the return is fraught with challenges that must constantly be negotiated and renegotiated. In the next set of more contemporary films, I demonstrate how the daily private lives of the characters illuminate broader social-political concerns. The more overtly allegorical, Soul Boy, together with the social realist Killer Necklace, Project Daddy and Leo, highlight the conditions of the marginalized in the society and decry poor governance. Finally, I explore From a Whisper and Something Necessary that fictionalise real traumatic national events. These two, mix real footage and fictional narrative to provide a path for engagement with broader political implications. I will show how through various imaginations, all the filmmakers transcend their present realities and imagine a more desirable nation. My argument is that although these films can be read as realist films, reading them as national allegories foregrounds the diverse ways Kenyan women filmmakers engage with national politics.
How I lost my mother : care, death, and the politics of invisibility
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Swartz, Leslie; Viljoen, Shaun; Green, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This creative writing dissertation falls into two sections. The bulk of the dissertation is a book-length memoir entitled How I lost my mother, and the brief second section provides a reflection on the memoir and the process of writing. The memoir uses the techniques of narrative nonfiction to introduce readers to issues of care and dying. The memoir tells the story of an emotionally complex relationship between mother and son, and of the struggles we all face in negotiating our way between closeness and distance, tenderness, anger and retribution. The book uses humour and story-telling to discuss issues which may otherwise not be palatable to a wide range of readers. The book maintains a deliberate tension between three narrative strands. First, the book functions in part as a social history of marginal Jewish life in southern Africa from the 1920s to today, with a critical look at the social demands and expectations of a close-knit community. Second, there is a raw account of a fraught but loving family relationship. Third, this is a book about loss, death, and the invisibilization of care issues. Many privileged people live their lives, and go through the process of dying, supported by vulnerable and poorly-paid people (usually women of colour), and the book discusses this reality. To an extent, my intentions in writing the book are didactic, but the book is written as a story about family life, and it invites co-construction of meaning rather than positioning the reader as somebody who needs to be taught. I hope that by showing my own doubts and my own struggles with issues, I invite the reader to think along with me. The book also deals the politics of memory and memorialization, which remains an important and contested issue in contemporary South Africa. Who has the right to speak about the past? Whose memories are “true”, to the extent that that it is possible to have “true memories”? Who gets to tell the stories? Who ends up as a writer famed for chronicling a particular conflict context (like Nadine Gordimer and Anne Frank), and whose stories will never be chronicled? What responsibilities do all story-tellers have to the past, and to what extent can people claim not to be constrained, shaped, and enabled by a past they inherited through good or bad fortune, or, more usually, an intertwined combination of both good and bad? Section 2 of the dissertation provides a critical reflection on the writing of the memoir and on questions of ethics, authenticity, and subjectivity in relation to life-writing more generally. I draw on writers from a range of periods and contexts to consider these issues, noting the inherent difficulties and contradictions of a writer commenting on his or her own writing. In keeping with other authors, I suggest that personal narratives may be a helpful way to communicate complex, and broader, concerns.
Language limits : the dissolution of the lyric subject in experimental print and performance poetry
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-12) Pieterse, Annel; Green, Louise; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, I undertake an extensive overview of a range of language activities that foreground the materiality of language, and that require an active reader oriented towards the text as a producer, rather than a consumer, of meaning. To this end, performance, as a function of both orality and print texts, forms an important focus for my argument. I am particularly interested in the effect that the disruption of language has on the position of the subject in language, especially in terms of the dialogic exchange between local and global subject positions. Poetry is a language activity that requires a particular attention to form and meaning, and that is licensed to activate and exploit the materiality of language. For this reason, I have focused on the work of a selection of North American poets, the Language poets. These poets are primarily concerned with the performative possibilities of language as it appears in print media. I juxtapose these language activities with those of a selection of contemporary South African poets whose work is marked by the influence of oral forms, and reveals telling interplays between media. All these poets are preoccupied with the ways in which the sign might be disrupted. In my discussion of the work of the Language poets, I consider how examples of their print poetics present the reader with language fragments, arranged according to non-syntactic principles. Confronted by the lack of an individuated lyric subject around whom these fragments might cohere, the reader is obliged to make his/her own connections between words, sounds and phrases. Similarly, in the work of the performance poets, I identify several aspects in the poetry that trouble a transparent transmission of expression, and instead require the poetry to be read as an interrogation of the constitution of the subject. Here, the ―I‖ fleetingly occupies multiple, shifting subject positions, and the poetic interplay between media and language tends towards a continuous destabilising of the poetic self. Poets and performers are, to some extent, licensed to experiment with language in ways that render it opaque. Because the language activities of poets and performers are generally accommodated within the order of symbolic or metaphoric language, their experimentation with non-communicative excesses can be understood as part of their framework. However, in situations where ―communicative‖ language is expected, the order of literal or forensic language cannot accommodate seemingly non-communicative excesses that appear to render the text opaque. Ultimately, I am concerned with exploring the manner in which attention to the materiality of language might open up alternative understandings of language, subjectivity and representation in South African public discourse. My conclusion therefore considers the consequences when the issues opened up by the poetry – questions of self and subject, authority and representation – are translated into forensic frameworks and testimonial discourse.
Myth and counterfactuality in diasporic African women’s novels
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Kwanya, Joseph Michael Amolo; Green, Louise; Sanger, Nadia; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation focuses on the way in which a selection of novels by diasporic African women writers has, in different ways, engaged with myth in order to challenge dominant masculinist and essentialist narratives about women’s roles in African society. These authors either draw on traditional myths, challenge the mythologising function of nationalist histories or generate new forms of myths for the future. Although these novels are not counterfactual in the conventional sense–they do not change the outcomes of history–I argue that counterfactual theory offers a valuable way of analysing them. Each of the authors takes facts, historical figures, known histories, and myths, and reworks them in different ways, creating new versions of events where women play key roles. I demonstrate that analysing these texts as counterfactuals allows us to tease out how these authors challenge the androcentric notions of gender in myth and history by focusing their imagination on the silenced, elided, and undermined stories of African women. My reading of Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) explores how using myth to unsettle history and history to unsettle myth uncovers complex stories of African women. Wartime novels such as Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019) and Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013) focus on the mythologising function of nationalist histories in which certain stories are elevated to a position of dominance and others are suppressed or ignored. Whether constructed by the author or simulated by female characters, counterfactuals in the two novels construct worlds where women’s roles and experiences during wars are revealed. My analysis of Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer (2020) and Nnedi Okorafor’s two novels, The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Who Fears Death (2010), explores the genre of speculative fiction as a flexible space for experimenting with the counterfactual framework in telling African women’s stories through new forms of myths. The analysis shows that while narratives such as myth and history seem fixed and controlling, counterfactuals are valuable tools for unsettling their dominance.
Poetics and politics in contemporary African travel writing
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Amimo, Maureen; Green, Louise; Musila, Grace; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates contemporary travel narratives about Africa by Africans authors. Scholarship on travel writing about Africa has largely centred examples from the Global North, yet there is a rich body of travel writing by African authors. I approach African travel writing as an emerging genre that allows African authors to engage their marginality within the genre and initiate a transformative poetics inscribing alternative politics as viable forms of meaning-making. I argue that contemporary African travel writing stretches and redefines the aesthetic limits of the genre through experimentation which enables the form to carry the weight and complexities of African experiences. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford and Syed Manzurul Islam, as well as local philosophy emergent from the texts, I examine the reimaginations of the form of the travel narrative, which centre African experiences. This study examines the adaptations of the traditional poetics of the genre within a spirit of ‘writing back’ in Binyavanga Wainaina’s ‘Discovering Home,’ Sihle Khumalo’s Dark Continent, My Black Arse and Almost Sleeping My Way to Timbuktu, and Kofi Akpabli’s A Sense of the Savannah: Tales of a Friendly Walk through Northern Ghana. I argue that the practice of ‘writing back’ is both constrained and complicated by the conflicted histories of imperialism and neo-imperialism that surrounds the genre. This is followed by an exploration of Afrocentric interventions in the genre in the form of what I call the literary guidebook. In this section I argue for a reading of Tony Mochama’s Nairobi: A Night Guide through the City-in-the-Sun, Alba Kunadu Sumprim’s A Place of Beautiful Nonsense and Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda as literary guidebooks that invest in the form fluidity capable of capturing the unstable textures of place within contemporary African urban and emotional geographies. The last section explores return as a distinct sub-genre of travel in Africa. By return, I refer to narratives where African subjects in the diaspora travel back to places of their ancestry within the continent. This section focusses on Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise: Surviving the Rwandan Genocide, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief, and Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jhelum to Tana. I argue that return travel is inflected by contestations of a past and a present of the travelling subject’s psyche, from which stem losses and continuities, remembering and forgetting, revelation and concealment, all of which inform perception in the moment of return. Throughout this dissertation, a significant definition of the kinds of travel and travel narratives possible emanates from the complex position of the authors as subjects travelling spaces that refuse reductive reading. By paying attention to the intricate complexities of the locatedness of the travelling subjects, contemporary African travel writing expands the margins of the genre and the kinds of discursivity the form generates. This study concludes that African travel writing is an interpretation of the genre that involves both a transformation of the form and a contestation of its politics.
Uncovering the apocalypse : narratives of collapse and transformation in the 21st century Fin de Siècle
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Carstens, Johannes Petrus (Delphi); Green, Louise; Goodman, Ralph; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines the idea of apocalypse through the lens of science fiction (sf) written during the current fin de siècle period. I have dated this epoch, known as the information era, as starting in 1980 with the advent of personal computing and ending in approximately 2020 when the functional limits of silicon-based digital manufacturing and production are expected to be reached. By surveying the field of contemporary sf, I identify certain trends and subgenres that relate to particular aspects of apocalyptic thought, namely, conceptions of the ‘terror of history,’ the sublimity of accelerated techno-scientific advance, the ‘affective turn’ in media-culture and posthuman philosophy. My principal method of inquiry into how the apocalypse is imagined or ‘figured’ in sf is the concept of hyperstition – a neologism (combining the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’) coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). Hyperstition describes an aesthetic response whereby cultural fictions – principally, ideas relating to apocalypse – are imagined as transmuting into material realities. I begin by scrutinizing two posthumanist works of theory-fiction (theory written in the mode of sf) by the CCRU and 0rphan Drift which anticipate immanent human extinction and imagine the inception of a new evolutionary cycle of machine-augmented evolution This sensibility is premised on the sociallydestabilising cycles of exponential growth that characterise information-era technological developments, particularly in the digital industries, as well as the accelerated human impact on the natural environment. Central to my argument is the romantic materialist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of accelerationism, schizoanalysis and Bodies without Organs (BwO’s). Their ontology is constructed around the idea that exponential rates of development necessitate a new aesthetic paradigm that ventures beyond philosophies of human access. The narrative of apocalypse, approached from this perspective, can be interpreted in catastrophic or anastrophic terms; either as a permanent ending or as the beginning of something radically new. Using hyperstition, I also investigate the sf of Russell Hoban, Michael Swanwick, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Dan Simmons, M. John Harrison and Paul McAuley to see not only how these authors interpret the concept of cultural acceleration, but also to identify common threads. Countering the catastrophic ‘death of affect’ postulated by theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio with the anastrophic rejoinder of cyberdelic information-era countercultures, I conclude by investigating the new ‘affective turn’ in contemporary media theory. The works of theoretical fiction and sf that I investigate are informed, as I demonstrate, by the Situationist techniques of psychogeography, dérive and detournement, as well as by the literary tropes of 18th and 19th century fin de siècle Gothic and dark Romantic fiction.

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