Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "Green, Louise, 1968-"

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    Eco-communitarianism : a poetics of the environment in East African literature
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Nabulya, Eve; Slabbert, Mathilda; Green, Louise, 1968-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study seeks to explore the ways in which stylistic techniques and modes of narration perform environmental activism in a selection of literary texts from East Africa. I reflect on the persuasive value of literary devices, notably personification, ekphrasis, metaphor and irony in effecting change in people’s attitudes towards the environment. My study considers how each of these devices enables conceptualization and animates conversations around contemporary issues in environmental discourse. I enlist environmentally committed texts: two dramas, three novels and five poems by East African writers to discuss the innovations and strategies through which the literary works access emotions and thus potentially influence the attitudes of readers. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s notion of "persuasion to attitude" as derived from Aristotle's theory of rhetoric, I demonstrate that an ecocritical approach can transcend the intra-textual focus of literature and investigate a text’s persuasive power or what I prefer to call textual eco-activism. I note that such a method, for the works in focus, unveils an underlying ecological consciousness amenable to African communitarianism, what I term as eco-communitarianism. I maintain that these works, in different ways, offer alternative visions and reflect on pertinent issues related to human and nonhuman agency, art and the representation of the physical landscape, the viability of apocalyptic rhetoric in the environmental campaign, and the relationship between governance and environmental conservation. Nestled in postcolonial eco-criticism, this study is predicated on the understanding that environmental literary productions and related criticisms constitute acts of activism and efforts at changing the status quo.