The novel as cultural and historical archive: an examination of Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006)
- Authors: Carvalho, Alyssa May
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Van Niekerk, Marlene , South Africa Fiction , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:8454 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1224 , Van Niekerk, Marlene , South Africa Fiction , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
- Description: This research engages with a contemporary theoretical debate in the literary field, namely the ability of fictional texts to contribute to archival records. Contemporary research in archival discourse suggests that there are many intersections between fiction and the archive. Using Hamilton and others’ seminal text Refiguring the Archive (2002) and Pasco’s “Literature as Historical Archive” (2004) as point of departure, this dissertation offers an analysis of the South African English translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004, translated 2006). In both form and function, the novel is viewed as a simulation of an archive. In Agaat, Van Niekerk has compiled a fictional archive of two indigenous South African cultures through her portrayal of the two main characters: Afrikaner culture during apartheid as embedded in the focalization of Milla de Wet and remnants of Khoi and/or San culture as emerge from the fictionalised subjectivity of her coloured housekeeper-nurse, Agaat. Through a conceptual and theoretical exploration of archival discourse, I argue that literary texts, such as Van Niekerk’s novel, have the potential to refigure (or creatively redefine) the archive and to enhance its scope and relevance, especially as South Africa undergoes transformation.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Nature, narrative and language in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat
- Authors: Moore-Barnes, Shannon-Lee
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat , Narration (Rhetoric) , Storytelling , Women and literature -- South Africa , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:8453 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1235 , Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat , Narration (Rhetoric) , Storytelling , Women and literature -- South Africa , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
- Description: Conrad Aiken’s observation that the “landscape and the language are the same, and we ourselves are language and are land,” depicts the material terrain we inhabit as necessarily informing the language we speak. An important corollary to Aiken’s observation is language itself writes the land. I argue that the binary division between culture and nature, as well as the attempts to universalise languages, abstracts discourse from necessary situated knowledges, alienating the land from the language it embodies. The severing of culture and nature as implied by Aiken’s observation is indicative of humanity’s progressive isolation from the land through language, as well as from their embodied natures. Remoteness results in what Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat (2006) terms a “poverty disease” (2006: 251). Michiel Heyns confirms that the character Agaat relates this barrenness of spirit to her “diagnosis of spiritual ills through human dealings with the soil” (2009: 132). I illustrate the novel’s revitalisation of language as an act of ecological recuperation that alleviates dis-eased consciousnesses by potentially recognising, valuing and responding to situated knowledges revealed in land narratives.1 My argument therefore uncovers the challenges that the novel directs at an unreformed and universal Western2 To this end I use critiques of colonialism that reveal culture’s assimilation of the Other, rationalist discourse that continues to appropriate nature as resource for a hierarchical culture. 3 By combining this literary analysis with a wider eco-theoretical enquiry I position my study in an interdisciplinary field of investigation. This is in response to the damaging consequences of the inherited and fragmentary nature of specialisation. In addition, by detailing literary and feminist especially the work of Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway and Nicole Brossard. I use these critiques to analyse self/Other oppositions that Western culture constructs and patrols to maintain a defensive culture of domination. I show how nature and all those feminised and marginalised by Western discourses that hierarchise culture have been consistently overlooked and under-represented by those who purport to ‘control’ the environment and privilege the symbolic language as the carrier of culture. Agaat provides fruitful terrain for the reflection of marginalised voices; voices that confirm the environment and language as necessarily both feminist and social justice issues. 1 My preference for the hyphenated usage of the word ‘dis-ease’ signals the equation between discomfort or unease and disease or sickness. 2 While I am concerned over emphasising words such as Western and Apartheid by capitalising them, I have decided to retain this form so as not to diminish the magnitude of the effect these discourses have had on global and regional communities. 3 When referring to Others I, like Karen J. Warren, capitalise the term. Warren defines Others as all earth Others subjected to “unjustified domination-subordination relationships” (2005: 252). responses to Western patriarchal discourse and its impact on nature, I show the ways in which literature negotiates the possible re-conceptualisation of our collective cultural imagination. Van Niekerk’s novel offers a sustained critique of the oppressive Western conceptual frameworks that have dominated Others through hegemonic constructions. Furthermore, I investigate what this writer might offer as an alternative to systems of social, political and ecological control and the violence it inflicts.
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- Date Issued: 2010
Saligia
- Authors: Strydom, Gideon Louwrens
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: Creative writing (Higher education) -- Research -- South Africa , Creative writing -- Fiction , Afrikaans fiction -- Study and teaching (Higher) , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
- Language: Afrikaans
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:6001 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020884
- Description: When her life starts falling apart, a journalist and writer heads for a small rural town. Here the strange and wonderful tales about a local woman ignite her curiosity. As the town's secrets unravel she finds the truth behind all the fantasies. And in fighting her own demons she makes an unusual connection to this woman. She soon realises that this connection holds the key to her own salvation. Or her downfall.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Disco
- Authors: Trantraal, Nathan
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Kaaps , South African fiction (English) -- 21st century , South African poetry (English) -- 21st century , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century , Afrikaans poetry -- 21st century
- Language: Afrikaans , English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/145217 , vital:38419
- Description: Creative writing portfolio.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Hierdie keer gaan nie maklik wees nie
- Authors: Visser, Deon Claudius
- Date: 2021-04
- Subjects: Creative writing (Higher education) -- South Africa , Diaries -- Authorship , Short stories, Afrikaans -- 21st century , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century , Afrikaans fiction -- History and criticism
- Language: Afrikaans
- Type: thesis , text , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/178317 , vital:42929
- Description: My tesis bestaan uit twee versamelings van prosa wat verwant en in noue verband met mekaar tree. Die prosa is fragmentaries en kort maar verbind met ‟n oorkoepelende storie wat in beide Afrikaans en Engels voorgelê word. Die Afrikaanse deel van my tesis ondersoek die verlede, en die Engels die toekoms. My algemene bron van inspirasie vir die struktuur en voorlegging van die tesis word verkry vanaf die klassieke raamverteller konvensie soos gebruik in One Thousand and One Nights, hierdie konvensie maak gebruik van raamfragmente wat binne ‟n groter geheel gevind kan word. Dit is juis hierdie komplekse struktuur wat dit moontlik maak om tyd, hede en verlede asook die toekoms, te kan ondersoek en uit te beeld. Verder maak dit dit ook moontlik om gekoppelde herinneringe, gedagteneigings, en fantasieverhale te kan gebruik as die dryfkrag van die oorkoepelende storie. Met betrekking tot kontemporêre fiksie vind ek die meeste aanklank en invloed by Sandra Cisneros se boek House on Mango Street. Ek het by hierdie verhaal geleer hoe om vignette en kortverhale onafhanklik maar met ‟n motief-verbinding aan mekaar te koppel. Tematies gesproke handel my tesis oor herinneringe, nostalgie, familieverhoudings, die dood asook afsluiting en aanbeweging. In terme van hierdie temas vind ek dat Nathan Trantraal se Chokers en Survivors, en Noudat Slapende Honde deur Ronelda S. Kamfer my die meeste insae gee oor die verhouding tussen Afrikaans en Engels in die literatuur. Verder is Loftus Marais se taalgebruik en die vermenging van taal in Staan in die Algemeen Nader aan Vensters ook insiggewend. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, School of Languages and Literatures, 2021
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- Date Issued: 2021-04