Magister Artium - MA (English)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/16395

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Browsing by Author "Brown, Duncan"

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    Argonaut
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Smith, Hélène; Brown, Duncan
    Argonaut is a book written in the genre of creative non-fiction to fulfil the requirements of a master’s degree in creative writing in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. As a result of chronic anxiety and unbearable physiological symptoms, I entered therapy as a twenty-four-year-old, where I discovered that I had very few memories before the age of 14, and this unearthed a compulsion to recall and understand what happened to me as a child. Argonaut documents the process of recovering and piecing together my life story by combining fragments of memories, chronic physical and psychological symptoms, dreams, and the analysis of these dreams. In the process I discover a history of trauma that was deliberately obfuscated, denied and buried by the adults in my life while I was a child. The book weaves together the themes of trauma, posttraumatic stress and post-traumatic growth, and uses the discipline of depth psychology as a lens through which to view and understand my psyche, its experiences, and its coping mechanisms, one of which was to repress my unbearable and unacceptable memories. Depth psychology focuses on the functioning and role of the unconscious mind and its processes, which are often symbolically expressed in the form of dreams and body symptoms. With depth psychology as a theoretical framework, Argonaut explores the connections between my internal psychic landscapes and the external landscape of real-life choices, behaviours and events. From a literary perspective, the book weaves together the psychic imagery of the unconscious mind with the external imagery of the human and natural environments, elucidating the intimate and meaningful ways in which our experiences of these different worlds are linked. The story also explores the complicated psychological vacillation between the repression and the recovery of memories.
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    South African crime fiction and the narration of the post-apartheid
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Fletcher, Elizabeth; Brown, Duncan
    In this dissertation, I consider how South African crime fiction, which draws on a long international literary history, engages with the conventions and boundaries of the genre, and how it has adapted to the specific geographical, social, political and historical settings of South Africa. A key aspect of this research is the work’s temporal setting. I will focus on local crime fiction which is set in contemporary South Africa as this enables me to engage with current perceptions of South Africa, depicted by contemporary local writers. My concern is to explore how contemporary South African crime fiction narrates post-apartheid South Africa. Discussing Margie Orford’s Daddy’s Girl and the possibilities of South African feminist crime fiction, my argument shoes how Orford narrates post-apartheid through the lens of the oppression and abuse of women. The next chapter looks at Roger Smith’s thriller Mixed Blood. Smith presents the bleakest outlook for South Africa and I show how, even though much of his approach may appear to be ‘radical’, the nihilism in his novel shows a deep conservatism. The third South African crime novel I examine is Diale Thlolwe’s Ancient Rites and I discuss it in the light of his use of the conventions of ‘hardboiled’ crime fiction as well as rural/urban collocations. In this case, the author’s representation of postapartheid South Africa appears to reveal more about the author’s personal views than the country he attempts to describe. The fourth and final novel I discuss is Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer. My discussion here focuses on the notion of justice in post-apartheid South Africa and Meyer’s ambiguous treatment of the subject. This discussion of contemporary South African crime fiction reveals what the genre might offer readers in the way they understand post-apartheid South Africa, and how it might be seen as more than simple ‘entertainment’.