Department of English

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"The enemy of the absolute": Women in the early poetry of T.S.ELIOT
(University of Western Cape, 2002) Birch, Alannah; Birch, Alannah
Mathew Arnold's 1867 poem presents romantic love as a condition of permanence that can offer refuge from a changeable world. Sixty years later, however, Virginia Woolf observes that romance has become rare as a subject of modern poetry. Her suggestion that there is an historical explanation for this change in literary subject matter is the starting point for this study of the representation of women in the early poetry of T.S. Eliot. Whereas Woolf tentatively dates the "death" of romance to the First World War I will suggest that this change in poetic sentiment is evident in Eliot's early work, some of which predates the war. In the poems under discussion, written between the years 1910 ("Portrait of a Lady" and "The Love Song of J.
Gender and landscape in the works of Olive Schreiner
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Jacobs, Nicolette; Birch, Alannah
My research will focus on the relationship between gender and landscape as portrayed in Olive Schreiner’s first published novel, The Story of an African Farm, and her much later novel, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, with reference to her letters and the non-fictional text, Woman and Labour. In The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner explores a young person’s viewpoints on religion, feminism and the social and physical environment of the Cape Colony. Published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Irons and widely recognised as among the first South African novels, the novel shows Schreiner’s interest in the emergence of female subjectivity revealed through the protagonist, Lyndall, in a landscape shaped by social hierarchies.
Haunting temporalities: Creolisation and black women's subjectivities in the diasporic science fiction of Nalo Hopkinson
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Volschenk, Jacolien; Birch, Alannah; Flockemann, Marika
This study examines temporal entanglement in three novels by Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson. The novels are: Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and The Salt Roads (2004). The study pays particular attention to Hopkinson's use of narrative temporalities, which are shape by creolisation. I argue that Hopkinson creatively theorises black women's subjectivities in relation to (post) colonial politics of domination. Specifically, creolised temporalities are presented as a response to predatory Western modernity. Her innovative diasporic science fiction displays common preoccupations associated with Caribbean women writers, such as belonging and exile, and the continued violence enacted by the legacy of colonialism and slavery. A central emphasis of the study is an analysis of how Hopkinson not only employs a past gaze, as the majority of both Caribbean and postcolonial writing does to recover the subaltern subject, but also how she uses the future to reclaim and reconstruct a sense of selfhood and agency, specifically with regards to black women. Linked to the future is her engagement with notions of technological and social betterment and progress as exemplified by her emphasis on the use of technology as a tool of empire. By writing science fiction, Hopkinson is able to delve into the nebulous nexus of technology, empire, slavery, capitalism and modernity. And, by employing a temporality shaped by creolisation, she is able to collapse discrete historical time-frames, tracing obscured connections between the nodes of this nexus from its beginnings on the plantation, the birthplace of creolisation and, as some have argued, of modernity itself.
Imagining what it means to be ''human'' through the fiction of J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K and Cormac McCarthy's The Road
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Welsh, Sasha; Birch, Alannah
Through a literary analysis of two contemporary novels, J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), in which a common concern seems to be an exploration of what it means to be human, the thesis seeks to explore the relationship between human consciousness and language. This dissertation considers the development of a conception of the human based on rationality, and which begins in the Italian Renaissance and gains momentum in the Enlightenment. This conception models the human as a stable knowable self. This is drawn in contrast to the novels, which figure the absence of a stable knowable self in the representation of their protagonists. The thesis thus interrogates language's capacity to provide definitional meanings of the ''human.'' On the other hand, although language's capacity to provide essential meanings is questioned, its abundant expressive forms give voice to the experience of human being. Drawing on a range of fields of enquiry, both philosophical, linguistic, and bio-ethical, this thesis seeks to explore the connection between human consciousness and the medium of language. It considers how the two novels in question play with the concept of language to produce or imagine other ways of thinking about human existence, and other ways of creating meaning to human existence through the representation of their novels.
Shelleyan monsters: the figure of Percy Shelley in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Van Wyk, Wihan; Birch, Alannah
This thesis will examine the representation of the figure of Percy Shelley in the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). My hypothesis is that Percy Shelley represents to Mary Shelley a figure who embodies the contrasting and more startling aspects of both the Romantic Movement and the Enlightenment era. This I will demonstrate through a close examination of the text of Frankenstein and through an exploration of the figure of Percy Shelley as he is represented in the novel. The representation of Shelley is most marked in the figures of Victor and the Creature, but is not exclusively confined to them. The thesis will attempt to show that Victor and the Creature can be read as figures for the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements respectively. As several critics have noted, these fictional protagonists also represent the divergent elements of Percy Shelley’s own divided personality, as he was both a dedicated man of science and a radical Romantic poet. He is a figure who exemplifies the contrasting notions of the archetypal Enlightenment man, while simultaneously embodying the Romantic resistance to some aspects of that zeitgeist. Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in the novel by contemporary authors, biographers and playwrights, who have responded to it in a range of literary forms. I will pay particular attention to Peter Ackroyd’s, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2011), which shows that the questions Frankenstein poses to the reader are still with us today. I suggest that this is one of the main impulses behind this recent resurgence of interest in Mary Shelley’s novel. In particular, my thesis will explore the idea that the question of knowledge itself, and the scientific and moral limits which may apply to it, has a renewed urgency in early 21st century literature. In Frankenstein this is a central theme and is related to the figure of the “modern Prometheus”, which was the subtitle of Frankenstein, and which points to the ambitious figure who wishes to advance his own knowledge at all costs. I will consider this point by exploring the ways in which the tensions embodied by Percy Shelley and raised by the original novel are addressed in these contemporary texts. The renewed interest in these questions suggests that they remain pressing in our time, and continue to haunt us in our current society, not unlike the Creature in the novel.
A study of Roy Campbell as a South African modernist poet
(University of the Western Cape, 2013) Birch, Alannah; Parr, A.N
Roy Campbell was once a key figure in the South African literary canon. In recent years, his poetry has faded from view and only intermittent studies of his work have appeared. However, as the canon of South African literature is redefined, I argue it is fruitful to consider Campbell and his work in a different light. This thesis aims to re-read both the legend of the literary personality of Roy Campbell, and his prose and poetry written during the period of �high� modernism in England (the 1920s and 1930s), more closely in relation to modernist concerns about language, meaning, selfhood and community. It argues that his notorious, purportedly colonial, �hypermasculine� personae, and his poetic and personal explorations of �selfhood�, offer him a point of reference in a rapidly changing literary and social environment. Campbell lived between South Africa and England, and later Provence and Spain, and this displacement resonated with the modernist theme of �exile� as a necessary condition for the artist. I will suggest that, like the Oxford dandies whom he befriended, Campbell�s masculinist self-styling was a reaction against a particular set of patriarchal traditions, both English and colonial South African, to which he was the putative heir. His poetry reflects his interest in the theme of the �outsider� as belonging to a certain masculinist literary �tradition�. But he also transforms this theme in accordance with a �modernist� sensibility.

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