Browsing by Author "Woodward, Wendy"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Amphibious Horses: Beings in the Littoral and Liminal Contact Zones
    (2013) Woodward, Wendy
    Horses galloping in littoral zones are represented as embodying wildness, freedom and a prelapsarian quality. Roy Campbell’s ‘The Horses of the Camargue’ includes themes which recur in texts about littoral horses: the romanticising segue between the horses and the environment they inhabit, the ramifications of wild horse and human entanglement and the unavoidable loss of littoral equine ‘freedom’ when he is trained and/or taken from the sea. Yet Campbell’s poem is dedicated to AF Tschiffely who rode two Criollo horses from Buenos Aires to Washington in 1925. If horses, generally, who cross boundaries between the wild and the tame, answer to those parts of ourselves which long for an uncomplicated connection with wildness, they also embody the potential for cross-species relationships based on training. Wolraad Woltemade’s horse exemplifies equine trusting of a rider; Edwin Muir’s poem, ‘The Horses’, stresses their desires for human connection. This paper will then take a serendipitous journey in the company of threshold beings who whinny littorally through childhood adventure stories, Misty of Chincoteague, and Big Black Horse, and the more sombre tale, The Homecoming, to fetch up on the edges of a dam in Tokai where a herd of horses, and one in particular, surpass youthful fable. Horses are luminous beings who exist liminally as well as literally— in personal myth and in grounded, horse-human relationships on the sandy dressage arena as they teach the rider the stability to connect symbol and ‘reality’, heaven and earth.
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    Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry
    (University of Pretoria, 2018) Woodward, Wendy
    This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic�in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements between human and canine, whether convivial or adversarial, manifest poetically in myriad ways in gendered and/or racialised contexts and analyses how the vulnerabilities of both humans and dogs are made to intersect. Ruth Miller portrays dogs as divine creations who are uncertain and �embarrassed�. Ingrid Jonker�s poems intertwine human and canine, foregrounding gendered vulnerabilities. Where dogs are figured metonymically, entanglements of human and dog break down binary categorisations, in Jonker�s poems as well as in those of other poets.
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    Imagining and imaging the city � Ivan Vladislavi? and the postcolonial metropolis
    (University of Western Cape, 2011) Ngara, Kudzayi Munyaradzi; Woodward, Wendy; Nas, Loes; Versluys, Kristiaan
    This thesis undertakes an analysis of how six published works by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavi? form the perspective of writing the city � Johannesburg � into being. Beginning from the basis that Vladislavi?�s writing constitutes what I have coined dialogic postcolonialism, the thesis engages with both broader contemporary urban and postcolonial theory in order to show the liminal imaginative space that the author occupies in his narrations of Johannesburg. Underlining the notion of postcolonialism being a �work in progress� my thesis problematises the issue of representation of the postcolonial city through different aspects like space, urbanity, identity and the self, and thus locates each of the texts under consideration at a particular locus in Vladislavi?�s representational continuum of the continually transforming city of Johannesburg. Until the recent appearance of Mariginal Spaces � Reading Vladislavi? (2011) the extant critical literature and research on the writing of Ivan Vladislavi? has, as far as I can tell, not engaged with his work as a body of creative consideration and close analysis of the city of Johannesburg. Even this latest text largely consists of previously published reviews and articles by disparate critics and academics. The trend has therefore largely been to analyse the texts separately, without treating them as the building blocks to an ongoing and perhaps unending project of imaginatively bringing the city into being. Such readings have thus been unable to decipher and characterise the threads which have emerged over the period of the writer�s literary engagement with and representation of Johannesburg. I suggest that, as individual texts and as a collection or body of work, Ivan Vladislavi?�s Missing Persons (1989), The Folly (1993), Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), The Restless Supermarket (2006 � first published in 2001), The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what (2006), are engaged in framing representations of the postcolonial city, representations which can in my view best be analysed through the prism of deconstructive engagement. To this end, the thesis examines contemporary South African urbanity or the post-apartheid metropolitan space (as epitomised by the fictive Johannesburg) and how it is represented in literature as changing, and in the process of becoming. As a consequence, the main conclusion I arrive at is on how the irresolvable nature of the city is reflected in the totality of Ivan Vladislavi?�s writing. In that way, it was possible to treat every text in its own right (rather than forcing it to conform to an overarching thesis). This central insight allowed for the effective application of urban theory to the close readings of the texts.
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    Imagining the real-magical realism as a post-colonial strategy for narration of the self in Zakes Mda's Ways of dying and the Madonna of Excelsior
    (University of the Western Cape, 2007) Ngara, Kudzayi Munyaradzi; Woodward, Wendy; Faculty of Arts
    The thesis examines the role of magical realism as a postcolonial trope in Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior. It begins by stating that the author uses magical realism as an alternative strategy for self narration in the face of the dominant ideologies of colonialism (apartheid) and nationalism. Chapter One examines the absurd taxonomies of colour that were legislated under apartheid in South Africa and, using ideas of postcolonial deconstruction, locate Toloki and Niki as characters in existing in incongrous circumstances. Chapter Two shows the strategies adopted by Toloki to fashion his own reality as opposed to accepting a place within a predetermined objective reality. Chapter Three examines the examination of sex as a physical act and the gendered rolesof women. The thesis concludes by considering the place and possiblities of Mda's writing in the canon of Southern African Literature in the light of the rich heritage of elements that are magical on the sub-continent of Africa.