Department of English

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Browsing by Subject "Aesthetics"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Bab’aba - Ugly short stories
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Nxadi, Julie Ruth Sikelwa; Moolman, Kobus
    Bab’aba - Ugly Short Stories is a collection of vignettes whose function is to colour and collage three portraits of Black women characters; namely, a rural woman (Nozikhali), a township teenager (Zola), and a child/baby (Loli). Each of these stories serve as details in each other’s portraits whilst remaining stories on their own. My intention with this collection was to restore some form of abstract equality and right to mystery by functioning within a lexicon of opacity. In the scholarship of decoloniality this is my argument for the legitimacy of vernacular/customised definitions for problems that preoccupy communities/individuals rather than having to always pin ourselves to already existing theory in order to be legible. In the scholarship of opacity, this is a contribution to the argument against the necessity for legibility/transparency (in the first place) in exchange for dignity. I chose ugliness as my thematic district of departure because of its connoted potential to provide richer explorations into notions of marginality and an emancipatory praxis that cannot afford to have in its makeup the potential to seek to eliminate. And though such a liberatory ambition is hard to fantasize about against the backdrop of popular chauvinism in the contemporary landscape of - particularly - South Africa, and the visceral effects thereof and the swift justice needed to attend thereto, I do think that there is merit in hallucinating some sort of doctrine of humanity that ends in dignity for all.
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    Facing the stranger in the mirror: Staged complicities in recent South African performances
    (Routledge, 2011) Flockemann, Miki
    The staging of complicity has developed into one of the most prevalent trends in recent South Africa theatre. The audience may become aware of their own complicity in injustice, or complicity may feature as a subject to be explored in the play. I will argue that one can identify three broadly defined performance modalities which shape current engagements with complicity. These modalities are identified by the adjectives, 'thick' (as in densely layered, complex, deep), 'reflective' (as in reflecting upon as well as revealing), and 'hard' (in the sense of direct, uncompromising, difficult to penetrate). Rather than signifying distinct categories, these terms are attributed to a cluster of performance dynamics.
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    Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics
    (Taylor & Francis, 2010) Flockemann, Miki
    The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?
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    The postcolonial aesthetics of beauty, nature and form: Reading the glass palace, the hungry tide and the shadow lines by Amitav Ghosh
    (University of Western Cape, 2020) Singh, Nehna Daya; Moolla, F. Fiona
    One can think of an aesthetic as one’s artistic mode and purpose. The aesthetic is differently foregrounded in each of Ghosh’s three selected novels: in the first novel studied, aesthetic concerns are linked with beauty. Female beauty in particular, is the primary aesthetic focus in The Glass Palace since it is beauty that inspires love and appreciation. In the second novel, The Hungry Tide, the aesthetic explores techniques of writing that encompass environmental questions. This novel shows nature as its primary aesthetic since it is through the encounter with nature that its aesthetic is realised and an appreciation for all life forms are established.
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    Under the Hibiscus: An eco-critical reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s postcolonial novels
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Khumalo, Sibongile; Taylor, Jane
    literature, music and culture”. As this statement suggests, ecocriticism is concerned with more than the representation of environmental questions in literature. It provides a way of examining the intersections and interconnections between the natural and human worlds. An ecocritical approach can examine the ways in which these interconnections are produced aesthetically in literature of different kinds, and not just literature that is overtly about the environment. I will argue in this thesis that the novels of one of the rising stars of African and world literature, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, are underpinned by an ecological aesthetic in this broad sense, and can, therefore, be read from an ecocritical perspective in the manner implied by Morton. This thesis will show that Adichie’s preoccupation with intersectionalities, interconnections and relationships lend her narratives to an eco-critical inquiry of this kind.