Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (English)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/9290

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The Namib, Kalahari and Karoo: Reading the desert in selected Southern African literature
(University of the Western Cape, 2025) Rawlins Isabel
The world’s desert regions have long inspired the imaginations of writers as landscapes whose aridity exposes the limits and possibilities of life. This thesis examines the lesser-known southern African deserts, the Namib, Kalahari, and Karoo across a range of prose genres. Spanning life writing, social realism, mythic realism, historical fiction, and crime fiction, the selected texts reflect interconnected desert ecologies that draw together human and more-than-human life with the material and the elemental. In inaugurating a desert humanities for southern Africa, this thesis proposes a “garocentric” imaginary that recognises the distinct forms of knowledge, storytelling, and resilience that emerge through aridity. Countering Romantic, colonial, and rugged individualist portrayals of the desert as a void, Henno Martin’s The Sheltering Desert recasts it as a place of shelter. Martin’s desert philosophy interweaves scientific observation with spiritual insight to recognise the distinctive resilience shaped by aridity. Carol Campbell’s two Karoo novels register the changing nature of the landscapes of both the Karoo and a newly democratic South Africa for the itinerant karretjiemense (carting-people). My Children Have Faces uses the natural contours of the desert to drive a narrative in which a family’s identity is rooted in the Karoo. The Tortoise Cried its Only Tear draws upon the region’s mythology to reconnect the protagonist with her lost desert heritage. Moving north to the Kalahari, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather depicts a desert under extreme drought. More-than-human beings, such as birds, illustrate how desert resilience arises through interdependence rather than solitary endurance. André Brink’s An Instant in the Wind, set in the seventeenth century, situates the semi-desert Karoo in relation to South Africa’s forests and coastlines. For the protagonists, their exposure to the elements of wind and sun strips away their prejudices and enables a connection that transcends time, race, and class, envisioning the desert as a space of encounter rather than isolation. Returning to twenty-first century post apartheid South Africa, Karin Brynard’s Homeland stages conflicts surrounding land repatriation in the Kalahari and the ethical implications of European bioprospecting of medicinal desert plants.
That night, this life: essays from a South African story
(University of the Western Cape, 2025) Rennie, Gillian
On 1 May 1993, the same year the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, masked gunmen shot and maimed a young man in his neighbourhood bar in East London, South Africa. He is Neville Beling, 20 years old that night and one of seven survivors permanently disabled while five others were shot dead. At the time, South Africa was in turmoil as its leaders negotiated a complex transition to democracy. Yet, unusually, the Highgate Hotel Massacre was never claimed by a political grouping, and nobody has ever applied for amnesty for the attack. These lacunae have left survivors with the additional devastation of questions with no answers. Ever since this attack on white civilians, Neville has wanted to know who the gunmen were and “why they done what they done”. In 1997, he asked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During a mediation in 2003, he asked the supposed commander of the attackers – only to discover shocking information which altered the course of his life. When we met in 2006, he wanted me, then a journalist and teller of other people’s stories, to tell his. It is now 2025. He is 32 years older than his bullets, and only a little nearer knowing his truth. Meanwhile I, after almost two decades working alongside him, recognise that I am no longer his detached observer and that this is our story as well as South Africa’s. The work of creative nonfiction which constitutes the core of this doctoral submission tells this story via a series of essays, arriving ultimately, in the essaying tradition, at recognitions and insights which were not evident to me at the time of setting out. En route to new understandings and reckonings, the book explores aspects of broad South African themes which animate our evolving relationship and emerge from Neville Beling’s life story. These include truth, reconciliation, trauma, witnessing, narrative, pain, forgiveness, home, auto/biography, memory. They also include whiteness, for both Neville and I are white South Africans coming to postcolonial terms in the land that is our home. It is inimical to creative nonfiction that its practice foregrounds ethical considerations.
Loving children: allegories of nation and family in selected South African texts
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Davis, Tatum
The adult world crucially encompasses children, but research in South African literature has mainly focused on adult worlds, whether white or black. The child, however, is a prominent figure in the poetry and fiction that has tried to capture South African experience in the past, present, and, importantly, implicit projections of the future, through the ways in which children often embody hope for the future. In South Africa, the child is caught up in the politics of the nation through the politics of love and past shame. While it is expected that the child will be loved unconditionally and unfailingly, narratives of love for the child demonstrate the shameful failures of love. Njabulo Ndebele, in Fools and Other Stories, attempts to rewrite the fate of the nation as struggles over black independence emerge, but as Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples shows, loving the child is irrevocably caught within national shame.
Now what? Dystopian futures in South African speculative fiction
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Martin, Caitlin Lisa
This thesis explores the rapidly expanding field of speculative fiction in South Africa through an exploration of Fever (2016) by Deon Meyer; Dub Steps (2015) by Andrew Miller; Triangulum (2019) by Masande Ntshanga; and The Raft (2015) by Fred Strydom. In engaging with these narrations of dystopian futures, the study explores the authors’ representations and conceptions of South Africa. The novels grapple with postapartheid South Africa’s relationship with its pasts, its memories, its failures, and its broken promises, and trace speculative narrative lines into an imagined future. Their future-directed narratives speak in interesting ways to our present conditions.
A fragmented history: visual sites of traumav in Zoë Wicomb's works of fiction
(University of the Western cape, 2024) Petersen, Charlise Wall; Hermann, Wittenberg
This thesis examines key works of fiction by the South African author Zoë Wicomb, re-reading them as engagements with the country’s traumatic apartheid past. A crucial argument advanced is that Wicomb’s prose makes trauma readable and visible through several explicitly visual moments. The thesis argues that Wicomb creates pictures in words, shedding light on the traumatic struggles of people in apartheid and post-apartheid settings and that such ekphrastic descriptions of visual media can make visible states of inner being. Such pivotal visual moments in her fictions include references to images such as photographs, art, and sculpture, but also hallucinations, dreams, or visions. These visual descriptions in the fictions do not only point to historical traumas and acts of violence against black bodies, but are themselves narrated in a broken, dismembered, and discontinuous way, thereby staging a collapse of language. The thesis argues that Zoë Wicomb’s works of fiction consistently explore correspondences between literature and various visual media and that this is one of the hallmarks of her authorship.
A fragmented history: Visual sites of trauma in Zoë Wicomb's works of fiction
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Petersen, Charlise Wall; Wittenberg, Hermann
Words cannot express my gratitude towards my supervisor, Dr Hermann Wittenberg, whose patience, words of encouragement, and outstanding feedback challenged my growth, and gave me the confidence to complete this thesis. I am also grateful for The University of the Western Cape which has always been a welcoming space to conduct my research, and for the Arts Faculty and English Department staff members whose professionalism and passion for learning helped to shape the academic I am today. I am indebted to the generosity of the A.W. Mellon Foundation which allowed me academic freedom, and without which I would not have accomplished this goal. I also wish to offer sincere thanks to my supportive friends and family, both nationally and internationally. Their prayers, texts and words of encouragement truly kept me going. In addition, I would be remiss not to offer a special word of thanks to my amazing mother who is unwavering in kindness and love, and whose support and enthusiasm carried me through the tough times. I hope this achievement makes her proud. I am also grateful for the support of my wonderful husband. He kept me smiling and motivated, carrying the load with me. I am thankful for his loving patience which made this task less daunting. Most chiefly, I owe this achievement to my God whose faithfulness I lean on, and who gave me this passion for academia and writing. All glory belongs to Him.
Bientang’s cave: A trans-disciplinary study of marginality in the epic in Afrikaans
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Phillips, Jolyn; Moolman, Jacobus; Krog, Antjie
This reflexive essay has a creative and an in-depth research component. I sought to write an Epic poem about a marginalised woman known as Bientang. Bientang was a Khoisan, or ‘strandloper’ as Khoisan people were known, in the coastal region of the Southern Cape, featured in several legends from this area. The legends tell of a woman who was supposed to have lived in a cave situated in the Old Harbour in Hermanus. Since then, the cave has had many incarnations and is currently a restaurant called Bientang’s Cave. Writing an Epic poem about a marginalised character is in some ways a contradiction. Therefore, I examine the terms ‘marginalised’ and ‘Epic’ in various ways: firstly, through research into issues of marginalization and creolization, more specifically of fishing communities in the southern Cape; secondly, through research into the characteristics, changes, and manifestations of the Epic in Afrikaans literature, in particular; thirdly, through writing my original Epic poem itself – an accepted form of practice-based research; and fourthly, through translating parts of the poem into English. The critical component of my research consisted of an inquiry into the Epic, especially within a South African context. Various Afrikaans long poems – the long poetic idyll Martjie (1911) by Jan F. E. Cilliers, Raka (1941) by N.P. Van Wyk Louw, Trekkerswee (1947) by D.J.
Signal To Noise: sonic reflections on the South African transition period (1984-1998)
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Swinney, Warrick; Taylor, Jane; Moolman, Jacobus
Background: This dissertation is set against the backdrop of my involvement with Shifty Studios, a small independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg, between 1983 and 1997. Most of this content is drawn from a wide range of reading across subjects generated from anecdotal discussions with involved musicians and friends; some alive, some barely alive and some spectral. The flimsy nature of some of these memories are sources for the creative nonfictional strands that help bind everything together; the aura of the absences contributing, almost metaphysically, to the overall ambience. “Rhizomic assemblage,” a term my supervisors and I bandied about during my MA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, perhaps best describes my (de)constructive methodologies employed here. Early chapters address this together with the psychological self-searching that involved finding solutions to life-long learning disorders and taking strength from others with similar predicaments. David Byrne, in Chapter One, helps in reconfiguring my disorder into a ‘superpower’, while Osip Mandelstam’s advice to “make a wry face in remembering the past” (109) situates, for me, the human in the humanities.
Bildungsroman writing by women in Africa and in the African diaspora
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Bivan, Amos Dauda; Sithole, Nkosinathi
The Bildungsroman has from inception traditionally been a male-dominated genre, but a number of significant women-authored novels written in the 20th century disrupt these established patterns. The thesis demonstrates how women authors of African descent are deconstructing, reappropriating, and reimagining the Bildungsroman genre to create space for black women protagonists in various geohistorical contexts. The thesis employs a critical framework that draws on concepts from Helen Tiffin's idea of counter-discourse narratives, as well as discourses on feminist criticism more generally. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, Maru by Bessie Head, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Beyond the Horizon by Amma Darko, and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are among the novels by African and African-American women writers analyzed for this study using such frameworks. As opposed to the individualistic male protagonists of traditional Bildungsromane, the texts examined in this thesis are found to demonstrate a sense of sisterhood instead of male heroic self-actualization. Instead of the Bildungsroman's typical story arc, which involves the development of a European young male character into adulthood these novels exemplify collective female experience.
The buried chameleon: A novel and critical reflective essay
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Fick, Cornelia Elizabeth; Moolla, Fiona
The critical-reflective component of the novel The Buried Chameleon explores the background to the writing of the novel, how I conducted my research, the challenges of writing a historical and contemporary dual narrative, why I chose the romance genre and the application of the theory of romance as national allegory in a South African context to my work. The objective is to consider how slavery shaped love relations in early South Africa while indirectly continuing to influence the construction of contemporary identities. My novel positions itself in relation to a number of local and international intertexts about slavery. Local intertexts comprise five historical novels, namely, Islands (2000) by Dan Sleigh, Turning Wheels (1937) by Stuart Cloete, An Instant in the Wind (2008) by Andr� Brink, Unconfessed (2007) by Yvette Christians� and The Slave Book (1998) by Rayda Jacobs, all of which highlight romantic relationships in ways that read history through concerns contemporary with the writing of the novel.
�Ag sjeim, siestog, sorry�: Tracing shame�s affect through performance in post-apartheid South Africa
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Wiese, Abigail; Taylor, Jane; Moolman, Jacobus
In this study I investigate what performance as a medium can contribute to our understanding of shame's affect. Given the difficulty of defining and concretising affect according to set parameters and outcomes, critical and dynamic debates about its nature continue. Most recently, New Affect theorists such as Brian Massumi have explored the role of the body in affective meaning-making. Our current social context requires a critical engagement with the forms of affect in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the intangible structures of power and oppression, as well as of desire, interest and pleasure. My aim is to determine the ways in which performance � as a medium through which to navigate an often difficult, evasive and deeply subjective experience � can facilitate a knowledge of how bodies experience, relate to and process shame.
Zimbabwe/Rhodesia writing home: Space, place, mobility and diasporic identity in selected novels
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Phepheng, Maruping; Moolla, Fiona
This thesis examines how �unhomeliness� in a Zimbabwean context enjoins mobility and the diasporic particularities that manifest as subjects move back and forth in a homemaking journey between the country-side and the urban, as well as mobility to foreign countries and back to the homeland. Particularities of inclusion and exclusion, (re)emplacement, (re)identity, assimilation, rejection and (un)belonging, all loom large as mobility, paradoxically, takes root and comes to shape experience in as significant a way as being in a homeland or hostland. This thesis is also about the ways in which the �diasporic� settler, in one of the novels which destabilises the familiar paradigms of diasporic literature, can exist and be dominant in the foreign but colonised spatial setting without needing to assimilate, and how this attempt to territorialise can traumatise those marginalised by the settler community. Since the end of the twentieth century, there has been a rise in the significance of space in humanities and literary studies. Theories about diaspora, identity and belonging have featured strongly in works of scholars of space and place such as Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, Tim Cresswell, Nigel Thrift, Robin Cohen, John Agnew, and Kelly Baker. Space is largely regarded as a dimension within which matter is located.
Eros and politics: Love and its discontents in the fiction of Ng?g? wa Thiong�o
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Annin, Felicia; Moolla, Fiona
In this study I focus on how Ng?g? wa Thiong�o�s fiction portrays his socio-political vision through the prevalence of the intimate relationships it displays. The study critically analyses the significant role romantic love and friendship play in the novels The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari (1987) and Wizard of the Crow (2006) against the backdrop of Ng?g?�s other fiction, plays and non-fiction. Ng?g? identifies himself as a Marxist, anti-colonialist/imperialist, and anti-capitalist writer, for whom there is no contradiction between aesthetic and political missions. The aesthetic and political projects take form through the representation, very importantly, of romantic love in his fiction. The significance of eros, which is clear in the fiction, is not, however, present in Ng?g?�s theoretical reflections on his writing as formulated in his essays. In Ng?g?�s early novels, we see love attempting to break the boundaries of religion and class in the creation of a modern nation-state. But there are obstacles to these attempts at national unity through love, the only relationship apart from friendship that is self-made, and not determined by kinship relations. In the fiction from the middle of Ng?g?�s career, we see romantic love consummated in marriage. The achievement of unity is, however, undercut by betrayal, which is a repeated theme in all the novels. The �betrayal� of the ideal of romantic love by materialism is the most significant threat to love. Friendship emerges in one of the later novels as a kind of �excursus� to romantic love that foregrounds, by default, the ways in which Ng?g?�s political vision seeks be consolidated through the personal relationship of romantic love. In Ng?g?�s final novel, we see his personal and political visions coming together in a utopian erotic union for first time. Because of the nature of the exploration, which aims at opening up the wider significance of eros, the study is not framed by a dominant theory, most of which would lead to understanding eros through gender and power relations. Instead, the study has been framed through concepts and debates on romantic love that emerge in sociology, anthropology, philosophy and literary history.
The jewelled net: Towards a Southern African theory/ practice of environmental literacy
(University of the Western Cape, 1999) Martin, Julia
This thesis suggests that there is an urgent need for academic work in literary and cultural studies to become more responsive to the contemporary eco-social crisis of environment and development. Questioning the sustainability of current practices, I introduce an approach which has emerged in the attempt to reorient my own work in English Studies towards what I call environmental literacy. My discussion consists of a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue. The prologue is a story essay which presents through metaphor and narrative some of the questions which later chapters explore in more familiarly academic register. Chapters One and Two assemble the theoretical tools which have shaped my priorities. The first situates the project in terms of issues in South African eco-politics, and goes on to introduce potentially useful models in eco-criticism , environmental history, ecological philosophy and feminist theory. The second chapter argues that elements in Mahayana Buddhism (specifically teachings on emptiness and dependent arising and their relation to compassion) offer suggestive models for further radicalizing our theory I practice. The following degree chapters experiment with writing environmentally literate responses to several texts (one historical and the rest contemporary). Chapter Three is an appreciative reading of the representation of the Garden in William Blake's poem The Book of Thel (1789), Chapter Four brings personal narrative into an analysis of Gary Snyder's epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Chapter Five is a critical survey of eco-cultural texts produced in South Africa during the period 1986- 1996. In Chapter Si.." I report on some of the pedagogical implications of thee orientation 1 have described , drawing on thee experience of teaching at the University of the Western Cape. The epilogue is brief and imagistic. The written text of the thesis is accompanied by pictures of people, plants and places.
Place, space and patriarchal femininities in selected contemporary novels by African women writers
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Steenkamp, Lize-Maree; Moolla, Fiona
In much feminist literature, women�s spaces are analysed as constructive and supportive sites that may offer respite from patriarchy. However, women�s spaces are not inherently emancipatory. Through the socio-spatial dispersal of patriarchal power, places and spaces varying in scale � nations, cities, rural towns, private-public places and the home � can construct women who further the interests of men. Specifically, homosocial spaces, spaces where women interact with other women, can produce femininities that oppress other women by actively advancing patriarchal concerns. The selected primary texts consider spaces in regionally diverse but socially similar African contexts: Sefi Atta�s Swallow (2011) and Lola Shoneyin�s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives (2010) are set in Nigeria, Miral al-Tahawy�s The Tent (1998) is set in Egypt, while Leila Aboulela�s Lyrics Alley (2010) is set in both Egypt and Sudan. I use the selected novels as cartographies for socio-geographical inquiry to establish how space and place construct patriarchal women. Literary spaces and places are studied from largest to smallest scale: The analysis of national spaces in the novels is followed by a study of urban and rural spaces, followed by private-public places, domestic place and, finally, at a micro-scale, the body-as-place. The analyses of these literary spaces will reveal the mechanisms by which patriarchal women are spatially produced, and may use space to oppress other women.
The post-genocidal condition: Ghosts of genocide, genocidal violence, and representation
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Van Der Rede, Lauren; Van Bever Donker, Maurits; Pillay, Suren
As a literary intervention, The Post-Genocidal Condition: Ghosts of Genocide, Genocidal Violence, and Representation is situated at the intersection of genocide studies, psychoanalysis, and literature so as to enable a critical engagement with the question of genocide and an attempt to think beyond its formulation as phenomenon. As the dominant framework for thinking genocide within international jurisprudence, and operating as the guiding terrain for interventions by scholars such as Mamood Mamdani, Linda Melvern, and William Schabas, the presumption that genocide may be reduced to a marked beginning and end, etched out by the limits of its bloodiness, is, I argue, incomplete and thus a misdiagnosis of the problem, to various effects. Moreover, I contend that it is this misdiagnosis that has led to what I name as the post-genocidal condition: a deferred return to the latent violences of genocide; enabled often through various mechanisms of transitional justice. This intervention is not a denial that under the rubric of the crime of genocide, as an attempt to destroy in whole or in part what Raphael Lemkin referred to as an �enemy group�, millions of people have died. Rather what I posit is that the physical violence of genocide is a false limit � that the bloodiness of genocide has been mistaken for the thing-in-itself. Thus this intervention is an attempt to offer another way of thinking the question of genocide by reading it as concept, enabling a consideration of its more latent violences, its ghosts. As such, I argue that genocide is first an attack on the minds of the persons who form the targeted people or group, through the destruction of cultural apparatuses, such as books, works of art, and the language of a people, to name but a few; and is lastly an attempt to physically exterminate a people. Thus this intervention invites a return to Lemkin�s formulation of the term in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944); that the word genocide is meant to �signify�, and as such offers a reading of the question of genocide as signifier, understood, I suggest, in the Lacanian sense. Thus, I posit that genocide, as signifier, operates on both the levels of metaphor and metonym, and as such both condenses and displaces its violence(s). The metaphor for genocide as signifier is, furthermore, rather than the signifying chain as Lacan would have it, the network. As such genocide is marked as text, rather than work; its perpetrators not authors, as Lemkin and various pieces of legislation have described them, but writers; and those who engage with the question of genocide, to whatever degree, as readers rather than critics. Consequently, this intervention stages the question of the reach of impunity and complicity, beyond the limit of judicial guilt and innocence. Metonymically, the relational displacement at work within the network of genocide allows for a reading of the various constitutive examples of the violence(s) that, in combinations and as collective, produce a new signification, other than that of the definitional referent.
Cinematic and photographic aesthetics in the novels of J.M. Coetzee
(The University of the Western Cape, 2017) Gilburt, Iona; Wittenberg, Hermann
This thesis will examine the extensive cinematic and photographic visuality inscribed in the fictions of J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee's prose is inflected by a complex intermediality that references media aesthetics, practices, and genres, as well as creating linkages to specific film texts. This study will examine a range of Coetzee's writings but will pay particular attention to his second novel In the Heart of the Country (1977), which will be used as a lens to explore the visuality of Coetzee's earlier and later fictions. In the Heart of the Country, it will be shown, employs innovative film techniques that reflect the influence of 1960s avant-garde cinema, with strong ties to two films in particular: Andrzej Munk's Pasaerka (1963), and Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965). A comparative analysis of the novel with Coetzee's unrealised screenplay adaptation will be used to show that these cinematic influences extend to narrative experimentation and theoretical engagements with time. This will be followed by an intensive exploration of the cinematographic aesthetic in Life & Times of Michael K (1983). Coetzee's two Karoo novels, it will be shown, employ film effects to a degree that sets them apart from his other fictions, rendering these texts as cinematographic counterparts. The study of photography will then examine how Coetzee's theoretical understanding of the image enables him to utilise and extend the narrative power of the photographic medium in three ways: by inscribing important narratives within individual images, by employing the photograph as a method of characterisation, and by simulating the photographic processes of capture and development during key narrative events. Although this exploration of photography will reference several of Coetzee's fictions, analysis will focus predominantly on Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country, and Slow Man (2005).
What lies beneath tutors' feedback? Examining the role of feedback in developing 'knowers' in English studies
(The University of the Western Cape, 2017) van Heerden, Martina; Clarence, Sherran; Bharuthram, Sharita
Feedback plays an important role in student learning and development in higher education. However, for various reasons, it is often not as effective as it should be. Many studies have attempted to �solve� the feedback situation by finding new ways to give feedback, or by exploring the various perceptions around feedback to see where the problem lies. In many of these studies, however, the purpose of feedback within disciplines are taken for granted or not actively made visible. This study therefore explores how (or whether) the practice of feedback aligns with the often hidden, taken for granted purpose of feedback in a discipline. The study focused specifically on English Studies, an undergraduate first year literature course at the University of the Western Cape. As the nature of the discipline is often invisible, even to those who are familiar with the course, the study drew on Legitimation Code Theory, and specifically the dimensions of Specialisation and Semantics, to make the invisible purpose of the discipline more visible. In so doing, it sought to enable a clearer understanding of what the purpose of feedback should be; namely, consistent with the underlying purpose of the discipline. English Studies was classified as a rhizomatic knower code, which means that what is valued in the discipline is not possessing knowledge as a study-able concept, but rather possessing the required aptitudes, attitudes, and dispositions. Feedback plays an important role in developing these knower attributes. The study took a qualitative case study approach to obtain a full, detailed account of tutors� feedback-giving practices. Data was collected from a small group of participant tutors, via questionnaires, focus group meetings, individualised interviews, and written feedback on sample essays provided by the tutors. 962 comments, spread over 65 essays, were analysed. The study found that, in terms of Specialisation, there was a misalignment between the purpose and the practice of feedback: feedback did not predominantly and/or progressively focus more on making the knower code more visible. Instead, the feedback was largely focused on a relativist code and a knowledge code. This indicates that students may be being misled about what is valued in the discipline. Additionally, in terms of Semantics, it was found that the feedback, given on single-draft submissions, would be more useful in a drafting cycle and that learning from the feedback was made difficult by the context-dependent comments that were either too complex to be enacted, or would be more appropriate in a drafting cycle. Ultimately, it was found that if there is not a careful consideration of what feedback should focus on, students may be misled about what is valued in the discipline. This could have effects beyond merely passing or failing the course.
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.
Shadows, faces and echoes of an African war: The Rhodesian bush war through the eyes of Chas Lotter � soldier poet
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Hagemann, Michael Eric; Field, Roger Michael
Poetry that is rooted in that most extreme of human experiences, war, continues to grip the public imagination. When the poetry under scrutiny comes from the "losing side" in a colonial war of liberation, important moral and ethical questions arise. In this thesis, I examine the published and unpublished works of Chas Lotter, a soldier who fought in the Rhodesian Army during the Zimbabwean liberation war (1965- 1980). In investigating Lotter's artistic record of this war, I propose that a powerful, socially embedded Rhodesian national mythology was a catalyst for acceptance of, and participation in, the Rhodesian regime's ideological and military aims. A variety of postcolonial theoretical approaches will be used to explore the range of thematic concerns that emerge and to unpack the dilemmas experienced by a soldier-poet who took part in that conflict. Trauma theory, too, will be drawn upon to critically respond to the personal impact that participation in organized violence has upon combatants and non-combatants alike. The production and marketing of this cultural record will also be examined and in the conclusion, I speculate on the changes modern technology and evolving social mores may have on future developments in war literature. Finally, I conclude my case for installing the challenging work of this often conflicted and contradictory soldier-poet as a necessary adjunct to the established canon of Zimbabwean Chimurenga writing.

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