Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (English)
This study aims to explore the creative interaction between narrative form and ideology in the inaugural novels by Nicholas Murhandziwa [Niq] Mhlongo and Kabelo Sello Duiker. To this end, the thesis uses Fredric Jameson’s conception of literary texts as socially symbolic acts as a theoretical framework to examine and explore the contradictions of youthful being in a social and cultural space, struggling to emerge from a colonial past, marked by increasing class stratification in the present.
These inaugural texts (Duiker’s Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams as well as Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog and After Tears) will be read as socially symbolic acts within their social and political context. In other words, they will not be read as mere transmitters of their historical context or as aesthetic forms divorced from their extra-textual reality. A contextual scrutiny without any regard to literary form will render these texts inert reflections of their social and political context. In similar vein, an examination of form without paying due regard to the social and political context makes the choice of the aesthetic form seem arbitrary. Therefore, this study using Jameson’s theoretical framework, will read these literary texts as dynamic agents within the social context in which they are embedded.
In addition, this study will read these texts as embodiments of unresolved textual tensions, ideological contradictions and multiplicity of voices. These narratives challenge the critical scholarship that attempt to read them as having a singular message and monological meaning, because they are a composite of contradicting ideological positions and multiplicity of voices...