Browsing by Author "Rossmann, Jean."

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A critical analysis of uncanny characters in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and The Graveyard Book.
(2018) Govender, Kamalini.; Rossmann, Jean.
In this dissertation I examine uncanny characters in Neil Gaiman’s novels Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008). I explore what constitutes uncanny characters in his narratives and the consequent effects these characters have on protagonists’ identities: their self-awareness and acknowledgement of alterity. Both novels have been classified under an experimental genre, Children’s Gothic, known for negotiating identity, making use of elements of horror and using allegorical versions of contemporary cultural debates (Jackson 2017). While critics like Richard Gooding (2008) and David Rudd (2008) have explored the uncanny in Coraline for its adolescent maturation and identity formation, dependent on traditional psychoanalytic paradigms of separating the child from the mother figure, I rely on contemporary re-readings of Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny” (1919) in conjunction with Carl Jung’s notion of “the shadow” to reveal how protagonists in Gaiman’s two novels gain self-awareness and an acceptance of ‘the other’. Through an analysis of the ghost-witch-child, Liza Hempstock in The Graveyard Book, and the beldam or Other Mother in Coraline, I reveal how their uncanniness (ambivalence, uncertainty and unhomeliness) blurs binarist notions of good/evil as well as hegemonies of gender, race and religion. As a ghost from the Elizabethan era, Liza reveals the presence of the past and forms of persecution and violence that are transhistorical (witch-hunts, child oppression and Antisemitism). Not dissimilar to Liza, I argue that the Other Mother’s doubling and ambivalence (good/evil, mothering/malign, human/monster) provides a powerful, transgressive alternative to limiting patriarchal definitions of the feminine. Both the Other Mother and Liza thus challenge oppressive forms of thinking and become catalysts for positive change in the protagonists’ sense of self. An understanding of how the uncanny works will assist readers in coming-to-grips with social anxieties involved in living in a multiple society, in which one is constantly confronted by alterity. Gaiman’s novels teach lessons in transforming the fear of the other into a moment of possibility. For this reason, I argue that Gaiman’s novels are relevant to the South African milieu, and share similarities with certain South African Children’s (or Young Adult) Gothic novels, such as Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now (2013). Through a comparison of uncanny characters in Human’s and Gaiman’s novels, I argue for a space for Children’s Gothic in the South African literary landscape. Through uncanny characters, Gothic has the unique capacity to co-opt young readers into the process of disrupting borders, renegotiating identities and bringing about individual and cultural transformation.
Impossible closeness: intimacies and transgressive desire in Park Chan-wook’s Stoker and The Handmaiden.
(2022) Naidu, Rasmika.; Rossmann, Jean.
This dissertation examines the representation of intimacies and transgressive desires in Park Chan-wook’s films Stoker (2013) and The Handmaiden (2016). I argue that these queer coming-of-age films represent women as active agents in their quests toward self-awakening and emancipation from patriarchal control (Mulvey 1989; Dworkin 2000). Indeed, transgression and taboo are two primary tropes in these narratives of queer sexual awakening. The films are compelling in their depiction of queer intimacies and the quest for an impossible closeness. Both plots play upon gendered expectations by presenting female protagonists who seemingly conform to patriarchal norms, only to dupe male characters (and the audience) and overturn these expectations with dramatic effect. I approach these films through the lens of queer and feminist theory, along with feminist film theory (Laura Mulvey and Kaja Silverman). My analysis of the representation of eroticism and intimacy in the films is informed by a critical lexicon provided by Georges Bataille, Karmen MacKendrick and Michel Foucault. This study considers Park’s role as a hybrid auteur and his capacity to occupy a liminal zone between art and commercial cinema, allowing him to access a wide and diverse audience. In my analysis of The Handmaiden, I explore the film’s self-reflexive interrogation of pornography’s objectifying power and the difficulty of representing women’s desires in cinema. Moreover, I explore how the inversion of gender power dynamics in the film highlights the illusory nature of phallic power, thus exposing the fantasy of male subjectivity, with its assumptions of mastery, authority, and sufficiency. Furthermore, I also explore how eroticism and intimacy are used as tools for liberation by the female protagonists. In my analysis of Stoker, I situate the film as a neo-noir thriller that co-opts elements of the bildungsroman to tell the coming-of-age tale of a fille fatale. I analyse scenes in the film that highlight the awakening of the protagonist’s killer/sexual awakening, the fluidity of sadomasochistic attractions and the quest for limit experiences that reveal the interconnectedness of violence, pleasure, and power. Reading through the lens of Silverman’s critique of the Oedipus complex, I outline how India rejects Oedipalisation. Focussing on the leitmotif of shoes, I discuss the film’s subversive rewriting of two traditional fairy tales, imagining an unrestrained feminine desire. In conclusion, I consider the transformative ethics of Park’s films, and how through vicariously sharing in the rebellious boundary-breaking of Park’s female protagonists, queer cinema encourages viewers to question heteronormative views on sexuality, intimacy and desire, inviting us to “to take a fresh look at our gaze (and our gays)” (Boyle 2012: 67).
Okorafor’s organic fantasy: an Africanfuturist approach to science fiction and gender in Lagoon.
(2021) Banks, Brett Taylor.; Rossmann, Jean.; Kayat, Jethro Anthony.
SThis dissertation critically examines Nnedimma Nkemdili (Nnedi) Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014a) in terms of how it exemplifies Africanfuturism. I will explore how Okorafor conceptualises her own genre – Africanfuturism – in contradistinction from western speculative fiction as well as from Afrofuturism. To explore Lagoon’s experimental form, I adapt Francis Nyamnjoh’s convivial theory (2015) to estrange postmodernism from its western context, providing an African critical vocabulary to describe Lagoon’s experimental ‘postmodern’ narrative style. I also apply Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg ([1985] 2016a) to explore the gendered and ecocritical dimensions of the novel. The cyborg provides a useful analytical tool and lexicon for exploring pluralistic gender identities as it represents an ‘other’ identity which “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway, 2016a). This dissertation explores how Lagoon challenges western cultural hegemony and recentres Africa in the global imaginary by taking the traditional tools of science fiction (advanced technology, magical powers, ‘first contact’ narratives) and subverts or reappropriates them to suit the goals of Africanfuturism. I focus on the plurivocal, fragmented structure of the novel and argue that Okorafor includes these elements to celebrate perpetual incompleteness and the reliance of the individual on the collective, rather than the superiority of individual subjectivity. For Okorafor, ontological ‘incompleteness’ (as propounded by Nyamnjoh) is the recognition of the self’s capacity for growth and new connections/understandings of our relationship to the natural world rather than a terminal point of development or a signal for nihilistic despair. My employment of Donna Haraway’s theorisation of the cyborg identity and the chimeric nature it propounds helps explore the gendered aspects of the novel. I also seek to link the concepts of ecological degradation and the patriarchal oppression of women to one of the broader goals of Okorafor’s Africanfuturism, which is to create a space for literature which is free from the oppressive binary codes of western imperialism. Lastly, I highlight the broader significance of Africanfuturist narratives in a post-colonial literary context, and comment on the broader ethical and political implications of Okorafor’s Africanfuturist project by discussing the potential of speculative fiction and Africanfuturism
Orion, Ram's-horn and Labyrinth : quest and creativity in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum.
(2014) Rossmann, Jean.; Stobie, Cheryl.
This study of Marlene Van Niekerk’s three novels, Triomf, Agaat, and Memorandum, explores the motifs of quest and creativity, and their association with the spiritual and numinous. Notions of self-creation, the imaginative re-creation of reality and the relationship between creativity, self-awakening and revelation are explored in an analysis of Van Niekerk’s novels. This thesis considers the encounter with alterity as a catalyst for undoing the boundaries of the self that leads to “profane illumination” and transformation. Van Niekerk’s characters confront alterity on numerous levels: their own abjection, death, the racial other, and the experience of alterity in artistic creation. It is worth noting that the characters who form the focus of this study – Mol, Treppie, Agaat, Milla, Jakkie and Wiid – are story-tellers and myth-makers, and that their creative use of symbol, myth and metaphor stimulate self-transformation. This study illuminates the relatively unexplored domain of the mystical and spiritual in Van Niekerk’s novels. This focus emerges within the context of a renewed interest in the spiritual within the humanities. Van Niekerk’s writing resonates with an integralist conception of spirituality that includes aesthetic experience, magic, and a sense of the sacred as embodied and demotic. The concern with immanence and non-dualism in Van Niekerk’s novels is typical of postmodern spirituality, and resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on art and the Dionysian worldview. For Nietzsche art is spiritual, turning the individual into a creator and “transfigurer” of existence. Through the lens of Nietzsche’s writings on the artist-philsopher, I explore the motif of a spiritual-ethical and aesthetic quest toward a greater openness to alterity, to the world, and toward cosmic interconnectedness. Chapter One offers a reading of Triomf, focussing on the antithetical perspectives of Treppie and Mol, and their ontological quests. I explore Mol’s abjection in terms of Luce Irigaray’s writings on female mysticism, looking at Mol as a burlesque Mary/Martha figure. I explore Mol’s mystical quest, her compassion, and her affinity with alterity, which allows her to become the creator of her own cosmology. Conversely, I explore Treppie’s quest toward becoming an artist-philosopher. In the conclusion to this chapter I examine the implications of Treppie’s and Mol’s cosmic gaze and their different ontological outlooks.
A study of intertextuality, intimacy and place in Barbara Adair's In Tangier we killed the blue parrot.
(2005) Rossmann, Jean.; Stobie, Cheryl.
In my thesis, I argue that Barbara Adair's In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot can be viewed as a palimpsest. In this sense her re-inscription of the lives and fictions of lane and Paul Bowles in the International Zone of Tangier, Morocco, in the 1940s reflects on and is implicated in the contemporary South African Zeitgeist. Through illuminating the spatial and temporal connections between the literary text and the social text, I suggest that Adair's novel creates a space for the expression of new patterns of intimacy. The Bowleses' open marriage and their same-sex relationships with local Moroccans are complicated by hegemonies of race, class and gender. To illustrate the nature of these vexed intimacies I explore Paul's sadomasochistic relationship with the young hustler, Belquassim, revealing the emancipatory nature of the expatriate's erotic and violent encounter with the Other. Conversely, I suggest the shades of Orientalism and exoticism in this relationship. While Adair is innovative in her representation of the male characters, I argue that she perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes in her representation of the female characters in the novel. lane is re-inscribed in myths of madness and selfdestruction, while her lover, Cherifa, vilified and unknowable, is depicted as a wicked witch. This study interrogates the process of selection and representation chosen by Adair, which proceeds from her own intentionality and positionality, as a South African, as a human rights law lecturer, as a (white) woman and as a woman writer. These explorations reveal the liberatory re-imagining of new patterns of intimacy, as well as the limitations of being bound by the implicit racial and gendered divisions of contemporary South African society.
A study of masculinity, memory and trauma in Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home.
(2019) Inarmal, Nadia.; Rossmann, Jean.
In this dissertation I explore the representations of ‘struggle’ masculinity and the trauma of black masculinity in Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013). My primary focus in this regard is Kimathi, the novel’s protagonist. I begin with situating the novel in the current literary landscape as a posttransitional novel (Frenkel and MacKenzie 2010). I rely on readings on the phenomenology of gender by Raewyn Connell (1995 and 2005) to illustrate how Kimathi subscribes to a harmful form of hegemonic masculinity. Marrying Connell’s concept with Pumla Dineo Gqola’s (2007 and 2009) commentaries on the performance of ‘spectacular’ masculinities in South Africa, I argue that Kimathi is interpellated by the radicalised ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle. Reading Judith Butler (2002) in conjunction with Frantz Fanon (1986), I examine the intersections of race, gender and history to discuss how the ‘woundedness’ of Kimathi’s postcolonial male identity is masked by an exaggerated performance of masculinity. In relation to his performance I consider how greed and corruption are presented as masculine qualities in the novel, and how the satirisation of male greed is intended as a criticism of South Africa’s ruling elite. I explore how the novel invokes the uncanny, and foregrounds Kimathi’s repression of crimes he committed against the character Senami. I argue that Senami, as a ghost and an uncanny figure in the present of the text, signifies a return of the repressed. Through her journey, the novel advocates for the import and ethics of remembering the past. The return of the repressed also has a broader socio-political significance, as it resonates with issues in the post-apartheid social text. Consequently, I offer an intertextual analysis of how Way Back Home speaks to the silences in memory left by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which contribute to the unresolved trauma felt by many South Africans. Finally, I discuss the polysemy and ambivalence of ‘home’ in the novel, as both a place of belonging and a place of origin, but also as a repository of history. I apply Homi Bhabha’s (1992) theory on the “unhomely” to explore Kimathi’s psychic disorientation as an exile-at-home. I argue that the loss of home (material and spiritual) constitutes a trauma of displacement for Kimathi and Senami. I consider what the return home involves for these characters, and whether this return suggests the possibility of closure, both for them and for South Africa as a nation. As a concluding point, I observe how the novel invokes Njabulo Ndebele’s (2010) assertion that we have “yet to return home” to justice and the ideals of democracy, implied in the novel’s preference for retributive, rather than restorative, justice.