Browsing by Author "Murray, Sally-Ann."

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Aspects of identity : poet, persona and performance in Sylvia Plath's Ariel.
(2010) Esterhuizen, Leigh Caron.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
Female identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection (first published in 1965) is a complex site of being and becoming within a 1950s culture of performance. From a twenty-first century perspective, this dissertation bridges traditional and contemporary readings of Plath and the Plath archive through a referencing of motifs such as celebrity, ‘the gaze’, ventriloquism and clothing. The inter-discursive approach used – literary, psychoanalytic, cultural – attempts to underline the ongoing significance of Plath’s place as a woman poet in literary studies.
Boneyard, an original novella, accompanied by an extended essay on experimental narrative strategies in selected examples of contemporary ficton.
(2013) Molloy, Vivienne Elaine.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
The following dissertation is comprised of an original novel/la Boneyard, as well as a critical exegesis exploring experimental narrative strategies. The novella works within the shifting boundaries of postmodernism. Techniques will include “contradiction, discontinuity, randomness, excess [and] short circuit” (McHale 1987:7). The work will traverse the transliterated present of the South African landscape while reaching into the recesses of (marginal) historical record in order to speak both of the postmodern culture of the present, and the interconnectivity between time and space. By examining South African authors such as André Brink, J. M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavić, the links of the past, the present and the future will be examined in re-orientating identity in a multicultural, mass-mediated and heteroglossic contemporary culture. The critical essay will examine these issues as well as issues of historical representation. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, the work which spurred my interest in the area of identity, historical discourse, memory, re-memory and forgetting, will be examined with particular emphasis of Marianna Hirsch’s term post-postmemory, a term delegated to the active remembrance of the diasporic Jewish American third-generation post-Holocaust community. The questions of memory and remembrance will be explored within the concerns of phantasmagorical amnesia and “museummania” prevalent in contemporary postmodern culture. Lastly, I will briefly reflect on my own manuscript, Boneyard, as well as the future of post-apartheid South African writing in terms of emerging genres, construction of identity via a traumatic past and the ethical implications of these endeavours.
Feet also feature.
(HardPressd., 2011) Murray, Sally-Ann.
No abstract available.
Ice core : an original collection of stories, plus a brief critical essay on the writing process.
(2013) Vurden, Melita.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
This thesis comprises an original collection of short stories entitled Ice Core, plus a brief self-reflexive essay on the challenges, emphases and informing contexts which influenced the writing process. The stories in Ice Core were envisioned and subsequently arranged as a short story cycle. Because of my interest in the shifting mobilities of geography, history and identity which inform the collection, I deliberately wished to avoid a linear narrative progression, hoping instead to capitalise on the ability of the cycle structure to accrue flexible resonance, to accommodate shifts of foci and voice even while simultaneously consolidating to form a ‘core’ connected to regional place and community. The stories are set in the North Beach area of Durban, so it is no coincidence that water as a motif repeatedly permeates the collection. This is apt for my interest in this urban coastal space, and serves to complement the mobile nature of the short story when positioned within a cycle. In the subsidiary component of the thesis, namely, the brief critical essay, I discuss the short story form as a genre, and conceptual paradigms of the short story cycle, referring to work by critics such as Forrest Ingram (1971) and Sue Marais (1992). The essay goes on to discuss regionalism as a major characteristic establishing realism in a cycle, with reference especially to character identification and distinctive dialogue. I suggest that these elements can animate ‘place’, prompting setting to emerge as the central character of the collection. I also refer to Michel de Certeau’s piece, “Walking in the City” (1998), since Ice Core captures fragments of Durban from a street-level point of view which, according, to de Certeau, is important in understanding the ways in which a city is made meaningful through incessant transformations. The mobility of my stories, then, can be seen to emulate something of the associated mobility of the local urban area on which the stories focus. Through this essay I aim to show the short story genre as not merely the naïve fragmented expression of personal experience or ‘inspired’ imagination but one notable for disciplined and inventive practices.
Ivan Vladislavic and what-what : among writers, readers and ‘other odds, sods and marginals’.
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, 2009) Murray, Sally-Ann.
This essay is an experimental quodlibet on some recent Johannesburg imaginative writing. It works outwards from a creative ‘overview’ of Ivan Vladislavić's position in South African literature to a perspective on versions of citiness represented by newer, black authors such as Niq Mhlongo and Phaswane Mpe. Unable to deny the neighbourly appeal of Vladislavić's signature ‘white writing’, however, I turn to a discussion of Portrait with Keys: Johannesburg and what‐what (2006), focusing especially on his use of fellow writers as generative literary‐cultural antecedents who enable him to bookmark the material streets of Johannesburg through an inspirational, written spirit of place.
Lyric↔L/language: essaying the poetics of contemporary women’s poetry.
(UNISA Press; Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2011) Murray, Sally-Ann.
Using the deliberately provocative strategies of “essaying” and “error”, which have become central to the poetry and poetics of women experimental writers such as Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this essay charts the writer’s slow understanding that lyric voice and linguistic-formal experimentalism in writing by women poets form a problematic, yet productive, interrelation. Lyric, suggests Kinnahan, is at once an apparently unmarked, naturalized poetic mode and, for women poets, a curiously over-marked, gendered category. At the same time, female experimental poets have not found a comfortable space within the avant-garde poetics loosely derived from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The essay moves to explore the challenges of the lyric-language conjunction in relation to the writer’s second collection, open season (2006), and suggests, through a method of trial and error, that a re-turn to lyric through the lens of international scholarship on contemporary experimental poetry by women writers can invigorate our take on the persistence of lyrical voice in poetry by South African women writers.
Mediating contemporary cultures : essays on some South African magazines, malls and sites of themed leisure.
(1998) Murray, Sally-Ann.
In this Thesis, from the disciplinary vantage point of English Studies, I explore some of the complex meanings that may be attributed to several forms and practices of South African consumer culture: magazines, malls and themed leisure. While these contemporary cultural 'texts' are often ephemeral, and people's attachments to them fractured, transient or at least ambivalent rather than unproblematic, my argument takes issue with the pessimism that informs much local and international criticism of consumer culture. My Thesis turns to concepts of affect, image, sign and discourse which have become features of current English Studies in order to generate readings of commercial culture more nuanced than the 'hard analyses' favoured by dominant practitioners of 'radical' South African cultural studies. At the same time, though, my analyses have learnt through disparate forms of local cultural study the necessity of grounding textuality in the structures of political economy. By means of manageable yet conceptually-suggestive South African instances, I consider how commodities and commodified experiences - generated in the first instance by the vested interests of Capital and related ideologies - may nevertheless be experienced by people in a plethora of ways not directly tied to the commercially-expedient construct of the 'target audience'. This experiential process entails a rampant volatility typical of a mass-mediated lexicon which challenges boundaries between high and low, formal and unofficial, propriety and the improper. While advertising and promotion, for instance, function as corporate attempts to contain proliferating signifiers and to secure a preferred, 'authorised' meaning for cultural goods or services, it is also the case that consumers themselves, perhaps creatively and certainly in clandestine ways that escape the supposed authorities of either market researcher or academic intelligence, author meanings that rework the limitations of what still tends to be construed within the university as a culture industry at once banal and insidious. The meanings of the contemporary cultures with which I deal, then, are highly mediated and many-layered, rather than constituting the mere surface announcement often imagined by scholars of both literary culture and of media- and cultural studies. The contexts of my Thesis are particular: it was completed in 1998, and has been produced from a university in KwaZulu-Natal by an academic formally trained in English Studies. In some respects, then, the interpretations I offer are narrow: geographically, historically and disciplinarily focussed. Yet in working on South African examples of commoditised forms and practices that derive from metropolitan vectors and have convoluted international genealogies, I have also sought to theorise the shifting interrelations of regional and national, local and global, discipline-specific and interdisciplinary knowledge. Drawing widely on studies into consumer relations - and at apposite points identifying conceptual connections and differences between 'foreign' figures like Michel de Certeau and influential South African thinkers such as Njabulo S. Ndebele - I suggest that for all its shortcomings consumerism needs to be understood as active process rather than as passive effect. My argument implies that such a rethinking of the conventional binaries of production and consumption is appropriate in a South Africa which is gradually giving substance to a democratic social order. Even within a politics premised on the individual, forms of consumption such as magazine reading and shopping need not necessarily be scorned as the selfish, even hedonistic pursuits caricatured by ideological purists: the Thesis seeks to demonstrate that people are at once citizens and consumers, individuals searching after distinctive identity and style as well as desirous of achieving a variety of community inflected bonds. Overall, the commercial culture examined in the Thesis is represented not as inevitably marred by cultural deficiency and degraded value - despite the dissatisfactions, irritations and deferred pleasures which for many of us form at least one facet of consumption - but as an everyday spectacle which is available for symbolic interpretation and aesthetic investment. This investment may be emotional as well as cognitive, sensuous as well as critical, mundane as well as exceptional, since individuals come to commodity culture with a range of longings, dreams, fears and sedimented allegiances. As my readings demonstrate, it is such diversity of response - provisional and elusive rather than predictable and guaranteed - which gives the lie to theories which are 'always-already' premised on the prior inscription and encoding of consumerism as manipulation.
Profiling the female crime writer : Margie Orford and questions of (gendered) genre.
(2013) Martin, Caitlin Lisa.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
Crime fiction, despite its long chronicled history, has only recently become prevalent as ‘genre fiction’ in South Africa. Despite being an historically disparaged form, crime fiction offers a platform to engage critically with elements of contemporary society. This thesis focuses in particular on the ‘Clare Hart’ series of krimi novels written by Margie Orford, considering some of the ways in which the author mediates the conventions of the genre. (I base my discussion on Like Clockwork [2006], Blood Rose [2007], Daddy’s Girl [2009] and Gallows Hill [2011], with brief remarks, in my conclusion, on the recently-published fifth novel, Water Music [2013].) I argue that Orford seeks to exploit the thrills and tensions typically associated with the genre even as, working through a gender lens, she attempts to reconfigure genre conventions and constraints in order to tackle ethical, social, economic and political challenges in South and southern Africa, especially as they impact upon women, children, and marginalised groups of people. My study examines how Orford undertakes a possible conscientising of her readership, in a genre which is ostensibly associated with easy, entertaining pleasures. In this endeavour, of particular importance is Orford’s characterisation of her protagonist, Clare Hart, an investigative journalist-cum-profiler whom she uses to turn a “defiant observer’s eye” (Orford 2010: 187) on the naturalised violence against women and children in the country, and to up-end some of the entrenched masculinist orientations of both thriller and hard-boiled traditions. Additionally, the thesis addresses the regional situation of Orford’s novels, the expressly southern African environment. Using selected theories of space and place, I argue that while setting is often important to literary fiction, for the crime thriller, setting is much more complexly spatialised, since it may assist in carrying an author’s contextualised criticism of received spatial hierarchies as they relate (especially) to gender and race. Additionally, I point out that Orford’s novels offer her the opportunity to situate narrative in relation to troubled regional histories and geographies, and to move beyond the immediate southern African locality to map the mass-mediated, global vectors which constitute the present, and to situate history in relation to contentious, provocative contemporary concerns such as “organized crime, collapsing state institutions, [and] street gangsters” (Orford 2010: 184). In doing so, I find, Orford offers psychological insight into the complex and highly unsettled nature of the protracted political transition which has marked South Africa’s shift from apartheid to democracy.
Shadow sounds : an original collection of poetry and an essay on questions of femaleness and diaspora in Meena Alexander's Illiterate heart.
(2013) Simon, Francine.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
Shadow Sounds: an Original Collection of Poetry and an Essay on Questions of Femaleness and Diaspora in Meena Alexander’s Illiterate Heart. The thesis comprises two parts: an original collection of poetry entitled Shadow Sounds, and a critical essay exploring the issues of diaspora and femaleness in Meena Alexander‟s Illiterate Heart. Shadow Sounds is a compilation of poems which examines the interrelations of a South African Indian familial structure, the emergence of a strong female sexual identity, and the open, even experimentally processual approach which influences the exploration of lyric voicing. The critical essay on Alexander investigates two major thematic concerns in the collection Illiterate Heart, namely, diaspora and gender. I postulate that the diasporic experiences of the writer have inflected all aspects of her identity, occasioning both rhizomatic compositions and the ongoing composition of a dispersed subjectivity. Alexander‟s hypothesised „selves‟ are observed and identified as constantly shifting and changing throughout Illiterate Heart, and effectively recast the popular conceptualisation of identity as singular and coherent.
Tenement : a novel manuscript plus a critical self-reflection on the process of writing.
(2010) Jackson, Carey-Ann.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
This dissertation has two parts. Part one is a manuscript for a novel, entitled Tenement, and part two is a critical self-reflection on the processing of writing. Tenement is a story about death, narrated from the perspective of a dead woman, and its themes are mortality, fragility, the urban environment, caring and social isolation. The narrator, who never discloses her own name, discovers her life may have ended, but not her awareness. Not immediately, anyway. For six days, she watches her own physical decomposition and the reactions of other people and creatures to this termination of life. The responses of the nonhumans who share her body and flat are intimate and oddly affirming, but those of her human neighbours less so. In the derelict tenement, full of invisible or forgotten people with nowhere else to go, there’s a stony indifference to the narrator’s death. But not to the empty apartment. In considering these reactions and the struggle for the vacant flat, the narrator reveals the world of which she was a part. Rising sea levels, illegal dumping and poverty are daily realities of life in the unnamed city in which Tenement is set. City officials may have sloughed off the areas most affected by the encroaching sea, declaring them abandoned and forcibly removing the slum dwellers, but others have returned to the area. Christened the flatlands, the zone is neither abandoned nor uninhabited. The struggle for survival is uncompromising, and the opportunities for fragility, creativity and care eroding as quickly as the land. Yet it is in death, and the new rituals that have emerged to deal with it, that the missed opportunities of individual and collective action are most evident. This, then, is part one of the dissertation. In part two, a reflexive account of the process of writing is offered. Key elements of the novel are discussed, including the use of a Möbius strip for temporal representation, along with its implications for the treatment of narrated and narrating time. The choice of narrator and the conceptualisation of her voice are explained, and the question of genre highlighted, along with the merits of African gothic and its iii contribution to postcolonial literature. Given that Tenement is a story set in a polluted, drowning city of the future, the challenges associated with focalising environment and the risks of using allegorical spaces in postcolonial novels are recognised. Tenement is juxtaposed with specific trends in contemporary South African fictional literature, and its differences and similarities considered. Finally, the contribution of empirical and desktop research to the creative writing process is highlighted, and the varied sources of influence and feedback acknowledged.
Unfamiliar shores : a collection of poetry with a self-reflexive essay component detailing the writing process and influences upon the poetry.
(2010) Naicker, Dashen.; Murray, Sally-Ann.
No abstract available.