5,716 research outputs found

    Whose story is it anyway? The ethics of narration and the narration of ethics in Summertime and Die Sneeuslaper

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    Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind

    "The day of the great writer is gone for ever": Author surrogacy in Martin Amis’s Money and J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime.

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    This study focuses on the use of author surrogacy in the novels Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis and Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee. It addresses the connection between their use of author surrogacy and their comments on what scholars classify as the postmodern cultural condition. Both authors have written themselves into their novels with a different purpose but both used strikingly similar themes to incorporate this purpose, although the stress on these themes varies. Authorial power, the distinction between the real and the imagined, and the fading line between high- and lowbrow culture are examples of the topics discussed in this study with regards to author surrogacy and the postmodern cultural condition. This study concludes that, through their use of author surrogacy, J.M. Coetzee mainly aims to critique, while Martin Amis satirises postmodern culture. Keywords: Amis, author surrogacy, authorial power, Coetzee, fact-fiction distinction, high- and lowbrow culture, postmodern cultural condition

    A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee

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    Studies on the author J.M. Coetze

    O doświadczeniu obcości języka w twórczości J.M. Coetzeego. Słowo wstępne

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    The present foreword refers to the address delivered by J.M. Coetzee on the occasion of conferring upon him by the University of Silesia the doctor honoris causa degree. Particular attention is paid to his thoughts on the role of English in the world of today. The author of the foreword shows that reflection on language in general and its role in moulding one’s identity in present in the Nobel laureate’s works, including his most recent novels. Further into the foreword, the author briefly discusses text reprinted in Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne: the already mentioned address by J.M. Coetzee, the conversation with the Author, and an article devoted to his works written by Robert Kusek.The present foreword refers to the address delivered by J.M. Coetzee on the occasion of conferring upon him by the University of Silesia the doctor honoris causa degree. Particular attention is paid to his thoughts on the role of English in the world of today. The author of the foreword shows that reflection on language in general and its role in moulding one’s identity in present in the Nobel laureate’s works, including his most recent novels. Further into the foreword, the author briefly discusses text reprinted in Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne: the already mentioned address by J.M. Coetzee, the conversation with the Author, and an article devoted to his works written by Robert Kusek

    O doświadczeniu obcości języka w twórczości J.M. Coetzeego : słowo wstępne

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    The present foreword refers to the address delivered by J.M. Coetzee on the occasion of conferring upon him by the University of Silesia the doctor honoris causa degree. Particular attention is paid to his thoughts on the role of English in the world of today. The author of the foreword shows that reflection on language in general and its role in moulding one’s identity in present in the Nobel laureate’s works, including his most recent novels. Further into the foreword, the author briefly discusses text reprinted in Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne: the already mentioned address by J.M. Coetzee, the conversation with the Author, and an article devoted to his works written by Robert Kusek

    Field-induced alignment of a smectic-A phase: a time-resolved x-ray diffraction investigation

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    The field-induced alignment of a smectic-A phase is, in principle, a complicated process involving the director rotation via the interaction with the field and the layer rotation via the molecular interactions. Time-resolved nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has revealed this complexity in the case of the director alignment, but provides no direct information on the motion of the layers. Here we describe a time-resolved x-ray diffraction experiment using synchrotron radiation to solve the challenging problem of capturing the diffraction pattern on a time scale which is fast in comparison with that for the alignment of the smectic layers. We have investigated the alignment of the smectic-A phase of 4-octyl-4'-cyanobiphenyl by a magnetic field. The experiment consists of creating a monodomain sample of the smectic-A phase by slow cooling from the nematic phase in a magnetic field with a flux density of 7 T. The sample is then turned quickly through an angle phi(o) about an axis parallel to the x-ray beam direction but orthogonal to the field. A sequence of two-dimensional small angle x-ray diffraction patterns are then collected at short time intervals. Experiments were carried out for different values of phi(o), and at different temperatures. The results show that the alignment behavior changes fundamentally when phi(o) exceeds 45degrees, and that there is a sharp change in the alignment process when the temperature is less than 3 degreesC below the smectic-A-nematic transition. The results of the x-ray experiments are in broad agreement with the NMR results, but reveal major phenomena concerning the maintenance of the integrity of the smectic-A layer structure during the alignment process

    Skin-Friction Measurements on Mathematically Generated Roughness in a Turbulent Channel Flow

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    Engineering systems are affected by surface roughness, however, predicting frictional drag has proven to be challenging. The present work takes a systematic approach by generating and manufacturing surfaces roughness where surface statistics, such as rms, skewness and power-spectral density can be controlled. The frictional drag on these surfaces is measured in a turbulent channel flow facility

    Autobiography as Autrebiography: the Fictionalisation of the Self in J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

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    J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood remains a fundamentally ambivalent work, generically speaking. The author seems unwilling to choose between autobiography and fiction. Whatever truth is attained may, in the last resort, be best expressed as a fiction of the truth
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