Aesthetics and resistance: aspects of Mongane Wally Serote's poetry.

[摘要] The literature produced by writers who align themselves with national liberation andresistance movements presents a serious challenge to dominant standards of literary .aesthetics. Resistance writing aims to break down the assumed division between art andpolitics. and in this view literature becomes an arena of conflict and struggle.This dissertation examines certain aspects of the poetry of Mongane Wally Serote inorder to explore the relationship between aesthetics and resistance in his writing. Overthe last two decades, Serote has made a significant contribution to the development ofSouth African literature, and his work has important implications for literary criticism inSouth Africa.Chapter 1 looks at some of these implications by discussing the concept of resistanceliterature and the main issues arising from the debates and polemics surrounding thework of Serote and other black political writers. Perhaps the most important here is theneed to construct a critical approach to South African resistance literature that can cometo terms with both its aesthetic qualities and political effects. This kind of approachwould in some way attempt to integrate the seemingly incompatible critical practices ofidealism and materialism.Accordingly, Chapter 2 is a materialist approach to aspects of Serote's early poetry.The critical model used is a simplified version of the interpretive schema set out byFredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. This model enables a discussion of thepoetry in relation to ideology, and also suggests ways of examining the discursivestrategies and symbolic processes in this particular phase of Serote's development.Serote's later work is 'characterised by the attempt to create a unifying mythology ofresistance. Chapter 3 thus looks at Serote's long poems from an idealist perspective thatis based on the principles of myth-criticism, As this is a complex area, this chaptermerely sketches the main features of Serote' s use of myth as a form of resistance, andthen suggests further avenues of exploration along these lines. The dissertationconcludes by pointing towards some of the implications of recent politicaldevelopments in South Africa for Serote and other resistance writers.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand