Herinnering, geskiedenis, identiteit : 'n ondersoek na beeld en teks in mito-poesis

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This investigation is informed by the assumption that language, as representationand as image, is positioned in a metaphorical relationship to reality. Language,as a structure of representation, is the way in which we represent reality toourselves and to others and recreate the past, as well as the way in which weinvest our lives with meaning, significance and experience. Language includesvisual and verbal representation, and this investigation shows how image andtext create a variety of multiple meanings through playful and interactivereciprocation.Following from the assumption that language comprises temporal and spatialqualities, it is also the terrain that enables us to know and understand reality,ourselves, and others. This emphasizes the material nature of language, whichis also connected with social and cultural practices and, as such, involvesreciprocation and interaction between divergences. Language is therefore amode of action that makes the bridging of divisions possible.Language is proposed as a medium through which the monolithic hegemony ofthe apartheid past may be confronted within a multicultural South Africa. The aimof representing this past in my work is not to recall it as it was or to discoveretemal, inheritable qualities, but rather to bring about re-demption (healing)through re-presentation. Re-demption and re-presentation is a textual practicethat involves a re-script of the past. With the understanding that history andculture are regarded as text, re-writing the past does not involve representationas mimesis, but as production.This investigation recognizes the role of the subconscious as the other or thealterity in all language constructs that makes it possible to circumvent the logic ofbinary oppositions; entertain alternatives simultaneously; erase boundaries;share spaces, and discover the other in the self. This unconscious language ofthe other, as a strange doubling and interplay between near and far, gives rise topoies/s.The creation of multi-dimensional spaces that draw the poetical and the everydayinto an imaginative and directed conceptual interplay as well as provoke dialoguebetween differences and diversities, engenders a desire for the complexity of theother. The interplay and recurrent movement across divisions and betweenparadoxes create a new and changed interspace, characterized by difference,plurality, and contradiction. Intertextual spaces allow relationships betweendifferences and exist precisely as a result of dialogicity between diversities. In thisway it is possible to establish, by virtue of difference, a mutual, interdependentrelationship with the other.Metaphorical language requires an allegorical reading that places divergences inrelation to one another, thereby causing a mythic animation of signification thatmoves from one level to another. Mytho-poeisis, as an allegorical structure, isproposed as a model by means of which symbolic transformation and redemptionof the personal and collective psyche may occur. Poetic re-imaginingas re-presentation impels change and transformation and points to other possibleforms of social and ethical experiences. This impulse, to reconcile the social andthe aesthetic, or the cultural with symbolic form, is based on the principle ofreconciliation between art and life.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University