Humanities 1:Layout 2 - University of Cape Town

10
In Psychological Research:
*Katie Rachael Bromley
Sarah May Cotton
*(With distinction) Christa Gelderblom
In Religious Studies:
*Marie Bastienne Klein
In Theatre and Performance:
*(With distinction) Darron Araujo
*Vaneshran Arumugam
(With distinction) Alude Sinayo Mahali
*(With distinction) Jacqueline Rita Singer
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF
PHILOSOPHY
In African Language & Literature:
Michael Oyoo Weche
Thesis Title: Bantu and Nilotic children’s
singing games: a comparative study of their
value communication
Michael Oyoo Weche has a BA (Literature)
and MA (Literature) from Kenyatta University,
Kenya. He is currently a lecturer at the
Catholic University of Eastern Africa,
Nairobi, Kenya. He has been studying at
UCT, in the department of African Languages
and Literatures, since 2007.
Michael Weche’s thesis examines
the aesthetic form and value communication
in selected Bantu and Nilotic children’s
singing games, with particular reference to
the Luhya and Luo communities of Kenya.
Based on the premise that Luyha and Luo
children’s singing games are creative outputs
that reflect the macro cultures of the two
communities, he uses ethnopoetic and ethnomethodological
approaches to reveal the
subtle communication in the singing games.
The comparative analysis reveals
that children’s creative outputs are repertoires
of the aesthetics, aspirations and norms
of their macro cultures. Through the performance
of the singing games children socialize
and assimilate the superstructure of
their communities’ aesthetics and norms.
The performance of the singing games is also
significant in the social and moral development
of the child. The singing games therefore
become significant in the child’s
socialization and can also be used in an educational
setting.
Supervisor: Dr Abner Nyamende (School of
Languages and Literatures)
In Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies:
Shathley Qadir Abrahams
Thesis Title: Older than language: comics
as heuristic for the philosophical canon
SQ Abrahams has a BA and MA both from
UCT, where he began his academic career in
the mid-1990s. In 2001, he became the first
African comics-scholar invited to present a
paper at the Congress of the Americas,
hosted that year in Puebla, Mexico. His professional
interests in popular culture allowed
him establish links with both the field of
Religious Studies and study emerging from
Information and Communications Technologies
and their prospective roles in education.
His thesis examines the role of
medium with respect to perennial questions
recurring in the history of philosophy.
Specifically, his thesis contends that the apperception
of such questions, and their resulting
resolutions, would be dramatically
altered when articulated in sequential art,
rather than in simple prose. To support this
statement he explores a range of aesthetic
mechanics of the comics medium, and various
semioideological connotative structures
that reflect on questions essential to the bodies
of work of philosophers ranging historically
from Giambattista Vico (c. 1725) to
Michel Foucault (c. 1979).
To underline an axiom central to
his thesis, Older Than Language closes out
with a brief exercise in speculative fiction.
Imagining certain twists in history (the failure
of Gutenberg’s printing press to popularize
learning and overturn artistic patronage,
for example), “Life In Print” is a posthumous
tribute to writer who redefined the role of
popular culture and literacy.
Supervisor: Professor J Hambidge (School
of Languages and Literature)
In English Language and Literature:
Fatima Fiona Moolla
Thesis Title: Individualism in the novels of
Nuruddin Farah
Fiona Moolla obtained her Undergraduate,
Honours and Masters degrees from UCT.
She previously served as a part-time lecturer
in the English Department and is currently a
lecturer in the Department of English at the
University of the Western Cape.
Fiona Moolla’s thesis performs a
close reading of individualism in the novels
of the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah. It argues
that a specific, individualist conception
of the self is central to the genre of the novel
as a cultural form that emerged with modernity.
This individualist conception locates the
sources of the self within an internal moral
horizon rather than in a realm external to the
subject. Against this background, the thesis
explores the constitution of the self in
Farah’s novels, approaching them through
the alternative insights of a moral philosophy
which suggests that one’s idea of oneself is
formed only in orientation to an external, social
idea of virtue. [The Southern African
ideal of ubuntu is one example of such an
orientation]. The thesis therefore draws attention
to the tension often generated between
the social commitment Farah
expresses as a writer and the constraints of
the form of the novel he employs. It is the
first critical work on Farah’s novels that explores
the ways in which the ideology of
form may work against the grain of an author’s
social commitments.
Supervisor: Professor H Garuba (Centre for
African Studies)
Sarah Rowan
Thesis Title: ‘The Efficacy of Song Itself’:
Seamus Heaney’s “Defence of Poetry”
Sarah Rowan has a BA (Honours) in English
and Linguistics and an MA in Creative Writing
(with distinction) from UCT.
Her thesis focuses upon Seamus
Heaney’s prose writing, particularly those essays
of his in which he defines the function
and purpose of poetry. Taken together,
Rowan argues, these essays amount to the
most concerted and far-reaching of the defences
of poetry that are available to us in
this historical moment. She underlines this
point by placing Heaney in a long line of ‘defenders’
of English poetry, beginning with
Sidney and including Shelley and later poets
like T.S. Eliot. She further highlights the special
value of Heaney’s defence by contrasting
his arguments with those of other famous
contemporary poets, including Czeslaw
Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.
Although the thesis points out that
Heaney’s arguments for the importance of
poetry are not unique in the originality of
their ideas—many of these derive from the
work of his predecessors—the Irish poet’s
powers of synthesis as well as his stylistic
gifts make the presentation of these arguments
more persuasive and less an instance
of special pleading than any to be found in
his contemporaries. His prose style, as well
as the consistent grounding of his argument
in examples provided by individual poems,
constitutes a witness to the pleasure and the
potency of the art form which is itself both
uniquely pleasurable and potent.
The originality of Sarah Rowan’s
own thesis lies in the fact that, while
Heaney’s distinction as a poet has attracted a
huge critical literature, there has been no thesis
to date which looks at his distinction as a
prose writer. Nor is there any which recognises
the extent to which his prose amounts
to one of the most coherent statements available
as to why poetry matters. ‘The Efficacy
of Song Itself’ is a remarkable demonstration
of just this.
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Watson
(English Language and Literature)