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This paper considers Sello K. Duiker’s two novels Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as precursors of recent literary trends in the South African post-transitional period. It makes an argument that these two novels anticipate the recent preoccupation with utopian idealism as a response to the challenges of the post-transitional postapartheid dispensation. To this day these texts remain unrivaled in their comprehensive meditation and elaboration on utopian idealism through their depiction of varied utopian paradigms, from singularity of pastoral solitude in Thirteen Cents to multiplicity of different monastic enclaves in The Quiet Violence of Dreams. These narratives not only pay tribute to utopian idealism through a depiction of its varied forms, but they are also a critique about its limitations and pitfalls. Hence, the narratives also foreground apocalyptic demise of the world as an alternative narrative resolution that competes with utopianism as the final and decisive panacea to the social imperfections of the postapartheid dispensation. In conclusion the paper argues that both Duiker’s texts are presciently prophetic not only about what is to come but also what needs to be done.

According to Gqola (2009) this 'masculinist spectacle' is described as follows: 'By masculinist spectacle I refer to the hypervisible, and self-authorising performance of patriarchal masculinity in public spaces, where such performance hints at masculine violence or a contest between forms of manhood' (Gqola, 64). [...]the narrative paradigms and literary forms chosen and used in these narratives are linked and connected to the particular ideological conception of the world. [...]tragedy seeks to grasp the soul in its vision of the real beyond the surface issues of social status and practical utility. Mhlongo seems thus to be validating what Henri Bergson has said about the prerequisite of a comic effect: \"To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart\" (63-64). [...]for the comic effect to be functional, human affairs should be portrayed with unruffled indifference and minimal emotional involvement as Mhlongo is doing in this narrative.

This study aims to explore the creative interaction between narrative form and ideology in the inaugural novels by Nicholas Murhandziwa [Niq] Mhlongo and Kabelo Sello Duiker. To this end, the thesis uses Fredric Jameson’s conception of literary texts as socially symbolic acts as a theoretical framework to examine and explore the contradictions of youthful being in a social and cultural space, struggling to emerge from a colonial past, marked by increasing class stratification in the present.These inaugural texts (Duiker’s Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams as well as Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog and After Tears) will be read as socially symbolic acts within their social and political context. In other words, they will not be read as mere transmitters of their historical context or as aesthetic forms divorced from their extra-textual reality. A contextual scrutiny without any regard to literary form will render these texts inert reflections of their social and political context. In similar vein, an examination of form without paying due regard to the social and political context makes the choice of the aesthetic form seem arbitrary. Therefore, this study using Jameson’s theoretical framework, will read these literary texts as dynamic agents within the social context in which they are embedded. In addition, this study will read these texts as embodiments of unresolved textual tensions, ideological contradictions and multiplicity of voices. These narratives challenge the critical scholarship that attempt to read them as having a singular message and monological meaning, because they are a composite of contradicting ideological positions and multiplicity of voices.Reading these inaugural texts of Duiker and Mhlongo as conveyors of their social and political reality denies not only their nature as aesthetic objects but also sanitises their textual tensions and ideological contradictions. This study contends that these texts relate to their extra-textual context through a contradictory process of complicity and contestation. This process of complicity and contestation is reflected in the way these texts depict the conflict between the youthful narrative consciousness and the social norms of the adult world.The juvenile narrative consciousness is a strategy of containment that embodies contradictory ideological positions. It challenges the status quo by enabling a fresh and unaccustomed perspective on the over-familiar realities of the conventional social order. However, it can also be seen (correctly or incorrectly) as projecting a desire for change as whimsical and temporary, which is to be outgrown once this youthful fantasy is forced to reckon with the wisdom of experience.Furthermore this study demonstrate how ideology inhabits form in these novels by dramatising how characterisation, narrative voice and setting embody an unresolved confrontation between the desire for a radical social change and disillusionment about the feasibility of that social change. The novels frame this confrontation between mobile and restless yearning for a new way of doing things and established ways of cognition, memory and representation through an ambivalent narrative consciousness, contradictory character delineation and ideologically conflicted social spaces.Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that the imaginary world represented in these narratives disrupts any coherent and monolithic ideological position. It is, in short an open, unfinished and incomplete literature that is continuously under construction and perpetually in the making, and like a Jewish messiah, it is forever expected but may never arrive

This research report will a make a comparative critical analysis of the two African feminist texts namely So Long A Letter and God Dies by the Nile. Their humanist and essentialist assumptions which underpin the texts' critique of patriarchy will be challenged and interrogated. The proj-ct will attempt show how both texts respond to masculine myths about gender by replacing those myths with other constructions which define WOmen or peasants in different yet nonetheless enclosed and stereotypical generalisations. In the process of this interrogative analysis ideology of each text as manifested through its stylistic devices such as plot, characterisation, setting and other formal features will be examined. Three important issues which will be central in this analysis namely question of identity, conceptions of power and projections of feminist liberation. The approach that will be adopted is the one which will assume the autonomy of the text over authorial claims or stated intentions. The fact that a text is written by a woman writer does not necessarily mean that it stands in antithetical terms to the dominant patriarchal values.The first chapter begins the discussion with a theoretical introduction to the comparative analysis of the project. The second chapter will be based around the critical analysis of Manama Ba' s So Long A Letter. The third chapter will focus on Nawal Saadawi'sGod Dies by the Nile. The fourth chapter concludes the discussion with an evaluative and comparative commentary on the two texts and by charting the way forward for African literary criticism.