Engaging with crime fiction as a literary practice

A dissertation submitted to the Wits School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for a Masters of Arts in Applied English Language Studies. Johannesburg, 2014Crime fiction is literature that has become a point of interest for various groups of people in South Africa. In this dissertation I focus on a group of students from the University of the Witwatersrand in terms of their thoughts and experiences about the crime novel. Their engagement with the genre is a literary practice that they enjoy. This research study establishes why this group of students are drawn to the genre and the ways in which they engage with it. Part of this data emanates from the students’ impressions on two South African novelists’ works. These novelists are, Deon Meyer who is the author of Blood Safari published in 2007, and Roger Smith who is the author of Mixed Blood published in 2009

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike

DESIGNING A TAXONOMY FOR VIRTUAL MUSEUMS FOR THE USE OF AVICOM PROFESSIONALS

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This thesis aims to go beyond the concept of so called ‘virtual museums’. In this work I will attempt to trace a new definition of the term ‘virtual museum’ providing the concept with renewed dignity, comparable to ICOM’S definitions of museums and other existing definitions of the concept. To do so the main part of this thesis is about creating a meta­model of taxonomy capable of including all the experimentations that have taken place in the field of ‘virtual museums’ in the last 20 years. In this direction I have investigated the concept of the museum as a medium as described by McLuhan and other thinkers, both within and outside the field of museology. The discovery of an unabridged work by McLuhan on technology in museums endorses, and opens a discussion on how technology is intended to be used for the communication of heritage. Another aim of this thesis is to investigate how museum professionals can deal with the new role of Information Technology in communicating heritage. In this thesis I intend to respond to the need of museum professionals both inside and outside ICOM for definitions and clearer understanding concerning the following questions ‘What is a virtual museum? Can it be comparable with a ‘real’ museum? What different kinds of virtual museums can be discerned in past experimentations? Can they be included in a taxonomy? How does this change the day to day work of museum professionals in accordance with the new technological potential for the communication of heritage

Genre and ...

Genres are everywhere and we all know how to use them. However, they are also elusive and hard to describe. We act and interact through genre, understand through genre, and organize through genre, but we have a hard time defining individual genres, and an even harder time understanding what a genre is and what a genre does. Therefore, genre is a central concept in many areas of scholarship today and is interlinked with many other central scholarly concepts, but its core function is still a subject of debate, and its connections with other core concepts remain sorely under-examined. Genre and … explores these connections in a series of articles that each analyzes the relationship between genre and one other central scholarly concept: conversation, rhetoric, categorization, paratext, interpretation etc., with examples spanning from Sherlock Holmes and avantgardistic literature to car commercials. The authors of the present volume have a common starting point in Scandinavian Studies, but span a wide field of scholarly tradition. Thus, taken together the articles in Genre and … are representative of an expanding and intriguing professional genre network

“Changing Places”: Travels Beyond the Anglo-American Campus Novel Genre

This thesis examines cultural and geographical limitations of the campus novel genre, proposing the study of global texts as alternative perspectives. Through analysis of critical studies of the genre, I argue that the campus novel is limited to studies of Anglo-American traditions, relegating global texts as marginal foreign variants. My research advocates further exploration of culturally and geographically diverse literary examples, considering their vitality and contemporaneity against the stagnant Anglo-American tradition. Chapter 1 identifies these limitations, through surveying the critical tradition of the campus novel genre. Chapter 2 presents an extensive overview of critical studies of campus novels beyond Britain and North America, thus contrasting their expanse against conspicuous absence in the critical tradition. To ensure systematic analysis of texts from diverse traditions, Chapter 2 also proposes the notion of kinship as connective framework, focusing on images of academic mobility as units of comparison between texts. The remaining chapters consider selected novels from various literary traditions, close-reading images of academic mobility and aspects of mobility such as motives, experiences, and endings of movement. Chapter 3 investigates survival and escape as motives for academic mobility in Alaa Al-Aswany’s Chicago and Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent. Chapter 4 dissects social mobility and the tradition of academic mobility from Indonesia to Egypt, in the works of Habiburrahman El-Shirazy. The final chapter observes university return narratives – an image of mobility presently absent in studies of the genre. Examining Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Pengabdian (Submission) by Norsiah Abd. Gapar, returns are assessed in the context of student missions, exploring how canon diversity presents unique images of mobility, and reframes the genre. In essence, this thesis evaluates the significance of socio-historical conditions in modifying meanings of comparable images of academic mobility, offering alternative cultural, geographical, and methodological perspectives of the campus novel genre

Social networking among UWC students: instant messaging genres and registers

Magister Artium - MAContemporary research has pointed to the importance of social media in the lives of young people today. This project aims to explore the emerging discourse conventions and generic structures of chat conversations on social networking media applications such as MXit, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and WhatsApp. The data for this project was acquired from undergraduate students between first- and third-year of study at the University of the Western Cape across four years (2010-2012 and 2014). The data is of three types: instant messaging chats which were collected from 2010 to 2012, and questionnaires and a focus group interview which were conducted in 2014. The main theoretical frameworks used for this project are genre and register theory by Martin and Rose (2003), Eggins and Slade (1997), Chandler (1997), Eggins (2004), Halliday and Hasan (1985). Bock (2013) and Spilioti (2011) were also used for the chat analyses. In this project I argue that although generic structures in instant messaging (IM) are conventionalised they still show a great amount of hybridity and fluidity. One of the main findings illustrates how different participants choose to begin and end their chats, whether it is with or without a greeting, and although they may be flouting the conventions of IM chatting they are not necessarily considered to be impolite. Furthermore, the findings of this project explores how the evolution and advancement of technology has contributed to the style of chatting as well as the norms of instant messaging as a genre