This study attempts to offer a reading of Msimang's poetry from the perspective of
deconstruction. In this course it is necessary to introduce and elaborate on certain
deconstruction strategies. This is mainly effected in the second chapter, where
consideration is given to diachronic and synchronic perspectives on deconstruction.
However, not all the ramifications of the various radical insights offered by
deconstructive approaches into the various fields are explored, only the significant
texts by mainly French theorists and their American disciples are investigated.
Secondly, this study seeks to show that the Zulu poems under consideration are
highly amenable to a deconstruction reading. This thesis examines the various
practices to absorb, transform, and integrate deconstruction and to make the theory
applicable as a critical method within the African languages critical environment. In
the third chapter, I am chiefly concerned with the claim that a text never has a single
meaning, but is a crossroads of multiple ambiguous meanings. Explaining the
historical context, the interdisciplinary scope, and the philosophical significance of
Derrida' s project are explored in the fourth chapter. Language has no determinate
centre nor any retrievable origin or truth. Belief in such is no more than nostalgia,
says Derrida. What actually exists is a complex network of differences between
signifiers, each in some sense carrying the traces of all others. With psychoanalysis
in the fourth chapter, the focus is not on the differences between the deconstructive
and psychoanalytic critics, but on their shared assumption that works ofliterature are
in some sense indeterminate. These properties lead to the sixth chapter, which deals
with intertextuality according to Derrida, Barthes and Bloom. The seventh and last
chapter is the general conclusion in which main observations are summarized and
important aspects highlighted. Finally, this thesis attempts to illustrate why the
deconstructive procedure of analysing texts in such a way as to explicate their partial
complicity with the theory, makes this deconstructive reading of Msimang' s poetry
possible.African LanguagesD.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages
