Presenting the prison : the South African prison autobiography under apartheid

This thesis investigates a range of South African autobiographical accounts of imprisonment, most of them by political prisoners under apartheid. Its principal focus is on the ways in which the prison as physical and ideological space intersects with a conscious literary construction of identity. The argument is that in these accounts, the prison features as both object and subject: it appears as one of the objects of description, a referent among others in a structured succession of events, but in fact it also serves as the very frame that enables and structures the consciousness that speaks about - and from within - the prison. In other words, the prison is one of the important coercive instruments that governed the forms of consciousness, literary and otherwise, that emerged in South Africa under apartheid. A broader topic engaged by this discussion is therefore also the role played by materially based disciplinary structures in the emergence of autobiographical literary forms.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Roux, Daniël

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8099

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8099