Academic literature on the topic 'Xhosa drama (Tragedy) – History and criticism'

The time is long gone when literary men were happy to treat literature, and tragic poetry in particular, as something which exists serenely outside time, high up in the empyrean of unchanging validity and absolute values. Nowadays it is conventional, and seems natural, to insist that literature is produced within a particular society and a particular social setting: even its most gorgeous blooms have their roots in the soil of history. Its understanding requires us to understand the society which appreciated it, and for which it came into existence. In the particular case of the tragic poetry of Athens, the most influential body of recent criticism focuses on the relation of the drama to the realities of political and social life.

Abstract In this article, I first discuss the reception of Aeschylus’ satyr plays in classical drama, the evidence for their reperformance, and their place in ancient criticism and scholarship. In the final section, I analyze the factors that contributed to the positive reputation of Aeschylean satyr play. Although the evidence is often very limited, I attempt to establish a framework for understanding this ancient reception. Here I propose that the importance placed on satyr play in Aeschylus’ reception in antiquity can be viewed as an extension of his image as the father of tragedy, through both the association of satyr play with the origins of tragedy and its place in the tetralogy.

In this paper I discuss several cases of controversial speaker-line attribution in Greek tragedy, with the overall goal of showing that greater attention needs to be paid to gender-specific language in the business of textual criticism. Differences between male and female speech in Greek drama may offer crucial indications for the attribution of contested lines. I argue that the distribution of E. El. 959-966 in the manuscripts should be maintained, primarily for two gender-related reasons: women in tragedy do not give commands to servants if free men are present, and the discussion of clothing at 966 is typical of Electra’s female concerns. For the first half of the ‘recognition duet’ between Helen and Menelaus at E. Hel. 625-659, I argue, on the basis of recent work on male and female lyric, that 638-640 should be assigned to Helen, and that there is no need to avoid giving 636 or 654-655 to Menelaus because they are ‘too emotional’ for a man. In discussing these passages I seek to contribute to the growing understanding of the distinct characteristics of tragic male and female language, and to argue for the role that the study of those characteristics can play in textual criticism.

Among the problematic works of great writers, Pushkin's Boris Godunov occupies a special place. This strange hybrid of history, drama, narrative poetry, and prose Pushkin called a “romantic tragedy,” and he considered it his masterpiece. Yet the play's publication in 1831 was met with surprise and dismay. By consensus of a baffled public, Boris Godunov was a failure—neither romantic, nor feasible on the tragic stage.Since that time, generations of critics, playwrights, and producers have tried to come to terms with this troublesome text. Tolstoi's famous comment—that all great nineteenth-century Russian works defy clear generic classification1—has been invoked in defense of many irregular texts, but not this one. Boris remains stubbornly, inexplicably “undramatic.” Criticism has in fact tended to redefine the play rather than to investigate it. Boundaries are routinely blurred between the historical Tsar Boris, the historical period when his tale is retold, and the world of the fictional creation itself.

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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Olu phando lugqale kubalinganiswa abafunzele ukuzibulala kwimidlalo ekhethiweyo yesiXhosa. Kwisahluko sokuqala ngumkhombandlela wolu phando, intshayelelo, injongo yophando, ubume besifundo namagqabantshintshi ngentyila bomi zababhali endicaphule kwiincwadi zabo namagama angundoqo. Kwezinye izahluko ingcingane ezahlukeneyo nalapho endingabalula ekaFreud isayikho-analisisi ndinaba ngokubanzi kumabakala awabekileyo afana nokuzalwa, isini, odiphasi khompleksi nephupha nenxaxheba yakhe ekugubhululeni okuyimfihlakalo ngokuthi aphande ubomi bomntu obadlulayo ukuze kubenokunyangwa impixano ekuye ngaphakathi. Enye ingcingane esetyenzisiweyo yile ingokuzibulala nalapho kuphononongwa ukuba ngobani abazibulalayo, abaqinisekileyo ngokufa kwabo, ukuzibulala ngesivumelwano nembalelwano abazishiyayo xa umntu ezibulala. Kwezinye izahluko ndiyibeka icace intsusa neziphumo zokuzibulala kwamaxhoba, ndayiphicotha nendlela ekuxhatshazwe ngayo amalungelo abalinganiswa ngabazali babo kuba benyanzela le mitshato yebhaxa ngenjongo yokuzuza ikhazi ngentombi zabo, nayo imixholo enxulumene nolu phando ndiyicaphule imixholo efana neyothando noqhankqalazo nomxholo wokutshatiswa kwabantwana ngebhaxa. Isahluko sesihlanu ngumqukumbelo jikelele nophononongo ngolu phando.

This study aims at highlighting some crucial aspects of Xhosa drama. These aspects are of great significance for the understanding of Xhosa drama. It also aims to historicize and contextualize examinations of traditional Xhosa drama and modern Xhosa drama.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 1991.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study is based on the comparison of six Xhosa radio dramas spanning the period 1987 and 1988. The main objective is to investigate the strengths and weaknesses which manifest themselves in the dramas. The dramas are compared with respect to the six structural elements of drama viz., theme, plot, characterization, time and space, and the techniques of production.Themes are studied to establish whether there have been any developments as far as the choice of themes is concerned in Xhosa radio dramas or whether there has been stagnation. Also given is a brief literary history of the themes broadcast in the Xhosa radio. The analysis of the plot structure is also done to identify the areas where they met the requirements successfully as well as where they failed to. The dramas are analysed according to the traditional approach Le. the exposition, complication, climax and the denouement.With regard to characterization, the characters are classified according to the function they perform viz., the protagonist, antagonist, tritagonist and confidante. They are also analysed according to their individual nature Le. whether they are static or dynamic, mono- or multidimensional etc. Techniques that the playwrights have used in the portrayal of their characters are also examined.The aspects of time and space are also discussed, to investigate the artistic skills of the different dramatists in handling the time and space relations. Time is viewed with respect to the following: order, duration, frequency, tempo and the presentation of the time structures. Space is discussed with respect to the following: type, function, and the techniques of localisation.A critical comparison of the production techniques used by these different playwrights is explored, the focus being on the microphone, sound effects and music. The examination conducted in the study basically revealed that there is little development in Xhosa radio dramas.The themes that are broadcast are mainly for entertainment and consequently have little intellectual depth. There is also a lack of innovation which is shown by the repetition of the same themes.The playwrights also lack skill as far as plot construction is concerned. The plays are devoid of conflict The absence of conflict in the dramas has an effect on characterization. It has given rise to weak antagonists in the dramas. Lack of focus regarding the main character is one of the faults that is evident in the dramas. Because of the fact that all characters are on the level of importance, it becomes difficult to pin-point who the focal character is. Finally, the Xhosa radio dramas discussed in this thesis revealed that there is latent potential in the Xhosa dramatists and the producers. It is therefore necessary that they should be motivated towards research on the subject and consultation with people who are knowledgeable in this sub-genre. Such actions could be of assistance towards the improvement of skills and techniques needed in the writing of the radio drama
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie is gebaseer op die vergelyking van ses Xhosa radio dramas wat strek oor die tydperk 1987-1988. Die hoofdoelstelling is om die sterkpunte en swakpunte te ondersoek soos dit na vore kom in die dramas. Die dramas sal vergelyk word met betrekking tot die ses strukturele elemente van die drama, naamlik, tema, intrige, karakterisering, tyd en ruimte, en die tegnieke van produksie. Die temas van die dramas is ondersoek om vas te stel of enige ontwikkelings wat betref die keuse van temas plaasgevind het, en of daar stagnasie was in hierdie verb and. Voorts sal 'n kort ootsig gegee word van die liter ere temas in radio Xhosa dramas. Die analise van die intrige van die dramas word gedoen om vas te stel waar daar suksesvol of onsuksesvol voldoen is aan vereistes. Die dramas word ontleed volgens die tradisionele benadering van uiteensetting, verwikkeling, klimaks en die afwikkeling. Betreffende karakterisering, word karakters geklassifiseer volgens die funksie wat hulle vervul, naamlik die protagonis, die antagonis, die tritagonis, en die vertroueling. Karakters kan ook ontleed word volgens hulle individuele karakter, dit is, in welke mate hulle staties of dinamies is, enkel- of multi-dimension eel, ens. Tegnieke wat die skrywers gebruik het in die uitbeelding van hulle karakters word ook ondersoek Die aspekte van tyd en ruimte word bespreek ten einde die artistieke vaardighede van die verskillende skrywers te ondersoek in die hantering van tyd en ruimte verbande. Tyd word ondersoek ten opsigte van volgorde, duur, frekwensie, tempo en die aanbieding van die tyd strukture. Ruimte word bespreek met betrekking tot die aspekte van tipe, funksie en die tegnieke van lokalisering. 'n Kritiese vergelyking word gedoen van die produksietegnieke wat aangewend is deur die verskillende skrywers, met die fokus op mikrofoon klankeffekte en musiek Die ondersoek in hierdie studie toon aan dat daar geringe ontwikkeling is in die Xhosa radio dramas. Die temas van die dramas wat uitgesaai word is hoofsaaklik van 'n vermaaklikheids aard met geen intellektuele diepte nie. Daar is ook 'n tekort aan vernuwing, soos aangedui deur die herhaling van dieselfde temas. Die skrywes toon ook 'n tekort aan vaardigheid wat betref die konstruksie van die struktuur van. intrige. Die dramas toon weinig konflik Die afwesigheid van konflik het ook 'n invloed op die krakterisering, wat aanleiding gee tot swak antagoniste in die dramas.'n Gebrekkige fokus betreffende die hootkarater is een van die foute wat opvallend is in die dramas. Omdat byna al die karakters op dieselfde vlak van belangrikheid is, is dit moeilik om te bepaal watter karakter die hootkarater is. Laastens, die Xhosa radio dramas wat ontleed is in hierdie studie toon dat daar latente potensiaal is in die Xhosa skrywers en regiseurs. Dit is nodig dat hulle aangemoedig word om navorsing te doen oor die onderwerp. Konsultasie met kundiges op hierdie sub-genre kan 'n hulp wees in die verbetering van vaardighede en tegnieke wat nodig is vir die skryf van radio dramas.

Thesis (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study aims at highlighting a crucial aspect of Xhosa drama: The portrayal of the role women have been forced culturally to assume in society. A selection of Xhosa plays from three periods (1958 - 1965; 1974 - 1982; and 1988 - 1997) is examined. In the process of the study, the analysis and the interpretation of these dramas as well as the depiction of women characters is examined. Authors of the ten dramas under study advocate change through the powerful forces of gender stereotypes and culture distortions. The attributes that the authors commonly ascribe to women characters are passivity, irrationality, compliancy and incorrigibility. An examination of the reasons behind this proliferation of these female stereotypes and the lack of realistic women characters is undertaken. The study posits reasons why particular stereotypes appear in the works of several authors over a period of time. The women characters are products of social conditioning, that is, ideals or counter-ideals of the prevailing values of the authors' culture. They are a symbolic fulfillment of the writers' needs. The broad cultural perspectives of the authors also shape the texts they produce. These dramas treat issues and themes, which become central to the formal and structural ordering of the drama. Such themes have an impact at times on form and structure. In each case the ideology of the class represented by authors under study is indeed reflected in the text, to its detriment. The dominating themes in the ten dramas are forced marriages and women abuse. The authors are so preoccupied with injustices against women that they distort certain cultural aspects by, for example, exaggeration. Women are constantly depicted as victims, while there are no indications in the authors' depictions of women that perceptions of their cultural role and status are in reality undergoing changes. The thesis is arranged as follows: Chapter 1 introduces the aim, the scope, the theories and the methods of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the development of plot within episodes in the dramas of the first literary period (1958 - 1965). These episodes depict the different phases of the dramas. A critical evaluation of the dramas by motivating their positive and negative aspects is undertaken. Chapter 3 deals with the development of plot within episodes in the dramas of the second literary period (1974 - 1982). As in the first literary period, a critical evaluation of the dramas by motivating their positive and negative aspects is examined. Chapter 4 deals with the development of plot within episodes in the dramas of the third literary period (1988 - 1997). A critical evaluation of the dramas by motivating their good and bad points is undertaken. Chapter 5 deals with woman as character in Xhosa dramas under study. A detailed analysis of the main woman character in each drama is undertaken. Furthermore, a critical summary of how the woman has been portrayed in the dramas is presented. Chapter 6 presents depiction of Xhosa culture in the Xhosa dramas. From each drama, certain selected aspects of culture are explored and an investigation of the portrayal of these aspects is undertaken. Chapter 7 summarizes the findings of the study.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die doelstelling van hierdie studie is om 'n kern aspek van Xhosa drama te belig: die rolle wat vroue kultureel gedwing is om te vervul in die gemeenskap. 'n Seleksie Xhosa dramas vanuit drie tydperke (1958 - 1965; 1974 - 1982; en 1988 - 1997) word ondersoek. In die loop van die studie, ontleding en interpretasie van hierdie dramas word die uitbeelding van vroue karakters ook ondersoek. Die skrywers van die tien dramas wat bestudeer word, betoog vir verandering deur middel van die sterk kragte van stereopites en kultureelverwronge voorstellings. Die eienskappe wat die skrywers algemeen toeskryf aan vroue karakters is passiwiteit, irrasionele optrede, gehoorsaamheid en deugsaamheid. 'n Ondersoek na die redes vir die proliferasie van hierdie vroulike stereotipes en die tekortkoming aan realistiese vroue karakters in Xhosa dramas word uitgevoer in die studie. Die studie voer redes aan waarom bepaalde stereotipes in die werk van verskeie skrywers oor 'n tydperk verskyn: hulle vrouekarakters is die produk van sosiale kondisionering, dit wil sêm ideale of teen-ideale van die heersende waardes van die skrywer se kulturele agtergrond en 'n simboliese vervulling van die skrywer se behoeftes. Die algemene kulturele perspektiewe van die skrywers beïnvloed en vorm ook die tekste wat hulle lewer. Hierdie dramas behandel naamlik vraagstukke tematies wat sentraalook bepalend is ten opsigte van die vorm en struktuur van die drama. Sodanige temas het gevolglik in bepaalde gevalle 'n invloed op die vorm en struktuur van die drama. Voorts word die ideologie van die klas verteenwoordig deur die skrywers in elke geval gereflekteer en die teks tot bepaalde nadele daarvan. Die prominente temas in die tien dramas is gedwonge huwelike en vrouemishandeling. Die skrywers is so gepre-okkupeer met die ongeregtighede teenoor vroue dat hulle bepaalde kulturele aspekte verwring deur, byvoorbeeld, buitensporige voorstellings. Vroue word voortdurend voorgestel as slagoffers, terwyl daar feitlik geen aanduidings is in die skrywer se voorstelling van vroue, dat persepsies oor hulle kulturele rol en status inderwaarheid besig is om veranderinge te ondergaan. Die proefskrif is soos volg gestruktureer: Hoofstuk 1 gee die doelstellings, omvang, teorieë en metodes wat in die studie gevolg word. Hoofstuk 2 behandel die ontwikkeling van intrige binne verskillende episodes in die dramas van die eerste literêre periode (1958 - 1965). Hierdie episodes gee 'n uitbeelding van die verskillende fases van die dramas wat in die studie ondersoek word. 'n Kritiese evaluering word van die dramas gedoen deur die positiewe en negatiewe aspekte daarvan te motiveer. Hoofstuk 3 behandel die ontwikkeling van intrige binne die episodes van die dramas van die tweede literêre periode (1974 - 1982). Soos vir die eerste literêre periode, word 'n kritiese evaluering gedoen van die dramas deur onder andere die positiewe en negatiewe literêre aspekte daarvan te motiveer. Hoofstuk 4 ondersoek die ontwikkeling van die intrige binne die episodes in die dramas van die derde literêre periode (1988 - 1997). Die kritiese evaluering van hierdie dramas sluit, soos vir die vorige periodes, 'n gemotiveerde beskouing in van die positiewe en negatiewe aspekte. Hoofstuk 5 ondersoek die vrou as karakter in die Xhosa dramas wat bestudeer word. 'n Gedetaileerde analise van die hoof-vroue karakters in elke drama word gedoen. Daarna word 'n kritiese oorsig aangebied van hoe die vrou voorgestel word in die dramas wat bestudeer is. Hoofstuk 6 bied 'n uitbeelding van Xhosa kultuur in die dramas wat ondersoek is. Bepaalde aspekte van kultuur word vir elke drama ondersoek en die uitbeelding van hierdie kultuur aspekte word behandel. Hoofstuk 7 bied 'n opsomming van die belangrikste bevindinge van die studie.

Thesis (MA (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005.
This study aims at highlighting one of the crucial aspects of Xhosa drama: how women have been regarded by a variety of communities as being inferior to men. This stereotype pervades almost all spheres of life. The low status assigned to women find its way into literature as well. Ngewu’s drama “Yeha mfazi obulala indoda” and Taleni’s drama “Nyana nank’uNyoko” has been examined. In most Xhosa literature, women are portrayed as submissive, obedient and minor characters. The advent of Ngewu’s work changed this scenario by portraying women as independent characters. This has led to great conflict with male characteristics and this demonstrates clearly that partriarchal domination is deep rooted in Xhosa culture.

This research expresses female character portrayal in various drama works written by males. Chapter one is a general introduction that gives the key to this study, the motivation that leads to the selection of this topic; a literary review on the portrayal of female characters in literary works written by males; the scope of study, the basic composition of the ensuing chapters and the definitions of terms that are of paramount importance for this research. Various literary theories are used in Chapter two for the analysis of the research texts. These literary theories include womanism, gender and feminism which expose the social effects caused by the negative perception of females in social life and the negative portrayal of female characters in male dramatic writings. Other literary theories include onomastics as a literary theory, which exposes the relationship between the name giver of a person and the power the name gives to its bearer, as well as psychoanalysis as a theory which proved to be unavoidable, since this study analyses the personal behaviour of the individual characters within their literary environment. Chapter three depicts the general victimization of female characters in male drama works and exposes the various effects of the attitudes of male writers towards female characters in terms of gender role. Chapter four shows a general stereotypical portrayal of female characters in male written drama texts. This chapter shows the impact of stereotyping on female characters from drama works that puts them in a vulnerable position, showing that it is risky to become a victim of ill-treatment in their communities and the literary world. Chapter five deals with the psychological literary review of female characters, showing them as being suicidal and murderers who easily take their own lives and those of other people. Chapter six is a general conclusion of the works which includes observer remarks from other literary researchers of the literature.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The main aim of study is to investigate characterisation in two of Ngewu's dramas. Ngewu's dramas are contemporary and many scholars have not yet had time to research them. The story in the drama Amadada la afunani ezintsaneni ?( 1998), is about the sexual abuse of children. This is new because the abuse of small children is not seen to indicate culture especially now that even fathers abuse their children. In the olden days children used to look to grown -ups for protection of every kind. The story in the second drama Yeha Mfazi Obulala Indada (1997) , is about a wife who hires assassins to kill her husband. In the past wives were submissive to their husbands. It was unheard of a wife challenging the husband's authority, let alone hiring assassins to kill him. Chapter 1 introduces the aim, the scope, the theories and the methods of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the plot structure of the dramas Amadada la afunani ezintsaneni? (1998) and Yeha Mfazi Obulala Indada (1997) Chapter 3 deals with characterisation in isiXhosa dramas, Amadada la afunani ezintsaneni(1998) and Yeha Mfazi Obulala lndoda (1997) Chapter 4 deals with language and the pattern of stylistic devices Chapter 5 concludes the findings of the study.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die hoofdoel van hierdie studie is om die karakterisering in twee van Ngewu se dramas te ondersoek. Ngewu se dramas is hedendaagse daarom is daar nog veel navorsing daaroor ezintsaneni (1998) gedoen nie. Die storie in die drama Amadoda la afunani handel hoofsaaklik oor die seksuele molestering van kinders. Seksuele kindemolestering is In relatiewe nuwe versknser want dit is taboe in kultuur veral nou dat die bekend is dat kinders deur hulle vaders gemolesteer word. In vroeer jare was kinders van volwassens afhanklik vir beskermering en welvaart. Die tweede drama Yeha Mfazi Obulala lndoda (1997) handeloor I vrou wat sluipmoordenaars huur om haar man om die lewe te bring. In vroeer jare was vroue aan hul mans onderdaning. Dit was ongewoon dat I vrou haar man se gesag sou ondermyn, en nog meer ondenkbaar die huur van sluipmoordenaars om hom om die lewe te bring. In hoofstuk 1 vind ons die doel van die studie, die omvang ,teoretiese raamwerk en metode van die studie. Hoofstuk 2 handeloor die struktuur van die twee Amadoda la afunani ezintsaneni (1998) en Yeha Mfazi Obulala Indoda ( 1997) Hoofstuk 3 handeloor die karakterisering in die isiXhosa dramas, Amadoda la afunani ezintsaneni (1998) en Yeha Mfazi Obulala Indoda (1997) Hoofstuk 4 handeloor die taal en skryfstyl van die skrywer. Hoofstuk 5 bevat die samevatting van die studie.