Sympathy with the Devil: Ethics and genre in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa
Item
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Title
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Sympathy with the Devil: Ethics and genre in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5f47fa9982dc:10933
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identifier
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11208
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Creator
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Saint, Lily,
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Contributor
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Peter Hitchcock
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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African literature | South African studies | Modern literature | ethics | genre | popular culture | reading | South Africa | sympathy
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Abstract
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Sympathy with the Devil considers textual and visual cultures in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa to examine how practices of reading and "ways of seeing" contributed to the formation of ethical relation during a period largely characterized by the absence of ethics. It focuses on reading populations generally underexamined in studies of reader response and ethical criticism, arguing that this neglect reinforces hegemonic discourses of cultural production and consumption that overprivilege the responses of certain types of readers to certain types of textual objects. By focusing on readers in positions of subjection and exploitation who consume a wide variety of textual and visual genres, Sympathy with the Devil seeks to carve out a place in the study of audience and reader reception that recognizes the ethical importance of all acts of reading.;While a reader's subject position determines her ethical response, the form and content of what she reads also influences this. If reading instantiates ethical being, the ethos summoned forth varies according to the form or genre of the text itself. While most work on the relationship between literature and ethics considers the production of ethical being through the pages of so-called "high" literature, little has been done to examine how popular culture and other reading materials also do this. Thus I consider various genres of culture production, including passbooks, photocomics and testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as novels, short stories, and memoirs. The dissertation accordingly reevaluates the role of popular culture in the formation of ethical consciousness. Despite the preponderance of philosophical and theoretical scholarly work examining the nature of the ethical, this study concludes that subjectivities characterized by oppression rather than by privilege are more conducive to the conditions of possibility that give rise to ethical consciousness and ethical action.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
