Dialogical narratives : reading Neville Alexander's writings

Abstract

This thesis is a transdisciplinary study of leading South African Marxist intellectual, political activist and sociologist of language Neville Edward Alexander’s written work in English. It is an attempt to explore the “dialogical narratives” as a proposition in my assessment of his work and it is also a description of a method he employs to arrive at his own political and literary compositions. In tracking his formation as a political subject and an activist, Alexander’s and other writers’ interpretations of his meetings with and his stories about people are explored. His writings cover the spectrum of politics, education and language, and he employed a political economy approach in all his written expositions. The study argues that he had an exceptional ability to “argue against himself” because he was a dialectical reasoner and because he embraced the political and sociological toolkit of historical materialism as the philosophical matrix of his work.