Masters Degrees (English)
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing Masters Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "De Villiers, Dawid"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemDisenchanting the American dream : the interplay of spatial and social mobility through narrative dynamic in Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Wolfe(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Theron, Cleo Beth; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the long-established interrelation between spatial and social mobility in the American context, the result of the westward movement across the frontier that was seen as being attended by the promise of improving one’s social standing – the essence of the American Dream. The focal texts are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), journey narratives that all present geographical relocation as necessary for social progression. In discussing the novels’ depictions of the itinerant characters’ attempts at attaining the American Dream, my study draws on Peter Brooks’s theory of narrative dynamic, a theory which contends that the plotting operation is a dynamic one that propels the narrative forward toward resolution, eliciting meanings through temporal progression. This thesis seeks to analyse the relation between mobility and narrative by applying Brooks’s theory, which is primarily consolidated by means of nineteenth-century texts, to the modernist moment. It considers these journey narratives in view of new technological developments and economic conditions, underpinned by the process of globalisation, that impact upon mobility.
- ItemOrigins, endings and the posthuman imperative in Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic fiction(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Kershaw, Andre James Daniel; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, I undertake an analysis of five primary texts in the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres, namely: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Drawing chiefly upon Frank Kermode’s work in The Sense of an Ending, in which he argues that imaginings of origin and end are crucial for conferring intelligibility upon being “in the middest” (8), I show how the confrontation of a particular kind of end point characterised by the proleptic spectre of the posthuman, invoked by texts within the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres, generates what I call a posthuman imperative to reinterpretation. This imperative is implicitly invoked by a text insofar as it raises or gestures towards the possibility of the posthuman and demands that the reader reorientate themselves, in the middest, in relation to this horizon. The process of reinterpretation of being-in-themiddest which occurs in response to the posthuman imperative, drawing upon narratives of origin and end, is primarily mediated through language and story. This process has implications for frameworks of meaning, value, ethics, truth, the self, and relation to the transcendent as well as to time and history. My analysis draws out a number of generative paradoxes which arise when attempting to write and read the possibility of the posthuman. To do so depends upon language, and yet language is brought into confrontation with its own limits as the limits of the human are approached. Further, while the posthuman imperative to reinterpretation is only generated in the face of the end, and an end in some sense is an essential precondition for the narrative concord of existence to which this process of reinterpretation is directed, the end is ultimately also that which threatens to undermine the possibility of narrative as such.
- ItemPoetics of passage in modernist reconfigurations of Odysseus(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Slabbert, Talitha; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: While the prevalence of the figure of Odysseus in Western literature has been much studied, insufficient attention has been paid to its associations with epistemology, and to the semiotic potential of the navigator-hero’s contest with the sea in figuring the relation between the episteme and the world it seeks to know. This thesis draws on Hans Blumenberg’s notion of “absolute metaphor” and Giambattista Vico’s notion of “poetic wisdom” to argue that Odysseus – in his ineluctable association with the image of the sea – serves, for modernist authors, as a means through which to represent the uncertain and difficult movement of existence and interpretation in the early 20th century, and that it becomes, for certain authors, an exceptionally intelligible means through which to figure their own hermeneutic ventures. The primary examples of this self-implicated hermeneutics studied in this thesis are Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and on James Joyce’s Ulysses, but, in order to contextualise these authors’ respective reconfigurations of the navigator-hero, I commence with a survey of some of the most influential reconfigurations of Odysseus that lead up to the 20th century, and of the disparate inflections given to the figure according to the epistemological attitudes of different authors and of their various historical contexts. This groundwork includes a consideration of the epistemological specificities of the 19th century, as the matrix from which the self-conscious hermeneutics of modernist literature would emerge. This project ultimately aims to lead to a more nuanced understanding of the way in which the figure of Odysseus operates within literature, and to an appreciation of the protean semiotic resources which it presents to authors, given its long history and its association with the similarly resonant image of the sea. In this thesis, I go on to reconsider Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential – but potentially reductive, if taken as absolute – claim that Odysseus is essentially a literary instantiation of Enlightenment reason on its trajectory towards a final disenchantment of the world. Instead, it is the argument of this thesis that the figure tends to exceed the specific configurations it is given, subtly destabilising – and potentially enriching – authors’ intended meanings through the inflections and the echoes of the multiple other configurations associated with it. As such, the figure operates in the milieu between determinate meaning and meaninglessness, providing authors with a provisional vehicle for their hermeneutics, a sort of poetics of passage through which to navigate an ‘oceanic’ and unhomely modernity.
- ItemScreening the posthuman : disembodied masculinity in virtual reality films(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Steenkamp, Lize-Maree; De Villiers, Dawid; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In science fiction films, cyborgs are often represented as embodiments of a transhuman drive to escape the limitations of the human body. This technologically mediated evolution is a continuation in the extreme of humanist principles such as linear progress, reason, autonomy and the primacy of mind over body. Donna Haraway has registered the possibility that, as a hybrid, the figure of the cyborg could be utilized to revise humanist principles, rather than reiterate them, through posthumanist representation. However, this seems counter-intuitive, as cyborgs in popular culture are known to exaggerate dualist gender ideals rather than subvert them. What is more, the disembodied cyborg that is constituted by human interaction with virtual reality seemingly maintains the mind/body binary rather than challenging it. Through the study of three virtual reality films that construct different kinds of interaction between human and machine, Brainstorm (1983), eXistenZ (1999) and Her (2013), I contend that the representation of the disembodied cyborg collapses the mind/body binary primarily through representations of sex and death, but that the subsequent invocation of associated gender identities reinstates the masculine/feminine binary. I accomplish this through a method of formal analysis of the cinematic representation of the disembodied cyborg and the spaces it moves in. Filmic virtual reality in Brainstorm and Her resonates with posthumanist concerns, and is discussed in relation to existing poststructuralist paradigms of signification in the works of primarily Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and N. Katherine Hayles. The formally alienating effects of Brainstorm are also integrated into a larger framework of film convention. With reference to Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and Neil Badmington, I discuss the disembodied cyborg as a posthuman figure in terms of its potential to collapse binaries, specifically those of mind/body and masculine/feminine. In order to appreciate the always-virtual nature of gender, the work of Judith Butler is utilized to explore the ways in which eXistenZ displays the fluidity of gender performances in virtual reality. I further argue that the three films accomplish the collapse of the mind/body dualism through the representation of sex and death, and reinstate binarist conceptions of gender performances. In Brainstorm and Her, desire and eroticism are coded as male undertakings that respond to the passive and objectified female form, whereas in eXistenZ, the representation of sexuality is more progressive. Violence, pain and death are also represented as the business of men in Brainstorm, while it is represented more playfully in eXistenZ. I aim to reveal the ways in which the emphasis on ultimate embodiment in virtual reality films through sex and death reinstates a sex-gender correlation, and thus, for the most part, do not succeed in the collapse of the gender dualism.