"The wife of Lucifer" : women and evil in Charles Dickens
- Authors: Ebelthite, Candice Axell
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Characters -- Women Evil in literature Women in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2189 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002231
- Description: This thesis examines Dickens's presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens's works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan's theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately "unknowable".
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- Date Issued: 2002
A history of confession: the dialogue between cynicism and grace in selected novels of J.M. Coetzee
- Authors: Hornby, Catherine Muriel
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation , Cynicism in literature , Grace (Theology) in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2190 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002232 , Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation , Cynicism in literature , Grace (Theology) in literature
- Description: In introducing the four novels under discussion as a “History of Confession”, this study explores the resistance to the dominant discourse of ‘history’ offered by the sustained confessions of individuals. In examining Coetzee’s oeuvre it is possible to delineate the outline of a dialogue between cynicism and grace, and the effects of these on the process of confession in each of the works Chapter One, dealing with Age of Iron, draws on Levinas’ theory of ‘the Other’ in order to elucidate the role played by the interlocutor or confessor in the process of confession.The recognition of the passage of the self through the Other is integral to the attainment of a state of grace, without which confession cannot be brought to an end The countermanding claims of the writer's will-to-write and duty to society are illuminated as a source of cynicism which overwhelms the intervention of grace. The Master of Petersburg, discussed in Chapter Two, is a confession of the guilt and despair faced by the writer who sacrifices his soul to answer the urge to write. Chapter Three, which examines Coetzee’s excursion into autobiography, represents a continuation of the confessional trend. The distance between the narrator and protagonist of Boyhood illustrates the convolutions of self-deception in the process of confession. The chapter which deals with Disgrace identifies a new trend in Coetzee’s writing:the concern with animals. Levinas’ theory, which identifies the encounter with the Other as necessary to precipitate an intervention of grace, is again useful in explaining how Coetzee has postulated the unassimilable otherness of animals as primary to human ethical development. This chapter also concludes that Disgrace represents a high point in the recovery of both grace and agency in Coetzee’s oeuvre.The concluding chapter suggests that the accumulation of meanings to the term ‘grace’enables its definition as a semi-religious abstraction. Coetzee suggests that belief in its existence has the power to affect interactions on the physical plane, especially those between the self and the Other.
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- Date Issued: 2002
Reading William Blake and T.S. Eliot: contrary poets, progressive vision
- Authors: Rayneard, Max James Anthony
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation , Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2279 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007545 , Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation , Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Description: Many critics resort to explaining readers' experiences of poems like William Blake's Jerusalem and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in terms of "spirituality" or "religion". These experiences are broadly defined in this thesis as jouissance (after Roland Barthes' essay The Pleasure of the Text) or "experience qua experience". Critical attempts at the reduction of jouissance into abstract constructs serve merely as stopgap measures by which critics might avoid having to account for the limits of their own rational discourse. These poems, in particular, are deliberately structured to preserve the reader's experience of the poem from reduction to any particular meta-discursive construct, including "the spiritual". Through a broad application of Rezeption-Asthetik principles, this thesis demonstrates how the poems are structured to direct readers' faculties to engage with the hypothetical realm within which jouissance occurs, beyond the rationally abstractable. T.S. Eliot's poetic oeuvre appears to chart his growing confidence in non-rational, pre-critical faculties. Through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot's poetry becomes gradually less prescriptive of the terms to which the experience of his poetry might be reduced. In Four Quartets he finally entrusts readers with a great deal of responsibility for "co-creating" the poem's significance. Like T.S . Eliot, although more consistently throughout his oeuvre, William Blake is similarly concerned with the validation of the reader's subjective interpretative/creative faculties. Blake's Jerusalem is carefully structured on various intertwined levels to rouse and exercise in the reader what the poet calls the "All Glorious Imagination" (Keynes 1972: 679). The jouissance of Jerusalem or Four Quartets is located in the reader's efforts to co-create the significance of the poems. It is only during a direct engagement with this process, rather than in subsequent attempts to abstract it, that the "experience qua experience" may be understood.
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- Date Issued: 2002
South African memoirs in a decade of transition: Athol Fugard's Cousins (1994), J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood (1997), and Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart (1999)
- Authors: Roux, Christine Ann
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: Autobiography , Fugard, Athol , Coetzee, J. M., 1940 , Breytenbach, Breyten
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2191 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002233 , Autobiography , Fugard, Athol , Coetzee, J. M., 1940 , Breytenbach, Breyten
- Description: This thesis examines three South African memoirs using M. M. Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogical relationship in language and literature. By offering an alternative to a postmodern or multicultural interpretation of autobiographies, Bakhtin’s precepts, that define a dialogic, help to reframe a way of discussing memoirs and avoiding dead-ends previously arrived at by essayists in James Olney’s 1980 collection. Bakhtin’s ideas discussed here, which include the “once-occurrent moment”, “architectonic contraposition”, ”emotional-volitional tone”, “alibi”, “non-alibi”, and “centripetal” and “centrifugal” force, help to rebuild a discussion based on temporary and evolving self truth rather than fiction, the postmodern interpretation, or confession, the new-age secular spiritualism based on multicultural and politically correct standards. For this, each author’s memoir had to be examined separately and a conclusion was arrived at through inductive analysis. Rather than try to find similar characteristics, I focused on what made each memoir different and unique. Janet Varner Gunn’s Autobiography: Toward A Poetics of Experience (1982) refocused the debate over autobiography on process. The question, what steps did each author take toward writing about himself, led the discussion to an examination of the priorities each author exemplified. Beginning with Fugard who emphasized spatial, concrete, and sensory detail to help him contain his emotional life, the thesis moves on to an examination of Coetzee’s sense of justice. From the physical and intellectual world follows Breytenbach’s spiritual space-making. In each memoir, control of space is evident on different levels of experience. Articulating space inevitably leads to a discussion of boundaries. Here, Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the modern self’s need to articulate a horizon or a framework is helpful in generalizing the effect of the autobiographical process. The conclusion reached is that autobiography is inherently centrifugal: it moves away from the center of cultural thinking because its “truth” bolsters itself on dialogical process which does not depend on a fixed authority but rather on communicative exchange. As an example of exchange, autobiography’s central truth is that it returns to a “unique point of origin”, namely the self, only to reconnect to the other in a potentially eternal exchange of responsiveness moving away from the center.
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- Date Issued: 2002