Paranoid metaphors: an examination of the discursive, theoretical and sometimes personal, interaction between the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the surrealist, Salvador Dali, and the English poet, David Gascoyne
- Authors: De Klerk, Eugene
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: Paranoia , Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 , Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989 , Gascoyne, David, 1916-2001
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2192 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002234 , Paranoia , Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 , Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989 , Gascoyne, David, 1916-2001
- Description: This thesis examines the historical interaction of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the surrealist, Salvador Dali, and the English poet, David Gascoyne. It traces the discursive, and sometimes personal, relationship between these figures which led to a psychoanalytic-based conception of paranoia that impacted on both surrealism and the surrealist-inspired poetry and theory of David Gascoyne. Furthermore it seeks to identify the potential ramifications of this conception of paranoia, and the artistic practice it engendered, for literary, Marxist and psychoanalytic theory.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
- Authors: De Klerk, Eugene
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: Paranoia , Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 , Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989 , Gascoyne, David, 1916-2001
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2192 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002234 , Paranoia , Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 , Dali, Salvador, 1904-1989 , Gascoyne, David, 1916-2001
- Description: This thesis examines the historical interaction of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the surrealist, Salvador Dali, and the English poet, David Gascoyne. It traces the discursive, and sometimes personal, relationship between these figures which led to a psychoanalytic-based conception of paranoia that impacted on both surrealism and the surrealist-inspired poetry and theory of David Gascoyne. Furthermore it seeks to identify the potential ramifications of this conception of paranoia, and the artistic practice it engendered, for literary, Marxist and psychoanalytic theory.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
South African women's literature and the ecofeminist perspective
- Authors: Ewing, Maureen Colleen
- Date: 2013-05-24
- Subjects: Ecofeminism in literature Ecology in literature Nature in literature South African fiction -- History and criticism Smith, Pauline, 1883-1959 Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Matthee, Dalene, 1938-2005 Poland, Marguerite
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2287 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007808
- Description: A social-constructionist ecofeminist perspective argues that patriarchal society separates the human (or culture) from nature, which causes a false assumption that humanity possesses the right, as a superior species, to dominate nature. This perspective integrates the domination of nature with social conflicts, including but not limited to racial discrimination, gender oppression, and class hierarchies. Understanding how these various forms of oppression interrelate forms the main goal of an ecofeminist perspective. Since the nature-culture, female-male, and whitenonwhite conflicts resonate and interlock throughout South Africa's history, socialconstructionist ecofeminism is an indispensable perspective for analysing South African literature. This thesis takes a social-constructionist ecofeminist approach and applies it to four women authors that write about South African society between the years 1860-1900. This thesis includes the following authors and their works: Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and two of her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (published posthumously in 1927); Pauline Smith (1882-1959) and her novel The Beadle (1926); Dalene Matthee (1938- ) and three of her novels, Circles in a Forest (1984), Fiela's Child (1986), and The Mulberry Forest (1987); and Marguerite Poland (1950- ) and one of her novels, Shades (1993). This thesis investigates two women from the time period (Schreiner and Smith) and two women from a late twentieth century perspective (Matthee and Poland) and compares how they depict the natural environment, how they construct gender, and how they interpret class and race power struggles. This thesis concludes that the social-constructionist perspective offers unique insights into these four authors. Schreiner's novels reveal her concerns about gender and racial conflicts in South Africa and her understanding of the nature-culture dichotomy as sustained by Social Darwinism. Smith offers insights into the complex power structures in a rural Afrikaans society that keep women and nonwhite races silent. Matthee writes nature as an active participant in her novels; the social and ecological conflicts emphasise the transformation of the Knysna area. Poland explores the racial tensions, gender conflicts, and environmental concerns that preceded the South African War. Schreiner, Smith, Matthee, and Poland make up a small cross-section of South African literature, but they provide a basis for further discussing the ecofeminist perspective within a South African context. , KMBT_363 , Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in
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- Authors: Ewing, Maureen Colleen
- Date: 2013-05-24
- Subjects: Ecofeminism in literature Ecology in literature Nature in literature South African fiction -- History and criticism Smith, Pauline, 1883-1959 Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920 Matthee, Dalene, 1938-2005 Poland, Marguerite
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2287 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007808
- Description: A social-constructionist ecofeminist perspective argues that patriarchal society separates the human (or culture) from nature, which causes a false assumption that humanity possesses the right, as a superior species, to dominate nature. This perspective integrates the domination of nature with social conflicts, including but not limited to racial discrimination, gender oppression, and class hierarchies. Understanding how these various forms of oppression interrelate forms the main goal of an ecofeminist perspective. Since the nature-culture, female-male, and whitenonwhite conflicts resonate and interlock throughout South Africa's history, socialconstructionist ecofeminism is an indispensable perspective for analysing South African literature. This thesis takes a social-constructionist ecofeminist approach and applies it to four women authors that write about South African society between the years 1860-1900. This thesis includes the following authors and their works: Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and two of her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (published posthumously in 1927); Pauline Smith (1882-1959) and her novel The Beadle (1926); Dalene Matthee (1938- ) and three of her novels, Circles in a Forest (1984), Fiela's Child (1986), and The Mulberry Forest (1987); and Marguerite Poland (1950- ) and one of her novels, Shades (1993). This thesis investigates two women from the time period (Schreiner and Smith) and two women from a late twentieth century perspective (Matthee and Poland) and compares how they depict the natural environment, how they construct gender, and how they interpret class and race power struggles. This thesis concludes that the social-constructionist perspective offers unique insights into these four authors. Schreiner's novels reveal her concerns about gender and racial conflicts in South Africa and her understanding of the nature-culture dichotomy as sustained by Social Darwinism. Smith offers insights into the complex power structures in a rural Afrikaans society that keep women and nonwhite races silent. Matthee writes nature as an active participant in her novels; the social and ecological conflicts emphasise the transformation of the Knysna area. Poland explores the racial tensions, gender conflicts, and environmental concerns that preceded the South African War. Schreiner, Smith, Matthee, and Poland make up a small cross-section of South African literature, but they provide a basis for further discussing the ecofeminist perspective within a South African context. , KMBT_363 , Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in
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Transcendence in Patrick White: the imagery of the Tree of Man and Voss
- Authors: Van Niekerk, Timothy
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Tree of man , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2254 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004269 , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Tree of man , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss
- Description: This study represents an exploration of White's concept of transcendence in The Tree of Man and Voss by means of a detailed account of some of the key patterns of imagery deployed in these novels. White's imagery is a key mode of expression in his work, not simply manifesting in overarching religious symbols and framing structures but figuring in constantly modulated tropes continuous with the narrative, as well as in minor, but no less significant images occasionally susceptible to etymological or onomastic reading. While no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive exploration of the tropes at work in these novels, a sufficient range of material is covered, and its metaphoric density adequately penetrated, to highlight and explore a fundamental concern in White's work with a paradoxical unity underlying the dualities inherent in temporal existence. A useful way of approaching his fiction is to view the perpetual modulations of his imagery as the dramatisation of an enantiodromia or play of opposites, in which the conflicts of duality are elaborated and paradoxically - though typically only momentarily - resolved. This resolution or coincidence of opposites is a significant feature of his notion of transcendence as well as his depictions of illuminatory experience, and in this respect White's metaphysics share an essential characteristic, not only of Christianity, but a range of religious and mythological systems concerned with expressing a transcendent reality. Despite these analogies, however, the novels at hand are not so tightly bound to Christian, or any other, meaning-making systems so as to constitute sustained allegories, and hence this study does not aim to chart a series of correspondences between White's images and biblical or mythological symbols. Indeed, a criticism often levelled at White - with The Tree of Man and Voss typically figuring in support of this claim - is that he too rigidly imposes religious frameworks on his work. An extension of this view is formulated in the Jungian critique of White's corpus offered by David Tacey, who argues that White's conception of transcendence is consistently challenged by the archetypal significance of the images he employs, which point to a contrary process of psycho-spiritual regression in his protagonists. In a fundamentally text-based approach, this study explores White's use of imagery while taking biblical resonances and archetypal interpretations into account, and suggests that, though White's images are highly allusive, they are not merely agents of imported Christian, or other traditional symbolic values. Nor do they undermine the authenticity of his depiction of the spirituality of his protagonists, or obtrude on the fabric of the narrative. Instead, the range of his images are - though often ambivalent - integral to a network of mercurial tropes which articulate and constantly evaluate a notion of transcendence through inflections and oscillations rather than equations of meaning.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
- Authors: Van Niekerk, Timothy
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Tree of man , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2254 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004269 , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Tree of man , White, Patrick, 1912-1990. Voss
- Description: This study represents an exploration of White's concept of transcendence in The Tree of Man and Voss by means of a detailed account of some of the key patterns of imagery deployed in these novels. White's imagery is a key mode of expression in his work, not simply manifesting in overarching religious symbols and framing structures but figuring in constantly modulated tropes continuous with the narrative, as well as in minor, but no less significant images occasionally susceptible to etymological or onomastic reading. While no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive exploration of the tropes at work in these novels, a sufficient range of material is covered, and its metaphoric density adequately penetrated, to highlight and explore a fundamental concern in White's work with a paradoxical unity underlying the dualities inherent in temporal existence. A useful way of approaching his fiction is to view the perpetual modulations of his imagery as the dramatisation of an enantiodromia or play of opposites, in which the conflicts of duality are elaborated and paradoxically - though typically only momentarily - resolved. This resolution or coincidence of opposites is a significant feature of his notion of transcendence as well as his depictions of illuminatory experience, and in this respect White's metaphysics share an essential characteristic, not only of Christianity, but a range of religious and mythological systems concerned with expressing a transcendent reality. Despite these analogies, however, the novels at hand are not so tightly bound to Christian, or any other, meaning-making systems so as to constitute sustained allegories, and hence this study does not aim to chart a series of correspondences between White's images and biblical or mythological symbols. Indeed, a criticism often levelled at White - with The Tree of Man and Voss typically figuring in support of this claim - is that he too rigidly imposes religious frameworks on his work. An extension of this view is formulated in the Jungian critique of White's corpus offered by David Tacey, who argues that White's conception of transcendence is consistently challenged by the archetypal significance of the images he employs, which point to a contrary process of psycho-spiritual regression in his protagonists. In a fundamentally text-based approach, this study explores White's use of imagery while taking biblical resonances and archetypal interpretations into account, and suggests that, though White's images are highly allusive, they are not merely agents of imported Christian, or other traditional symbolic values. Nor do they undermine the authenticity of his depiction of the spirituality of his protagonists, or obtrude on the fabric of the narrative. Instead, the range of his images are - though often ambivalent - integral to a network of mercurial tropes which articulate and constantly evaluate a notion of transcendence through inflections and oscillations rather than equations of meaning.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
Versions of confinement: Melville's bodies and the psychology of conquest
- Authors: Goddard, Kevin Graham
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Criticism and interpretation Human body in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2216 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002259
- Description: This thesis explores aspects of Melville’s presentation of both the whale and the human bodies in Moby-Dick and human bodies in other important novels. It argues that Melville uses his presentation of bodies to explore some of the versions of confinement those bodies experience, and by doing so, analyses the psychology which subtends that confinement. Throughout Melville’s works bodies are confined, both within literal spatial limits and by the psychology which creates and/or accepts these spatial limits. The thesis argues that perhaps the most important version of bodily confinement Melville addresses is the impulse to conquer bodies, both that of the other and one’s own. It adopts a largely psychoanalytic approach to interpreting bodies and their impulse to conquer, so that the body is seen to figure both in its actions and its external appearance the operations of the inner psyche. The figure of the body is equally prevalent in Melville’s exploration of nationalist conquest, where, as with Manifest Destiny and antebellum expansionism, the psychological and physical lack experienced by characters can be read as motivating factors in the ideology of conquest. A final important strand of the thesis is its argument in favour of a gradual shift in Melville’s interpretation of the value and possibility of genuine communion between human beings and between humans and the whale. One may read Typee as an attempt by Melville to explore the possibility of a this-worldly utopia in which human beings can return to a version of primitive interconnectedness. This exploration may be seen to be extended in Moby-Dick, particularly in Ishmael’s attempts to find communion with others and in some moments of encounter with the whales. The thesis uses phenomenology as a theory to interpret what Melville is trying to suggest in these moments of encounter. However, it argues, finally, that such encounter, or ‘intersubjectivity’ is eventually jettisoned, especially in the works after Moby-Dick. By the end of Melville’s life and work, any hope of an intersubjective utopia he may have harboured as a younger man have been removed in favour of a refusal actually to assert any final ‘truth’ about social, political or even religious experience. Billy Budd, his last body, is hanged, and his final word is silence.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
- Authors: Goddard, Kevin Graham
- Date: 2003
- Subjects: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Criticism and interpretation Human body in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2216 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002259
- Description: This thesis explores aspects of Melville’s presentation of both the whale and the human bodies in Moby-Dick and human bodies in other important novels. It argues that Melville uses his presentation of bodies to explore some of the versions of confinement those bodies experience, and by doing so, analyses the psychology which subtends that confinement. Throughout Melville’s works bodies are confined, both within literal spatial limits and by the psychology which creates and/or accepts these spatial limits. The thesis argues that perhaps the most important version of bodily confinement Melville addresses is the impulse to conquer bodies, both that of the other and one’s own. It adopts a largely psychoanalytic approach to interpreting bodies and their impulse to conquer, so that the body is seen to figure both in its actions and its external appearance the operations of the inner psyche. The figure of the body is equally prevalent in Melville’s exploration of nationalist conquest, where, as with Manifest Destiny and antebellum expansionism, the psychological and physical lack experienced by characters can be read as motivating factors in the ideology of conquest. A final important strand of the thesis is its argument in favour of a gradual shift in Melville’s interpretation of the value and possibility of genuine communion between human beings and between humans and the whale. One may read Typee as an attempt by Melville to explore the possibility of a this-worldly utopia in which human beings can return to a version of primitive interconnectedness. This exploration may be seen to be extended in Moby-Dick, particularly in Ishmael’s attempts to find communion with others and in some moments of encounter with the whales. The thesis uses phenomenology as a theory to interpret what Melville is trying to suggest in these moments of encounter. However, it argues, finally, that such encounter, or ‘intersubjectivity’ is eventually jettisoned, especially in the works after Moby-Dick. By the end of Melville’s life and work, any hope of an intersubjective utopia he may have harboured as a younger man have been removed in favour of a refusal actually to assert any final ‘truth’ about social, political or even religious experience. Billy Budd, his last body, is hanged, and his final word is silence.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
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