OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Bertelsen, Eve"

Browsing by Author "Bertelsen, Eve"

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Bildung and the metaphor of growth in the novels of T. Hardy and D.H. Lawrence
(1987) Kerbel, Sorrel; Bertelsen, Eve
This dissertation explores aspects of the German Bildungsroman, several nineteenth century English versions, and Lawrence's revitalisation of a genre which had become unfashionable and almost moribund. It examines Jude the Obscure (1896) and three of Lawrence's novels in the light of a distinction between a Bildungsroman and an Entwicklungsroman, showing where Hardy and Lawrence merge generic tradition and individual predilection to modify the forms. Hardy is chosen for comparison and contrast with Lawrence, partly because of Lawrence's own critical interest as evidenced in "The Study of Thomas Hardy" (written concurrently with the Brangwen saga), and because Jude the Obscure represents the state of the Bildungsroman at the turn of the century. Chapter One describes specific narrative features of the Bildungsroman to arrive at a "schema" of Bildung, and differentiates between Bildung and Entwicklung. Though its scope is necessarily restricted, its aim is an awareness of the grid of conventions upon which and against which the individual work operates. Chapter Two offers Jude the Obscure as Bildungsroman. It argues that Hardy, with his "radical", "Meliorist" approach, deliberately questions and frustrates the tradition. Hardy refuses the socially acceptable reconciliation of the paradigm, and has lost the Romantic vision of Nature as recourse, a vision Lawrence abundantly retains. The metaphor of organic growth, a legacy of the English Romantics, is central to Lawrence's modification of the paradigm in Sons and Lovers, The .Rainbow and Women in Love. His fidelity to a sequential chronology is justified in terms of Entwicklung, a pattern of continuous growth, so that "form is content". Lawrentian questers belong to a Romantic elite of unique individuals who grow to fulfilment naturally, breaking out of their enclosures. Entwicklung is socially subversive, rejecting conventional social integration, questioning its assumption of the individual's helpless passivity, and transcending the limitations of class and birth. Though the phases of Bildung and choice of imagery are traditional, Lawrence's metamorphosis is highly original and Modernist in terms of sheer narrative experimentation and sensibility. And the traditionally "closed" ending of the paradigm is exchanged for open-ended ambivalence, not only a reflection of Lawrence's philosophy that art should never be contained, but itself echoing the instability and insecurity of the new age.
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George Orwell and Raymond Williams : a comparison of their thoughts on politics, letters and language
(1989) Johnson, D W; Bertelsen, Eve; Higgins, John
The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the 'exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their 'political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of experience; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of 'literature'; they both explore the relation between 'politics' and 'letters'; and they both seek to use 'letters' in the service of (socialist) 'politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a 'unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care.
Open Access
The grotesque in the works of Federico Fellini and Angela Carter
(1997) O'Gara, Maura Rayne; Bertelsen, Eve
Chapter one of this thesis attempts to explicate and analyze the controversy that has historically surrounded the grotesque. Contention over the grotesque has existed since the earliest known discourses on the subject by Horace and Vitruvius. The indeterminacy and paradoxical nature of the grotesque, which disturbed these men of antiquity, has continued to generate debate among modern theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser whose ideas serve as touchstones throughout this work. Understandably, theorists, who strive to create systems of ideas which attempt to explain and define phenomena, are drawn to the grotesque. However, they are inevitably placed in the paradoxical position of trying to categorize something which ultimately subverts the conventional logic which underlies that process. Furthermore, the standards of mimesis and decorum, from which the grotesque gets its disruptive force, are subject to society. Societies provide the different conventions and assumptions that determine the form of the grotesque. Therefore, the grotesque will always have to be approached in its historically specific contexts of production and reception. What becomes apparent in analysing the grotesque is that attitudes toward its indeterminacy and paradoxical nature, which transgress the monologic binaries and implied hierarchies of Western thought, reflect the position of the observer or producer of the grotesque. If one espouses the cause of the low, as does Balch tin, then the indeterminacy and paradox of the grotesque provides an egalitarian possibility for the marginalized. If one stands with the status quo, as does Kayser, the transgressing of the definitions and distinctions which support the status quo is experienced as frightening and sinister (Harpham, 73). The differences noted between Kayser and Balch tin as observers of the grotesque may also be made between Federico Fellini and Angela Carter as producers of grotesque texts. The following two chapters of the thesis explore how the grotesque is used in Fellini's films (chapter two) and Carter's novels (chapter three). Carter, like Bakhtin, celebrates the grotesque as a means of empowerment, particularly for women and her work seems to employ the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque. Fellini's films also use images of carnival, but Fellini, like Kayser, sees the grotesque as an isolating aspect of the human condition. Fellini uses the grotesque only to show humanity's alienation from a knowable world, whereas Carter uses it to demonstrate the possibilities of a totally new one. Carter appears to take the Fellinian, Kayserian, negative attitude towards the grotesque and turn it around for her feminist cause. She utilizes the emancipatory aspect of the grotesque inherent in its denial of hierarchy without, however, idealizing it as Bakhtin appears to. She is well aware that carnivals, like her novels, are author(ized). In analyzing the continuum of Fellini's and Carter's works, both artists show an increased dependence on the use of the grotesque combined with postmodern strategies to support their intentions. However, the continuum of Fellini's oeuvre suggests the development of a modernist approach which attempts closure, but faced with the impossibility of final determinacy, turns to the quagmire of simulacra where no meaning is possible. Carter, on the other hand, increasingly uses the grotesque and postmodern strategies not only to reveal and deconstruct oppressive representations, but to allow agency for the reconstruction of new subjectivities. As this thesis will demonstrate, the grotesque's indeterminacy may provide a way to understand "reality" or the means to construct a better one.
Open Access
Power and pleasure : the politics of film analysis and feminist community media education
(1999) Du Toit, Jeanne Erika; Bertelsen, Eve
This dissertation examines the value of feminist film theory for the analysis of representations of women in visual media, and the potential of media education for establishing a culture of critical viewing. Feminist film theory is thus critically considered, as are associated debates within feminism on the reproduction by media institutions of categories of gendered identity implicated in violence against women. At attempt is made to synthesise key insights offered by sociological debates within feminism (Segal, Vance and Riley), feminist film theory (Mulvey and Kuhn) and discussions of media education (Clarke and Masterman), with a view to developing a description of spectatorial relations which may inform community-based media education programmes. Central to such a formulation is a post-structuralist notion of the subject operating within gendered power relations. The thesis concludes with a detailed evaluation of a media education course for women run at the Community Arts Project, Cape Town in 1993.
Open Access
The relation between form and ideology in Doris Lessing's Children of violence
(1991) Kapp, Rochelle Lynne; Bertelsen, Eve
The aim of this study is to examine Doris Lessing's relationship to Africa and to politics as reflected in the Children of Violence series, and to examine the impact of this on the form of the texts. The study plots the ideology of the series (which is strongly autobiographical) by examining Lessing's own biography over the seventeen years of writing the series, and by means of close textual analysis of narrative focalisation and representation of subjectivity. It is a central contention of the study that literature is influenced by political and historical events and emerges from a social and cultural milieu which helps shape form and content. The importance of engaging with rupture as it manifests itself in the text in the form of silences and contradictions, is stressed. The first two novels, Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage were written while Lessing was still a member of the Communist Party; A Ripple From The Storm, Landlocked and A Four-Gated City after she had left. Despite this, the ideology of the series is remarkably consistent in that we are presented with a humanist perspective which poses the conception of an essential self throughout, despite Lessing's political affiliation. Whereas the ideas of individual essence are evident only in silences and contradictions in the earlier texts, Lessing's romanticism is increasingly openly expressed in the texts which were written after she leaves the Party. Her increasing sympathy with her protagonist is represented in the change in narrative focalisation from omniscience to free-indirect speech. The central change in the series is in Lessing's depiction of her protagonist's relationship to Africa. Before Lessing leaves the Party, her protagonist desires a construction of herself as African, after Lessing leaves, her protagonist is described as alienated from Africa and having no role to play there. The Children of Violence series enacts the reworking of the protagonist's (and Lessing's) contradictory position as African and exile.
Open Access
"Stratagems to unblind" : reflexivity and existentialism in three novels by John Fowles
(1991) Immerman, Linda R; Bertelsen, Eve
This thesis proposes to re-examine John Fowles's self-reflexive practice and its interactions with existential themes on the basis that critical commentaries have not fully accounted for the rigour of his reflexive approach, nor for the complexity of its interrelations with existential philosophy, as it is used in his work. In my introductory chapter, I give a brief outline of critical treatments of Fowles's reflexivity, identifying two broad approaches. The first of these suggests that a reflexive aesthetic is a means, for Fowles, of remaining within a realist frame in an age of epistemological scepticism about the validity of its premises. The second approach more explicitly links reflexivity to Fowles's existential scruples whereby the 'ontological guilt' engendered by the conscious control of novel-writing can be assuaged and a degree of 'authentication' achieved. Reflexivity, in other words, exposes the writer's own 'bad faith' and allows him to be purged of it, alongside his characters who engage in journeys of discovery, leading to greater self-knowledge and moral commitment, through the enabling medium of personal narrative. These approaches, I suggest, are limited in that they assume that Fowles's reflexive novels can be apprehended as a unified body of work located within a conservative poetics (thought to be peculiar to English fiction) and assimilated to a humanistic moral branch of existentialism. My own method, then, is to attempt to look more closely at what I call the "reflexive positions" of each of the three novels under discussion and to account for their differing theoretical, epistemological and ontological affinities by establishing the critical contexts in which they reflexively situate themselves. This enables a more thorough examination of Fowles's development as a reflexive writer than has been offered thus far. The careful specification of Fowles's reflexive commentaries, furthermore, allows for a critique of the assumption that his reflexivity is explicable entirely in terms of his existential commitment. The thrust of my argument is to throw into question the unproblematic alliance between aesthetic and philosophical concerns that commentators perceive in his work. These issues are traced through Fowles's first three novels, The Collector (1963), The Magus (Revised Edition, 1977) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), each of which is treated in a separate chapter. My approach in these chapters is to specify clearly the "reflexive position" of the individual novel under discussion and then to examine critically its correlations with existential preoccupations. The resulting disruptions, contradictions and displacements I identify suggest a deviation in Fowles's work from the existential framework used to explain it and a growing concern with issues converging on postmodern and poststructuralist areas of inquiry, particularly the constitutive capacity of language, the decentering of the subject and the discursivity of what we call 'reality'. The typically recuperative positions Fowles's critics take up and the existentialist, moralist and humanistic grounds on which they interpret his work, I suggest, are inadequate to coping with his self-reflexive practice, necessitating such a reappraisal. A brief examination of his later novels in an appendix indicates that Fowles's movement away from humanist themes is anticipated in the earlier novels to a degree not widely recognised by critical commentaries.
Open Access
Television advertising and television audiences in contemporary South Africa
(1988) Field, Martin Stanley; Bertelsen, Eve
The three television channels provided by the South African Broadcasting Corporation target different demographic sectors of the South African population. A survey was conducted quantifying advertisements shown on SABC 1, which caters for a mainly black audience, and on SABC3, which caters for a mainly white audience. The semiotic codes employed to engage the viewers were recorded, tabulated and measured. The differences between the codes used on each channel were compared and tested for statistical significance. Significant differences were observed in the type of speech used by the advertisements, the race of the characters, the types of products advertised, the lifestyles portrayed and the type of rhetoric used. Specific examples were subjected to textual analysis to gauge where the approaches to the audiences differed or converged. A number of strategies were observed, reflecting the advertisers' perceptions of the audiences' relationships with the economic and political establishments. Corporate advertisements often represent the diversity of South African society, establishing a corporate identity as a unifying feature. Advertisements for financial services either exploit white anxieties, or black optimism, encouraging investment or credit purchases respectively. A stereotype representing South African isolation and backwardness is often presented as a negative identity, implying a progressive alternative to which the product is integral. Allegories of societal transformation also feature, with varying moods of anxiety or excitement depending on the audience.
Open Access
Viewing postmodernist television : Moonlighting, Twin Peaks and The Simpsons
(1995) Baderoon, Gabeba; Bertelsen, Eve
Contemporary life is distinguished by a massive capacity for exchanging information. Increasingly comprehensive, global communication networks allow discrete realities to be linked. These prolific sources of representation generate a "membrane" of mediation, and a formal regime of fragmentation, depthlessness and allusiveness (Chambers, 11). These economic, epistemological and aesthetic conditions constitute postmodernism. This dissertation addresses the theoretical challenge of form by attempting to craft an approach commensurate to such semiotic density (Wollen, 65). Since formalist approaches have been criticised as ahistorical, attention is given to the concept's social dimensions hence the history and production context of communication technology is considered. The inquiry also acknowledges the specificities of its location. The matrix of unfamiliar allusions which characterises the South African experience of American texts, embodies the multi-tiered allusiveness of postmodernist texts. It also illustrates the cult precept that quotation can be appreciated even when its source is not recognized. Cult theorises viewership as active yet ambivalent (Eco, 1988, 454). The initial chapter delineates parameters in postmodernism, narrative, genre and cult theory. Subsequent chapters examine three postmodernist television series: Moonlighting, a detective series, Twin Peaks, a soap opera, and The Simpsons, an animated sitcom. Deploying parody, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, each has a complex relation with genre. Tony Bennett conceives of the latter as zones of sociality which constitute and are constituted by other zones (105). Changes in genre therefore articulate changes in modes of thinking and inscribe different reading strategies.

Browsing by Author "Bertelsen, Eve"

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