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The first part of this thesis offers a theoretical foundation for the analysis of Tolkien- texts. Each of the three fields of interest, nostalgia, utopia, and the pastoral tradition, are introduced in separate chapters. Special attention is given to the interrelations of the three fields. Their history, meaning, and functions are shortly elaborated and definitions applicable to their occurrences in fantasy texts are reached. In doing so, new categories and terms are proposed that enable a detailed analysis of the nostalgic, pastoral, and utopian properties of Tolkien- works. As nostalgia and utopia are important ingredients of pastoral writing, they are each introduced first and are finally related to a definition of the pastoral. The main part of this thesis applies the definitions and insights reached in the theoretical chapters to Tolkien- The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. This part is divided into three main sections. Again, the order of the chapters follows the line of argumentation. The first section contains the analysis of pastoral depictions in the two texts. Given the separation of the pastoral into different categories, which were outlined in the theoretical part, the chapters examine bucolic and georgic pastoral creatures and landscapes before turning to non-pastoral depictions, which are sub-divided into the antipastoral and the unpastoral. A separate chapter looks at the bucolic and georgic pastoral- positions and functions in the primary texts. This analysis is followed by a chapter on men- special position in Tolkien- mythology, as their depiction reveals their potential to be both pastoral and antipastoral. The second section of the analytical part is concerned with the role of nostalgia within pastoral culture. The focus is laid on the meaning and function of the different kinds of nostalgia, which were defined in the theoretical part, detectable in bucolic and georgic pastoral cultures. Finally, the analysis turns to the utopian potential of Tolkien- mythology. Again, the focus lies on the pastoral and non-pastoral creatures. Their utopian and dystopian visions are presented and contrasted. This way, different kinds of utopian vision are detected and set in relation to the overall dystopian fate of Tolkien- fictional universe. Drawing on the results of this thesis and on Terry Gifford- ecocritical work, the final chapter argues that Tolkien- texts can be defined as modern pastorals. The connection between Tolkien- work and pastoral literature made explicit in the analysis is thus cemented in generic terms. The conclusion presents a summary of the central findings of this thesis and introduces questions for further study.
Die Studie Writing (Against) Postmodernism: The Urban Experience in Contemporary North American Fiction- stützt sich auf drei Hauptthesen. Zunächst wird dargelegt, dass sich postmoderne theoretische Positionen hinsichtlich des Verlusts menschlicher Handlungsfähigkeit und der Unzuverlässigkeit der Sprache trotz ihrer Umstrittenheit dazu eignen, ein Zeitgeistphänomen der nordamerikanischen urbanen Mittel- und Oberklasse um die Jahrtausendwende zu beschreiben. Wie Writing (Against) Postmodernism zeigt, korrespondieren die Leben der Figuren in den untersuchten Romanen "- The Savage Girl- (Alex Shakar, 2001),- Look At Me- (Jennifer Egan, 2001),- Noise- (Russell Smith, 1998),- Glamorama- (Bret Easton Ellis, 1998),- Ditch (Hal Niedzviecki, 2001),- Manhattan Loverboy, and- Suicide Casanova- (Arthur Nersesian, 2000, 2002) " mit Ideen, wie sie von zeitgenössischen Theoretikern wie Frederic Jameson, Paul de Man, Jean Baudrillard oder Jacques Derrida vertreten oder hergeleitet werden. Die Studie nimmt zudem ausführlich zu theoretischen Debatten rund um die Postmoderne Stellung. Sie zeigt die argumentativen Unzulänglichkeiten postmoderner Positionen und ihrer Anwendungen auf und arbeitet Argumente für einen maßvollen Realismusbegriff sowie gegen die Tendenz heraus, "that extra edge of consciousness" (Raymond Williams), welches Menschen zum selbstbestimmten Handeln befähigt, allzu schnell zu verwerfen. In einem weiteren Schritt argumentiert die vorliegende Studie, dass die oben genannten Texte und ihre Figuren nicht nur Unzufriedenheit mit dem postmodernen Leben und dem postmodernen Text beschreiben, sondern dass sie einen Weg aus postmodernen Aporien andeuten, die anfangs als gegebene Realität erscheinen. In der Bewegung weg von postmodernen theoretischen Positionen und deren praktischen Konsequenzen können die Bücher als Reflex eines 'post-postmodernen' Diskurses in der kulturellen Produktion Nordamerikas gelesen werden.
1.The Discursive Construction of Black Masculinity: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality
1.1.The Plight of Black Men: A History of Lynchings and Castrations
1.2.The Discursive Construction of the Black Man as Otherrn
1.3.Black Corporeality and the Scopic Regime of Racism
2. Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible man'
2.1.Invisible Black Men: Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinityrn
2.2.Transcending Invisibility
This study focuses on the representation of British South Asian identities in contemporary British audiovisual media. It attempts to answer the question, whether these identities are represented as hybrid, heterogeneous and ambivalent, or whether these contemporary representations follow in the tradition of colonial and postcolonial racialism. Racialised depictions of British South Asians have been the norm not only in the colonial but also in the postcolonial era until the rise of the Black British movement, whose successes have been also acknowledged in the field of representation. However these achievements have to be scrutinized again, especially in the context of the post 9/11 world, rising Islamophobia, and new forms of institutionalized discrimination on the basis of religion. Since the majority of British Muslims are of South Asian origin, this study tries to answer the question whether the marker of religious origin is racial belonging, i.e. skin colour, and old stereotypes associated with the racialised representation are being perpetuated into current depictions through an examination of the varied genre of popular audio visual media texts.
In Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, Toni Morrison negotiates ways of individual and collective identity formation through figurations of space and trauma. In geographical spaces that are public and private, open and closed, inclusive and exclusive, space of the past and spaces of the present, Morrison writes discursive spaces in which to create individual and communal African American history and identity, based on the traumatic hi-stories at the core of the Black American experience: the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, just to name a few. In the three novels, Toni Morrison subscribes to a postmodern notion of space and place, presenting it as relative to the individual- frame of mind. Places are used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds and their different ways of dealing with trauma. Trauma that is not worked through and transcended is presented by Morrison as impacting the protagonists- ability to fashion a home out of a vast and often hostile space. The physical and mental space of Morrison- protagonists is occupied by historical traumata that disables the protagonists to find a place in the present without revisiting the places of their troubled past. While this burdens their lives, it also opens up a historical and metahistorical discourse that allows the revision of mainstream historiography to include minority histories of oppression and trauma. Morrison reconfigures the American historical landscape by emphasizing the subjectivity of any history and offering alternatives to historical grand narratives through her historiographic metafiction. All three novels explore the possibility of reconciliation between past trauma and present life. Doing so requires Morrison to send her protagonists on strenuous journeys through time and space in order to visit the past trauma that keeps them from making a home in the here and now. The protagonists venture back to the primal scenes that bear major significance for their lives but have been suppressed for being too painful to remember. Their pain thus awakens anew, but out of it grow the possibility of a life in the present and the hope for a future. The pasts Morrison thus digs up serve as anchors to situate the African American place in the American historical landscape. Those primal places have a geographical as well as a historical and psychological quality, as places in Morrison- novels are often used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds, containing the memory of the traumatic past. By spatializing time, Morrison makes history accessible to a communal working through, thus countering the modernist impulse to treat memory as a private faculty embedded in the individual- psyche. This makes it difficult, for African Americans with individual recollections of slavery and racist oppression for example, to use traumatic memory as the basis for a common sense of identity. Morrison uses spatialized time as a forum to discover this basis, to allow for the establishment of a common historical bond. At the same time, she warns against instrumentalizing a common history to exclude those who do not share it. Any history, for Morrison, should be open and flexible enough to accommodate different perspectives. Essentially, Morrison suggests that western historiography is a discursive construct. By allowing, in all three novels, a polyphonic weaving of different equal histories to destablize a single, authoritative, hegemonic historiography, Morrison gives African Americans the power to construct her own past, her own present, and thereby claim back her identity. Moreover, Morrison destabilizes the duality of private space and public space that has long served to distinguish subjective individual memory from objective communal history and thus to legitimize certain accounts of history at the expense of others. The gendered as well as the racial other, by virtue of being excluded from the public sphere, have been excluded from their own historicization. By opening up the private sphere of personal trauma and loss, Morrison spatializes personal memory in a way that it forms a parallel public sphere in which African Americans may negotiate their historicity, move out of the timelessness of the private into the historicized public. By opening up the traditionally private sphere of the home to the public and turning it into a deeply political place, Morrison redefines home in a way that it does not necessarily conform to the classic view of a closed-off shelter but rather a transient place with flexible boundaries that allows for the formation of liberated individual and communal identities out of (hi)stories of pain and trauma.
Seit den frühen siebziger Jahren ist im anglo-amerikanischen Raum eine große Anzahl an Romanen erschienen, die alle auf einer bzw. zwei eng verwandten schottischen Feenballaden ("Thomas the Rhymer" und "Tam Lin") basieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht eine Auswahl dieser Romane in vergleichender Perspektive. Der erste Teil beschäftigt sich mit Feenglauben und -literatur im Allgemeinen, während der zweite Teil der Analyse von zehn auf den Balladen basierenden Romanen gewidmet ist. Da im Ausgangsmaterial Elemente keltischen Volksglaubens eine zentrale Rolle spielen, untersucht das erste Kapitel die Grundlagen und möglichen Ursprünge des keltischen Feenglaubens. Um neben einer Einführung in die volkskundlichen Grundlagen auch eine Verankerung der Arbeit in aktuellen literaturwissenschaftlichen Theorien zu gewährleisten, gibt das zweite Kapitel einen Überblick über Theorien der phantastischen Literatur. Vorgestellt werden strukturalistische und funktionale Ansätze, die sich chronologisch von J.R.R. Tolkien (1948) über Tzvetan Todorov (1970) bis hin zu Farah Mendlesohn (2005) bewegen. Um die Bearbeitungen der frühmodernen Balladen literaturgeschichtlich einzuordnen, zeichnet das nächste Kapitel die Geschichte der literarischen Bearbeitungen des Elfenstoffes in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis ins späte 20. Jahrhundert nach, mit Schwerpunkt auf englischsprachigen Werken. Von im Mittelalter noch stark vom Volksglauben beeinflussten, moralisch ambivalenten Figuren entwickeln sich die Elfen seit dem 16. Jahrhundert zu satirisierten, miniaturisierten und verniedlichten Gestalten; die Fantasyromane des späten 20. Jahrhunderts scheinen jedoch wieder zu stärker bedrohlichen Elfen zurück zu finden. Das nächste Kapitel widmet sich der Darstellung des Ausgangsmaterials, der zwei Balladen, die als Nr. 37 bzw. 39 in der Balladensammlung von Francis James Child zu finden sind. Erläutert werden die Entstehungsgeschichte der traditionellen Ballade (traditional ballad) im Allgemeinen und von Child Nr. 37 und 39 im Besonderen, sowie Varianten, Symbolik und Besonderheiten der zwei Balladen. Die anschließenden Analysekapitel beschäftigen sich jeweils schwerpunktmäßig mit einer Balladenadaption in Romanform: - Dahlov Ipcar: The Queen of Spells (1973) - Elizabeth Marie Pope: The Perilous Gard (1974) - Diana Wynne Jones: Fire and Hemlock (1984) - Ellen Kushner: Thomas the Rhymer (1990) - Pamela Dean: Tam Lin (1991) - Terry Pratchett: Lords and Ladies (1992) und The Wee Free Men (2003) - Patricia McKillip: Winter Rose (1996) Alle Analysekapitel sind ähnlich strukturiert: Nach kurzer Vorstellung des Autors folgt eine Zusammenfassung der Romanhandlung. Da alle Romane mehr oder weniger stark intertextuell sind, werden daraufhin Einflüsse und intertextuelle Anspielungen untersucht. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt dabei auf der Verarbeitung der zwei Child-Balladen. Da nahezu alle untersuchten Romane ähnliche Hauptcharaktere aufweisen (junges Mädchen, junger Mann, Elfenkönigin) untersuchen die Analysekapitel diese Figurenkonstellation sowie die hier verarbeiteten folkloristischen Einflüsse. Trotz der großen zeitlichen und geographischen Bandbreite der Schauplätze sind sich die Romane erstaunlich ähnlich, vor allem in der Darstellung ihrer Hauptfiguren. Die weibliche Heldin ist meist jung, eigenwillig und unterscheidet sich oft durch eine negative Charaktereigenschaft oder Umweltbedingung von ihren Altersgenossinnen. Nahezu alle Romane werden aus der Perspektive der weiblichen Hauptfigur erzählt. Dies führt dazu, dass die männliche Hauptfigur weniger zentral und oft durch eine gewisse Passivität gekennzeichnet ist. Infolgedessen ist die zweite aktive Figur der Konstellation ebenfalls eine Frau " die Elfenkönigin. Auch in ihrer Darstellung lassen sich in allen Romanen große Gemeinsamkeiten finden: Sie ist attraktiv und grausam, kühl und oft überheblich. Insgesamt werden die Elfen in den Romanen deutlich unsympathisch geschildert. Sie sind eine Spezies schöner, (fast) unsterblicher, oft übernatürlich intelligenter und mit magischen Fähigkeiten begabter Wesen, doch sind sie auch kalt, grausam und vollkommen fremdartig und unverständlich für die Menschen. Ein möglicher Grund für die negative Darstellung der Elfen scheint didaktischer Art zu sein, da die Botschaft aller Adaptionen an die Leser lauten könnte: "Akzeptiere deine Unvollkommenheit und lass dich nicht von vermeintlich überlegenen Gegnern einschüchtern " auch sie haben Schwächen". Auch in Richtung Gender-Diskurs scheinen viele der Autoren eine Aussage machen zu wollen. Sie zeichnen ihre Heldinnen als "starke Mädchen", die in einer Umkehrung des "damsel in distress"-Schemas einen Mann aus der Gefangenschaft der Elfen retten. Als feministisch kann man die Adaptionen jedoch nicht bezeichnen, da sie hierzu eher zu konservativ sind, was sich vor allem darin zeigt, dass die einzige Frau im Roman, die wirklich über Macht verfügt " nämlich die Elfenkönigin " am Ende die Verliererin ist.
As a target for condemnation, the thematic prevalence of racism in African American novels of satire is not surprising. In order to confront this vice in its shifting manifestations, however, the African American satirist has to employ special techniques. This thesis examines some of these devices as they occur in George Schuyler- Black No More, Charles Wright- The Wig, and Percival Everett- Erasure. Given the reciprocity of target and technique in the satiric context, close attention is paid to how the authors under study locate and interrogate racism in their narratives. In this respect, the significance of anti-essentialist Marxist criticism in Schuyler- Black No More and the author- portrayal of the society of his time as capitalist machinery is examined. While Schuyler is concerned with exposing the general socioeconomic workings of the 1920s from a Marxist perspective, Wright offers the reader perspective into how this oppressive machinery psychologically manipulates and corrupts the individual in the historic context of Lyndon B. Johnson- political vision of the Great Society. Everett then elaborates on the epistemological concern which is traceable in Wright- work and addresses the role media representation plays in manufacturing images and rigid categories that shape systematic racism. As such, the present study not only highlights the versatility of satire as a rhetorical secret weapon and thus ventures toward the idiosyncrasies of the African American novel of satire, it also makes an effort to trace the ever-changing face of racial discrimination.
ENGLISH ACADEMIC LITERARY DISCOURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA 1958-2004: A REVIEW OF 11 ACADEMIC JOURNALS
(2007)
This study examines the discipline of English studies in South Africa through a review of articles published in 11 academic journals over the period 1958"2004. The aims are to gain a better understanding of the functions of peer-reviewed journals, to reveal the presence of rules governing discursive production, and to uncover the historical shifts in approach and choice of disciplinary objects. The Foucauldian typology of procedures determining discursive production, that is: exclusionary, internal and restrictive procedures, is applied to the discipline of English studies in order to elucidate the existence of such procedures in the discipline. Each journal is reviewed individually and comparatively. Static and chronological statistical analyses are undertaken on the articles in the 11 journals in order to provide empirical evidence to subvert the contention that the discipline is unruly and its choice of objects random. The cumulative results of this analysis are used to describe the major shifts primarily in ranges of disciplinary objects, but also in metadiscursive and thematic debates. Each of the journals is characterised in relation to what the overall analysis reveals about the mainstream developments. The two main findings are that, during the period under review, South African imaginative written artefacts have moved from a marginal position to the centre of focus of the discipline; and that the conception of what constitutes the "literary" has returned to a pre-Practical criticism definition, broadly inclusive of a variety of types of artefact including imaginative writing, such as autobiography, letters, journals and orature.
Mental processes are filters which intervene in the literary presentation of nature. This article will take you on a journey through literary landscapes, starting from Joseph Furphy and end-ing with Gerald Murnane. It will try to show the development of Australian literary landscape depiction. The investigation of this extensive topic will show that the perception of the Aus-tralian landscape as foreign and threatening is a coded expression of the protagonists" crisis of identity due to their estrangement from European cultural roots. Only a feeling of being at home enables the characters to perceive landscapes in a positive way and allows the author to depict intimate and familiar views of nature. This topic will be investigated with a range of novels to reveal the development of this theme from the turn of the nineteenth century (the time of Furphy- novel Such is Life) up to the present (i.e. novels by Malouf, Foster, Hall, Murnane).
The main aim of "Her Idoll Selfe"? Shaping Identity in Early Modern Women- Self-Writings is to offer fresh readings of as yet little-read early modern women- texts. I look at a variety of texts that are either explicitly concerned with the constitution of the writer- self, such as the autobiographies by Lady Grace Mildmay and Martha Moulsworth, or in which the preoccupation with the self is of a more indirect nature, as in the mothers" advice books by Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Richardson or the anonymous M. R., or even in women- poetry, drama and religious verse. I situate the texts in the context of early modern discourses of femininity and subjectivity to pursue the question in how far it was possible for early modern women to achieve a sense of agency in spite of their culturally marginal position. In that, my readings aim to contribute to the ongoing critical process of decentring the early modern period. At the same time, I draw on contemporary theory as a methodological tool that can open up further dimensions of the texts, especially in places where the texts provide clues and parallels that lend themselves to a theoretical approach. Conversely, the texts themselves shed interesting light on feminist and poststructuralist theory and can serve as testing grounds for the current critical fascination with fragmentation and hybridity. Having outlined the theoretical and methodological framework of my study, I then analyse the women- writings with reference to a matrix of paradigmatic dimensions that encompass their most prominently recurring themes: the notion of writing the self, relationships between self and other, demarcations of private and public, the women- notorious preoccupation with self-loss and death, as well as the recurrent theme of the "golden meane". I suggest that this motif can provide the vital cue to early modern women- constitution of self. The idea of a precarious "golden meane" links in with to parallel discourses of moderation and balance at the time, but reinterprets them in a manner that can present a workable and innovative paradigm of subjectivity. Instead of subscribing to a model of decentred selfhood, early modern women- presentations of self suggest that a concluding but contested compromise is a workable strategy to achieve a form of selfhood that can responsibly be lived with.
