Please read the abtract in the section 09summary of this document / Dissertation (MA (Arts History))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

M.A. (English) / The aim of this d i s s e r t a t i on is to identify the influence of Bertolt Bretht on Fugard's life and work in South African theatre. As Fugard himself is not German-speaking, and his experience of Brecht is perforce through translations of Brecht into English, this is not a comparative study bet veeri the dramatists. It merely uses Fugard's own statements about his reading of Brecht in English at various points in his career, from the 1950s to the present, to show this particular aspect of his own development as a dramatist. The standard works on Fugard - Athol Fugard, Stephen Gray (ed.) (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1982), Dennis Walder, Athol Fugard (London: Macmillan, 1984) and Russell Vandenbroucke, Truths the Hand can Touch (Johannesburg: Donker, 1986) - refer only glancingly to this possibility. The introduction establishes the many references Fugard has made to Brecht in his writing - which includes not only his plays, but his novel, filmscripts, notebooks, letters and interviews and interprets how Fugard perceives various Brechtian theatre principles, such as the use of the alienation effect, the epic nature of drama and the function of theatre in the community. In the following chapters Fugard's vorks are examined, in order to show how Brecht has been of use to him at various key points in his career. This is done chronologically, so that a larger picture of the influence on Fugard's development as a dramatist and his changing use of Brecht as a source may be seen. The conclusion of this dissertation takes the findings of the previous chapters and assesses the nature of the BrechtFugard link, taking into account the different aspects and levels. This is briefly compared to the findings of the latest critical work to have corne out in which Fugard features - Martin Orkin, Drama and the South African State (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991) - in an attempt to show how using the methodology of a source and influence study like this is of value in coming to a deeper understanding of the dramaturgy of a writer like Fugard...

The purpose of this thesis is to review and revise all historical evidence hitherto available concerning the international aspects of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Its scope includes several layers, including how the peoples in the West, as well as their leaders, behaved during the crisis. It will look at the international arena in 1956 from the Hungarian perspective, as well as attempt to come to a historical explanation for Western, and specifically American actions during the uprising, and the precepts which led to them. In doing so, it shall in particular take a careful revision of the long-standing charges levelled against the West, concerning its alleged passivity, hypocrisy, or willingness to escalate the crisis via the controversial broadcasts of Radio Free Europe.

Brecht's concept of character and its influence on the content and style of his works Brecht's concept of character, based on the Marxist-socialist premise of the perfectibility of man, is one of the most important aspects of his work. He believes that man's character is comparable to an atom, constantly falling apart and re-assembling itself. He states that man should be defined by his contradictory actions. With this view of man, several assumptions of the traditional theater no longer hold. There is no stalwart hero to pit the strength of his character against fate, there is no moral code by which he could act, since all is seen as being in flux and ethics are decided upon according to the demands of each specific situation. Since the heart of tragedy usually is the struggle of a heroic figure against fate, and since Brecht's figures are changeable and no longer heroic, the premises of tragedy no longer exist. Furthermore, the hero's character can no longer serve to advance the action of the play. The environment has to serve now as a stimulus for its progress. Although Brecht believes in the eventual advent of a "golden age,” he presents his figures as being engaged in a daily struggle, winning, losing and compromising. Such figures no longer can be shown by traditional acting methods Brecht invented the "epic" way of acting to accommodate them. New methods of observation and expression are the result of these new "heroes." Thus, Brecht's concept of character serves to convey his idea of man's existential possibilities, but also causes stylistic changes in his work.

The German expressionist poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), a great admirer of the philosopher, psychologist, poet, anti-Christ and art theoretician Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), quoted and commented on the works of the latter from 1926 until his death. Benn’s references to Nietzsche range from the mere mention of the name in some works to entire poems (c.f. “Sils Maria”), essays, and lectures on Nietzsche (c.f. “Nietzsche – nach fünfzig Jahren”). Benn made no secret of his hero-worship for Nietzsche and considered himself the latter’s heir as far as his theory of art was concerned. Three key ideas on art, which Benn took over from Nietzsche and quoted, elaborated, and commented upon are: the idea that the world and existence are justifiable only as esthetic phenomena, the idea of art as the “Olymp des Scheins”, and the idea of art as the actual task of man, as his metaphysical activity. In my thesis I have attempted to show that in spite of Benn’s great admiration of Nietzsche as art theoretician, in spite of the fact that Benn used Nietzsche’s art vocabulary and took over quotations from his works almost verbatim, in spite of the fact that both Benn and Nietzsche saw in art the salvation for man in the midst of the European nihilism, Benn misunderstood Nietzsche’s basic message. I have explained that Benn and Nietzsche looked upon nihilism from two divergent points of view. Nietzsche concerned himself with giving the old “absolute” values, which were in their death-throes, the coup de grace and tried to establish in his Übermensch” ideal, an ideal which man is not meant to ever attain, but must continuously strive for, a new set of values, a new “metaphysics”, one not of the supernatural world, but of the natural world, different from the metaphysics of the Christian-Platonic tradition in that it looked upon man as a unity, a polarity of the material and the non-material and sought to bring them in harmony not through the violence of the extermination of the passions and the drives, but rather through their sublimation. For Nietzsche, nihilism was a brief temporary stage in the history of ideas, the natural and necessary conclusion of the old absolute values, an end the seed of which the old values had borne in themselves from their very inception, since they were based upon a denial of and violence against nature. Nietzsche’s attitude was a dynamic, revolutionary and creative one, and he saw at the center of his new valuation, as an enticement to life, as that which leads man to an affirmation of the totality of life – its pain and sorrow as well as its joys. For Benn, on the other hand, who saw in Nietzsche not a positor of new values, but a destroyer of the old ones, a materialist and a disciple of Darwin, nihilism was insurmountable and here to stay. His attitude was a heroic nihilism – one of resignation, a static, quietistic attitude. As a result of man’s progressive cerebration and his subsequent loss of a genuine relationship to nature, the material and the non-material aspects of man, life and intellect were considered by Benn to constitute an irreconcilable antimony. As a result he also considered art and life as two separate spheres and saw art as an escape, as the artist’s search for his identity. From this point of view Benn developed his theory of absolute art, of art for the sake of art, of art as form. I have attempted to show that Benn’s misunderstanding of Nietzsche on the subject of art – not notwithstanding the similarity or the vocabulary employed by the two authors – stems from his misunderstanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher, from the fact that Benn overlooked certain aspects of the writings of Nietzsche in favor of other aspects. By Benn’s own admission, his favorite book on Nietzsche was Ernst Bertram’s “Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology” (1918). I have examined this book, under whose spell Benn had fallen, and have found that Bertram, a member of the George-Kreis, the members of which used the Nietzsche of the Nietzsche “Legend” to their own ends, made no claim to either historical or philosophical accuracy, indeed that he overlooked Nietzsche’s philosophy completely, that his goal was to perpetuate the Nietzsche “cult” of the Kreis. For Bertram Nietzsche was not a philosopher, but a mystic and a saint. It is well-known that Nietzsche’s vocabulary lends itself especially well to misinterpretations of all sorts, intentional as well as unintentional. One need only think of what the Nazis were able to do with the“blond beast”and the “superman”, words taken out of context and used as slogans to fit a given ideology. The first scientific work which dealt seriously with Nietzsche as a philosopher was that by Jaspers in 1936, in which a brief half-page is devoted to art. The other scientific works on Nietzsche as a philosopher have appeared only much more recently.

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<p> This study investigates variables associated with residential mobility and migration at the ecological level. The aim of the study is to test the application of factor analysis to a more specific subject than the description of the whole urban structure. </p> <p> Theoretical formulations about urban growth, urban ecology and mobility are examined, together with empirical research in these fields, to determine variables considered to be associated with changes in residence. The indicators of variables chosen for analysis are from census data and city reports, and each census tract of the chosen urban area is assigned a value for each indicator. The area selected for the study is the Hamilton Metropolitan Area, Ontario. </p> <p> The results of the analysis reveal that most of the variation in the variables is accounted for by two factors: dwelling type and household composition, and economic status. These are the same factors which have been identified in factorial ecologies of geaeral urban structure. </p> The remaining factors are more associated with mobility, and reveal that different origins of movers and migrants are associated with different characteristics and geographical distributions. The hypotheses concerning the relationships with age, population growth and distance from the city centre are supported by the analysis, and the size and direction of movement is generally as expected. However, the hypothesis of increasing economic status with increasing distance migrated is not confirmed: migrants from abroad and different provinces tend to migrate to areas or lower economic status than migrants from Ontario or from the Hamilton metropolitan fringe. </p> <p> This study recognises the limitations of a factorial ecology of residential mobility. Particular care should be exercised in the selection of variables and measures of these variables. Factorial ecology is a descriptive tool, and further analysis of apparent association between variables should be undertaken to determine their statistical significance. </p> <p> The study emphasises the contribution of factorial ecology to the description of areal associations of more specific subjects such as residential mobility, and possibly for other social phenomena. As such, it provides a means for parsimonious description of aspects of urban social geography. </p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)