In the last twenty years, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series has become very popular. Pratchett's success hinges in part on his use of allusion, in what Tolkien called the "Cauldron of Story," and what Pratchett refers to as "white knowledge." This paper explores the Discworld novels and illustrates Pratchett's use and success of storytelling through a few key directions: folk tales, fantasy literature, movies, and rock music. Pratchett has received limited critical review, mostly of a negative nature, while producing a strong literary series, one crafted with both obvious and subtle recognition of his genre's sources. While standing on the shoulders of giants, Pratchett both respects and scrutinizes the myths and stories that construct our reality. Critically, Pratchett's fiction deserves more respect and closer study; this paper attempts to give him his due.

The aim of this dissertation was to critically analyse Terry Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell trilogy in terms of three areas, namely Pratchett’s use of various fantasy techniques; how comedy and satire function as distancing mechanisms; and how fantasy and comedy function in accordance with Erikson’s and Bettelheim’s theories concerning identity formation in adolescent and child readers. The primary aim of this dissertation was therefore to provide a literary reading of Pratchett’s trilogy, Only You Can Save Mankind (1992), Johnny and the Dead (1993) and Johnny and the Bomb (1996). However, it also acknowledges the possible didactic and developmental benefits of the books. The trilogy is entertaining, exciting, witty and child-friendly (Baldry cited in Butler, James and Mendlesohn, 2004:41), but it is also clear that Pratchett endeavours to challenge his child readers by presenting everyday situations from foreign and unusual perspectives. This dissertation argues that, as Baldry states, Pratchett ‘expands the thinking of his young readers with new ideas or unconventional ways of looking at familiar ideas’ which will ultimately help them consider their own lives in alternative and perhaps even more meaningful ways (quoted in Butler, James and Mendlesohn, 2004:41). The idea of ‘distancing techniques’ is vital for this study, because it proposes that readers can be transported from their Primary Realities (in which they live and function on a daily basis) into Secondary Realities or worlds which are unlike the Primary Reality in form and composition, but not unlike them in the way they function. Once this removal has taken place, bibliotherapists argue that readers are able to look back upon their primary world with new insight into their sense of industry and identity and also into the way their primary reality functions and the way they function within it. J.R.R. Tolkien (1985:35) explains that ‘…fact becomes that which is manipulated by the fantasy writer to produce a keener perception of the primary world and a greater ability to survive in it’. Owing to Pratchett’s specific comic brand of fantasy, a discussion of his comic and satiric techniques is also presented. Part of this discussion again concentrates on the ability of comedy to act as a distancing mechanism, while another discusses how Pratchett uses comedy to satirise certain aspects of society. As Bergson (1911:17) states in his book, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, laughter is a way of ‘correcting men’s manners’. Pratchett thus makes use of various comic techniques to mock and ridicule certain features of society, such as its obsession with television, its materialism, or its obsession with computer games. This research is important as the fantasy genre is often considered to be mere popular fiction, to which parents and school teachers are frequently averse. However, with the increase in sales of fantasy works over the past decade, especially in adolescent and children’s fantasy, study of the genre and its possible influence on readers is becoming increasingly necessary. This dissertation undertakes to show that fantasy works can be both complex and satisfying literary works while they also have a positive influence on child readers. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / English / unrestricted

No description available.

В данной магистерской диссертации исследуются окказионализмы, созданные Терри Пратчеттом, в сопоставлении с их русскими эквивалентами. Рассматриваются способы конструирования окказиональной лексики в оригинале и переводе романов «Мор, ученик Смерти» и «Мрачный жнец», определена частотность использованных способов перевода. В русле существующих теорий эквивалентности доказана зависимость используемого способа перевода от степени семантической нагруженности индивидуально-авторского онима или реалии, а равно от типологической принадлежности каждой окказиональной единицы. / This master's thesis studies the occasional words created by Terry Pratchett as compared to their Russian equivalents. The ways of constructing occasional words in English and Russian variants of the novels "Mort" and "Reaper Man" are considered, the frequency of the applied translation methods is defined. Within the existing theories of equivalence, the dependence of the applied method of translation on the degree of semantic meaningfulness of the individual author’s word is proved, as well as on the typological peculiarities of each occasional lexeme.

This dissertation presents a holistic framework for approaching fantastic school stories: that is, narratives which feature the protagonist’s education in magic. This three-part framework attends to the ways in which the fantastic school story subgenre draws upon the characteristics and possibilities of the school story genre, fantastic literature, and representations of education – in which a hidden curriculum is always inherently present – to create unique opportunities for representing and foregrounding issues and structures within educational institutions and the relationship between education and power. Employing this lens allows for a more nuanced and complex consideration of the impact of fantastic elements in these narratives, examining the ways in which such elements exaggerate, embody, or enforce underlying ideologies and norms and offer encouragement to readers to interrogate these aspects of the text and the mundane educational experiences they encounter. This framework is then used to analyse representative texts in the subgenre and explicate the hidden curriculum of each: ideologies of immutable gender and identity in Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall; the use of testing as a gatekeeping measure to reinforce Pureblood supremacy in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series; the prerequisite of economic capital to access education, undermining the myth of post-secondary studies as social mobility, in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles; the violence of imperial educational institutions in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy; and the vocational habitus of witchcraft, including gendered divisions and expectations of personal sacrifice, on the Discworld in Terry Pratchett’s “Tiffany Aching” quintet. This framework and these illustrative analyses, by explicating the structures underlying the protagonists’ education and the ways in which they are thereby limited, participate in the projects of developing an emancipatory approach to children’s literature and in consciousness-raising regarding hidden curricula in education. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Texts in the fantastic school story subgenre – that is, narratives about a young person learning how to use magic, often at a school – are a valuable opportunity to explore the relationship between power and education. Here, I present a three-part approach for reading these texts which looks at how these narratives combine elements of the school story genre, fantasy literature, and representations of education to create a unique format. This unique format makes it easier for readers to see underlying structures and issues in education by making familiar elements feel unfamiliar through the addition of magic. I then use this three-part approach to analyse fantastic school stories by Lev Grossman, Terry Pratchett, Patrick Rothfuss, J.K. Rowling, and Jane Yolen. Reading the texts through this lens brings forward issues related to education like gate-keeping, socioeconomic status, imperialism, and gendered norms and divisions.