Thesis (doctoral)--Tübingen, 1973. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 290-300.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-256).

The south African playwright Athol Fugard of ten explores the problems which apartheid has created within his society -problems ranging from the racial and societal to the spiritual. He seems to communicate his thoughts about these issues through many direct references to space. This study investigates the meanings these spaces communicate. Four plays were chosen as representative of Fugard's subject matter (covering both white and non-white society) and career: Blood Knot (1963), People are Living There (1970), The Road to Mecca (1985), and My Children, My Africa (1990). Then three steps were carefully followed. First, each reference to space was identified and categorized using Keir Elam's and Susanne Langer's definition of "virtual space" as guide to the establishment of categories. Three categories were established: virtual space (that which is immediately visible to the audience), extended-virtual space (the off stage world which is real to the characters but unseen by the audience), and imaginary space (that which the characters project on or into the world around them). second, patterns and relationships among the spaces were identified (using Kenneth Burke's and Mary McCarthy's methodology of image clusters and dramatic alignments). Third and finally, the meaning of these patterns was explored, often using Edward Hall's science of proxemics to facilitate understanding. There is considerable similarity and continuity from play to play in the use of space. Fugard often employs references to extended-virtual space to communicate the many ills which have arisen in South African society. He also typically includes a virtual space or spaces which provide a safe haven from those ills. In addition, be almost always uses reference to imaginary space or spaces to communicate the hope for the future of freedom for all of South Africa's people. Ideally, the recognition of the spaces in Fugard's work should be actively, and knowingly, articulated in any production of his plays. This study provides a methodology for exploring these spaces and an indication of what many of the spaces mean.

No description available.

Part one of the thesis. She's leaving. She's running away. Everything goes too fast. If she doesn't, the emptiness in her life will destroy her. There, in Africa, nothing happens. Nothing but sight, silence, space and time. There, she finds another way of living. There, everything happens. Everything that has anything to do with essence. Only then can Gisella, 30, come back. / Part two. How can one tell of silence with words? How can silence be what makes not only the style and themes of a fiction, but the whole fiction, resonate, vibrate? In the fiction of Marguerite Duras, more specifically in Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) and L'amour, the obsession of silence is what modulates the representation of time and space, be it corporal, geographical or domestic, and what transforms reality in an attempt to open the heart of things, beings and time on the infinite, the invisible, the sacred.

In response to theoretical inquiries into the decline in the production of utopian literature, this dissertation argues that the decline or, rather, the "postmodern" loss of faith in utopian literature and utopian thinking results from the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism and its material and discursive/ideological appropriation of global space. To demonstrate this thesis, the dissertation examines the invariably dystopic imaginative geographies in the fiction of J. G. Ballard. By analyzing the historical-geographical discursive context of Ballard's imaginative geographies, the dissertation attempts to locate and recover those absent spaces that might have served as probable sites of Utopia. / The first part of this dissertation examines Ballard's "Concentration City," "Report on an Unidentified Space Station," "The Enormous Space," "The Overloaded Man," and the novel High-Rise. This section concludes generally that the imaginative geographies inscribed within those texts are closed, insular, homogeneous, pathological and exclusionary social spaces that are antithetical to a Postmodern Utopia whose socio-cultural inclusiveness would be predicated upon a "politics of difference." / The second half of the dissertation examines Ballard's later works, such as Rushing to Paradise (1994), Cocaine Nights (1996), and Super-Cannes (2001). By discursively analyzing the similar yet more ideologically transparent imaginative geographies in these recent works, the dissertation concludes that it is not exclusively the material and ideological conquest of social space by global capital that poses the greatest threat to Ballard's "utopian" socio-spatial imaginary. Rather, it is also the postcolonial threat of the dislocations and mass immigrations of the Indigenous Other precipitated by globalization. It is the emergence of the de-territorialized Other that impels Ballard's imaginative geographies to recoil inwardly into "Privatopias," "white enclaves" and "imperial ghettos" demarcated by neocolonial pathological geographies of exclusion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [323]-338).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-198).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-267).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-348). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ82819.