A bakhtinian analysis of William Golding’s rites of passage: heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque in the novel

Download

index.pdf

Date

2011

Author

Tuğlu, Utku

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

392
views

112
downloads

This thesis analyzes William Golding’s Rites of Passage using a detailed examination of the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque to investigate the points of mutual illumination and confirmation between Bakhtin’s ideas and Golding’s novel. Therefore the method of analysis is divided between a close study of Rites of Passage and an equally close examination of Bakhtin’s ideas. The Bakhtinian concepts studied in this thesis are central to his idea of language and theory of the novel and their analysis in Rites of Passage reveals that while these concepts shed light on the stylistic, structural and thematic complexities of the novel, the novel also verifies the working of these concepts in practice. Moreover, the results of the analysis indicate two main points in which Golding’s novel and Bakhtin’s ideas confirm and illuminate each other. The first point is related to Bakhtin’s celebration of the novel genre for its capacity to include diverse elements, a celebration that find its counterpart in Golding’s novel due to the novel’s heteroglot nature, polyphonic structure and inclusion of the carnivalesque. The second point is related to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism which emerges as a relational property common to his mentioned concepts. As this thesis shows, Golding’s Rites of Passage is a dialogic novel in this regard, with its foregrounding of dialogic relations between heteroglot languages, characters’ voices and social classes. This thesis ends with a discussion indicating postmodern aspects of Bakhtin’s ideas and Golding’s novel, which include intertextuality, the problematization of truth, and the blurring of boundaries between opposites.

Subject Keywords

English literature

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613329/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/20522

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

An analysis of metafictional self-reflexivity in laurence sterne's the life and opinions of tristram shandy and William Gass' willie masters' lonesome wife Okuroğlu, Şule; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2005) This thesis evaluates metafictional self-reflexivity, and presents it within the scope of certain structuralist and post-structuralist approaches especially by referring to William Gass̕ definition of metafiction and Raymond Federman̕s theories on the devices of metafiction. Then aspects of the works of William Gass̕ Willie Master̕s Lonesome Wife and Laurence Sterne̕s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy are discussed within this framework.
Jungian archetypes in samuel beckett's trilogy Kızılcık, Hale; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2005) This thesis analyses the Jungian archetypes employed in Beckett's trilogy. It begins with an overview of Jungian archetypes and the relation of these archetypes to the fundamental themes dealt with in Beckett's work. The thesis then asserts that some archetypal features occur almost obsessively and are further clearly implicated in the main themes of the trilogy. The central archetypal patterns that frequently appear in the novel are the hero's quest, return to paradise and rebirth. This dissertation is the...
Nomad thought in Peter Reading’s Perduta gente and Evagatory and Maggie O’sullivan’s In the house of the shaman and Palace of reptiles Türe Abacı, Özlem; Birlik, Nurten; Department of English Literature (2015) This study aims to explore the processes of becoming in Peter Reading’s Perduta Gente and Evagatory and Maggie O’Sullivan’s In the House of the Shaman and Palace of Reptiles by concentrating on the spatial, corporeal and performative politics in their poetry within a theoretical framework based on Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad thought and their revisionary ideas on the politics of body, space and subjectivity. This study also investigates how nomadism as a critical category enables an exploration of the form...
Rereading Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Richard II : Wesker's The Merchant and Ioneco's Exit the King Altındağ, Zümrüt; Norman, Ünal; Department of Foreign Language Education (2004) This thesis is a comparative study of how Shakespeare̕s ideas transcend the boundaries of his own time and still remain as the major sources of inspiration for modern dramatists. Arnold Wesker and Eugéne Ionesco explore the concept of the "other" leading to loss of identity and awareness of non-being embedded in Shakespeare̕s works. The main argument is that the contemporary playwrights reinterpret Shakespeare̕s works in the light of some modern issues and ideas to reveal the entrapment of the individual.
A Julia Kristevan analysis of Emily Dickinson and John Milton Sarıkaya, Merve; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of Foreign Language Education (2007) This thesis aims to analyze poems by Emily Dickinson and John Milton according to Julia Kristeva’s theories of poetic language and abjection, and to see the extent to which these concepts are applicable to two such different poets and also to see how the poets compare within such analytic framework. Kristeva adapts a psychoanalytic approach to poststructuralist theory. Psychoanalytic criticism with its two leading figures, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, has been analyzed to see its reflections on Kristeva...

Citation Formats

U. Tuğlu, “ A bakhtinian analysis of William Golding’s rites of passage: heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque in the novel,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2011.