Dept. of English Language and Literature - Ph.D. / Sc.D.

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • ItemOpen Access
    The carnivalesque in Ben Jonson's three city comedies: Volpone, the Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair
    (Bilkent University, 1997) Kurtuluş, Gül
    The idea of carnival is explored in Rabelais and His World, in which Bakhtin shows that the carnival was an officially sanctioned period in which all dogmas and doctrines, as well as the fonns and ideologies of the dominant culture could temporaiily be overturned. This resulted in activities that could be seen as profane and heretical, such as the paiodies of religious rituals, or treasonous and socially subversive, such as the parodies of kingship, inversions of master-seiwant roles, and the like. Moreover, the phenomenon of carnival allowed the merging of categories that are kept separate by the ideologies of a certain culture; the serious and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, life and death, rulers and the mled, and so on. According to Bakhtin, the advantage of carnival was that it reminded of the athibutes of the dominant culture, the characteristics of the people at large, the divisions in the culture, of class distinctions, and of value judgments and differences. Bakhtin considers carnival as an actual socio-cultural phenomenon. In Bakhtin's analysis of carnival, symbolic polarities of high and low, official and unofficial, grotesque and classical are deformed and reconstructed. Ben Jonson's comedies deal with the symbolic extremities of the exalted and the base. In his comedies Jonson plumbs the depths of social classification, taking his characters from the lower strata of the underworld, as well as from the higher stiatum of the body politic; the advocates, masters, doctors, etc. Thus, Jonson comments on the political and the social changes in the first half of the seventeenth centuiy. In his plays the 'licensed release' of carnival is experienced, which is a kind of protest against the established order. Yet, the carnival Jonson depicts in his comedies is also intended to preserve and stiengthen the established order. It is a foim of social control of the low by the high. Although the world seems to be turned upside down and the roles change during the carnival, in fact the rulers who were chosen and crowned reaffinn the status quo. Therefore, the carnival spirit in Ben Jonson's comedies is a vehicle for social protest, but at the same time the method for disciplining that protest. Bakhtin's concept of camivalesque is highly significant in discussing the sociocultural and political content of Ben Jonson's comedies. His theoiy helps one see Jonson's comedies in an especially wide perspective. This dissertation aims to link Bakhtin's discovery of the importance of camivalesque with Ben Jonson's three best known comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Narrative strategies in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and The Good Soldier
    (Bilkent University, 1996) Raw, Meltem Kıran
    In opposition to theories which gave the author pride of place as the creator of literary works embodying definite meanings, the French thinker Roland Barthes maintained that it was the reader, and not the author, who attached meanings to a text. According to Barthes, the major factor which enabled readers to interpret works of fiction, or to render them "intelligible," was their narrative structure. Following Barthes, the French critic Gérard Genette developed a comprehensive theory of narratives. In the light of Barthes’s views and Genette’s theory, this dissertation will analyse the English novelist Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End and The Good Soldier. Both works have narrators who undergo a process of identification with a major character. Through an analysis of the narrative strategies employed by the narrators, the dissertation aims to discuss the implications of this process in the interpretation of these works.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Narrative techniques in Doris Lessing's stories and sketches
    (Bilkent University, 1996) Uzundemir, Özlem
    The aim of this thesis is to analyze the themes of Doris Lessing's short stories and sketches, with particular reference to the narrative techniques developed mainly by the French Structuralists Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette. Following the introduction where these narrative strategies are discussed, the three developmental chapters of this research - the first dealing with a child or an adolescent's development, the second concerning an adult's experience and the third involving the observation of an outsider - try to prove how "form " clarifies "meaning". This study also tries to demonstrate how Lessing's style has changed from referential stories which have well-organized plot structures and developed characters to sketches having no story line or central characters to disclose the uncertainties of modern societies.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The environmental ethic in Wordsworth's poetry
    (Bilkent University, 1995) Çakırlar, Ali Özkan
    Wordsworth's poetry, with its emphasis on the independent existence and consciousness of nature , has a distinctive place in the Romantic movement. His interest in the external world is not, of course, totally new and original. He prefers to take man, nature and society as the main sources and subjects of his poetry. However, the way Words worth handles his themes is revolutionary and unique. Nature, for him, is an in dependent and self - sufficient presence having its own consciousness and the ref ore it is treated exclusively in various parts of his poetry. Man, like other beings, belongs to the larger family of nature in terms of both his individual and social existence. In this context, Words worth's poetry functions as an insistent reminder that man ought to adapt himself as well as his society to the broader order of nature.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Dystopia and Doppelgangers: the Gothic indictment
    (Bilkent University, 1997) Koç, Ertuğrul
    The Gothic genre has been the victim of much misinterpretation: when not savaged for its grotesqueness, it has been praised only for its wilder flights of fancy. However, it was as much a product of the Augustan "Age of Progress" as its decorous counterpart. Sentimentalism. There are specific socio-historical reasons behind its emergence, and a surprising philosophical and theological depth to its indictment of the shortcomings of its age: even at its most fantastic, it shows the political, economic, religious, ethical and psychological dilemmas of eighteenth and nineteenth century British society and its individuals. In its ambiguous attitude towards the Middle Ages and Catholicism, its ludic use of archaic literary motifs, and its juxtaposition of supposedly irrational codes of belief with more modem positivistic post-Enlightenment doctrines, it holds nothing sacred: Gothic is as valuable a form of dystopian satire as it is a psychologically effective form of fantasy. This dissertation has grown out of an analysis of five Gothic novels: Horace Walpole's The Castle o f Otranto, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries o f Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They best represent the way that Gothic strategies provide a sardonic reflection of bourgeois society and its unacknowledged inheritance; they best convey the tensions (some topical, some universal) which for the most part Gothic deliberately leaves unresolved.