| Summary: | This dissertation attempts a Bakhtinian analysis of the polyphonic dialogue between
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Karel Schoeman's Na die Geliefde Land and Jason Xenopoulos' Promised Land.
Specific Bakthinian concepts are employed to determine whether the films are "apt"
adaptations of the literary texts; how the stylistically hybrid texts engage in conversation
with different movements, genres and trends; how the polyphonic conversations
between different texts and discourses, such as literature and film, or colonialism and
postcolonialism, can provide insight into the variety of discourses, textual and
ideological, of a postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa; and how identity crises
experienced by key characters can be explained using the notions of hybridity, "The
Marginal Man" and liminality. All four texts have key characters that experience identity
crises that spring from cultural hybridity; their cultural hybridity has the potential to either
render them marginally stagnant or lead them to liminally active participation within their
imagined communities.
This dissertation argues that even though there are major differences between the films
and the literary texts they are based upon, they are relevant to a specific target audience
and therefore enrich the ur-texts. Salient characteristics of realism, symbolism,
impressionism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and the apocalyptic
dialogise one another within the four texts, thereby liberating the texts from one authorial
reading. The dialogue between the discourses of literature and film supplement an
understanding of the dialogue between war, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism
and the Will to Power. === Thesis (M.A. (Applied Language and Literary Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006
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