The chiastic pleasure/pain pricncipale as a satiric mode

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An everview ef Uys’s chiastic approach to specifie reference to evita Bezuidenbout

The middle-aged man in the shiny black dress with silver inlay sits tensely on the plush back seat of the imported stretch-limo…. He glances down at his hands. His hands look feminine. His legs are crossed and are shaved to just above the knee where no one will see the hairs. She doesn’t wear minis. The legs look feminine, living up to their reputation as one of the best pairs of ladies’ legs in the land.The man glances into the smallmirror … The face of the most famous white woman in South Africa, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, stares out at him. Her eyes are greener than his, her lips fuller, her face longer…. The man in the dress and the matching hat wets the lips of the woman he is made up to be. Through the heavy false eyelashes circling his eyes like verandahs, he sees the grand pillars of the Houses ofParliament slide by on his right.

The chiastic pleasure/pain pricncipale as a satiric mode

As was briefly indicated in Chapter One, the second chapter focuses closely on both Pieter-Dirk Uys’s particular blend of satire, which turns on the slippage between entertainment and anger: the pleasure/pain principle. Chapter Two examines various descriptions of satirical criticism. It also attempts to identify and delineate ‘some of the forms and stylistic devices’ (Abrams, 1971: 156) that Uys uses (in common with other writers of note, both past and present) in order to show how these are an integral component of his chiastically constructed satirical messages that foreground entertainment above condemnation. The chapter starts with a brief historical overview of the development of satire to highlight its chiastic nature.

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SATIRE THROUGH CHIASTIC ROLE-PLAYAND THE TRANSVESTITE PERSONA

Chapter Three focuses on Uys the writer, fore-grounding his creative impulse and dramatic method. Integral to the latter is a discussion ofUys’s role as actor and, more especially, of his role as female impersonator, which involves a complex chiastic conflation of the performer and transvestite persona. Testifying to the success of the dramatist’s innovative transvestite creations, the name of Uys, writer and actor, has become synonymous with that of his alter ego, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, South Africa’s popular ‘comic queen’ who commands ‘joyful allegiance’ (Kustow, [1998] 1999:2) wherever and whenever she performs.

READING CHIASTIC SIGNS IN PERFORMANCE SEMIOTICS

Pieter-Dirk Uys’s preferred literary mode appears to be drama and includes live on-stage performances, filmed and audio versions of stage performances and programmes produced for television. This assumption arises from Uys’s regular composition of, and performance in, mainly one-man rewes from the early 1980s onwards, as noted in the previous chapters. Semiotic! analyses in this chapter focus on a selection of non-verbal signs in a number of Uys’s dramatic productions in the media mentioned above and enumerated later in this chapter, as well as still photographs of these performances.

CHAPTER ONE: An everview ef Uys’s chiastic approach to specifie reference to evita Bezuidenbout
CHAPTER TWO: The chiastic pleasure/pain pricncipale as a satiric mode
CHAPTER THREE: Satire through chiastic role-play and the tranvestite persona
CHAPTER FOUR : Reading chiastic signs in performance semiotics
CHAPTER FIVE : Ecita:mtth as/or legend /living legend
CHAPTER SIX : Conflating chiastic configuration: fact/ficton/faction
CONCLUSION
BIOGRAPHY

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