Die representasie van die visie in die verhalende prosa van Elsabe Steenberg

[摘要] Elsabe Steenberg's oeuvre, consisting among others of forty two stories in bookformat, has four target groups -- preschool children, young children, teenagers andadults. Her narrative work is so richly textured and contains such a depth of insightinto the complexities of life that it should not only attract attention because of itstopicality, but that it should also be exposed -- especially in a society searching fordirection -- to as large a number of readers and researchers as possible.It is clear that all of her works represent a view of reality which, from anintertextual point of view, could be seen as being grounded in the ontological pointof departure. The main focus of the present study is to investigate therepresentational procedes through which the ontological view is represented in fourselected texts from the oeuvre. This is done in order to establish internal textualvariants and constants. The four selected texts, in which tree symbolism manifestsitself in various intertextual permutations, are: Die boom wat wou loop (forpreschool children), Soek-soek op soek (for young children), Boom homer boomste(for teenagers) and Plek van die bruin geeste (for adults). The rest of the oeuvre, aswell as Elsabe Steenberg's poetics, are referred to cursorily in order to establish acorroborating intertextual comparative base.The procedes representing the whole internal textual universe, from concrete object,�?through the different but also complementary narrative elements, further to the overtrepresentation and manifestation of the abstract theme and view of the narrativeworld, are all investigated. The four texts are first discussed independently bymeans of a structuralist-semiotic approach, after which the variants and constantsare determined intertextually.The numerous aspects of the representational system of the view of reality in allfour the intensively studied texts, as well as those in the rest of the oeuvre whichare only touched on briefly, an point toward one fundamental factor as semioticsign, namely: God is. Identity as an intertextual constant plays a very prominentrole in the whole oeuvre. Consequently, the numerous ways in which thefundamental view of reality are represented, are thus also associated with God'sidentity or Being, for example, God is the Origin, God is the Giver of insight intothe diversity, interrelatedness and meaning of reality, and God is the realregenerating Force.

[发布机构] North-West University