The worldings of Ruganda’s plays
| dc.contributor.author | Mugarizi, Evans Odali | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-09-27T09:34:55Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2018-09-27T09:34:55Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2018-06 | |
| dc.description | A thesis submitted to the school of humanities and social sciences in fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of doctor of philosophy of Kenyatta University. June 2018 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | This study was a discursive interrogation of Ruganda’s six published plays: The Burdens (1972), Black Mamba (1973), Covenant with Death (1973), The Floods (1980), Music without Tears (1982) and Echoes of Silence (1986), from a semiotic perspective. It focused on four aspects: 1) the location of the plays’ events and action within spatio-temporal contexts of the dramatic world, 2) investigation of the perceptual effects that are created out of the use the mechanical techniques of roleplay and projection, 3) investigation of the signification of non-verbal codes of communication used in the plays, and, 4) investigation of how the use of various forms of speech build the meta-narratives and conflicts of the plays. The main objective of the study was to establish how the use of these elements makes Ruganda's drama comprehensible and intelligible within the virtual reality of the dramatic world. It enquired into the dramatic contexts of the plays in terms of spatial location of action from the mimetic time sense of “here-and-now” in relation to the characters’ experience and their future projections within the time locus of “then” or “elsewhen” and spatial sense of “elsewhere”. The study was guided by Keir Elam’s (1980) postulation of the semiotics of drama and theatre that elucidates the ordering of the dramatic world in relation to the world of reality. The theory emphasizes how cognizance of the various levels of worlds influences perception and inference of meaning. This theory aided in the abstraction of different worlds created by characters resulting from the deployment of the techniques of role-play, projection and aural and visual symbolism. Thus, when the characters play other characters as opposed to who they are, they display attitudinal constructions of the other characters that they enact or impersonate. This creates a different plane of perception of the enacted character. In addition, the study appropriated John Austin’s (1962) and John Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory to interrogate how the playwright variegates his dramatic speech for aesthetic effect. The study establishes that Ruganda uses both mimetic and diegetic forms of speech in his plays for different purposes. The former is used to construct the first level action of the plays, while the latter constructs the enveloping action. Dialogue, monologue and narration are used as distinct speech forms to establish the contemporaneity of the dramatic action and point at the time of occurrence. The study concludes that Ruganda creates various contexts by use of technique, symbolism and variegated speech forms that either distance or collapse the world of reality and the dramatic worlds of his plays | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Kenyatta University | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/18669 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Kenyatta University | en_US |
| dc.title | The worldings of Ruganda’s plays | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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