Nostalgic memories. Perspective and perspectival changes in text and film of A Child's Christmas in Wales

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography grade: 15 University of Stuttgart course: Cultural Seminar language: English abstract: Christmas... that magic blanket that wraps itself about us that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting or of prayer but always it will be a day of remembrance a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.This quote by Augusta E. Rundel illustrates so well the innermost feelings of the speaker inDylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales who reminisces about the most beautiful time ofthe year he passed with family and friends. However he does not just recount facts in anemotionally detached way; and it is the aim of this term paper to analyze the confounding ofthe adult and the child speaker that is the former being entirely plunged in his memoriessurrounding him like a fragrance he seems to actually be the child he was reliving somescenes again.First of all after having given some information about the text version of Thomas' work I willintroduce Gérard Genette's theory of narratology and mainly focus on the distinction betweennarration and focalization. This subtle difference as well as other terminology referring to thequestion of perspective is very enriching as it permits to localize the narrator's point of viewand involvement to understand the story's organization and eventually to reflect on the howand why of the blurring of boundaries between the adult speaker of the here and now (at themoment of speaking) and the child speaker experiencing the events. I will argue that thosetwo are intertwined with several gradations more or less explicit in text and film.Next the way of narrating the style and linguistic issues will be examined in order toattribute certain expressions or sentence structures either rather to t