Travelling Texts: J. M. Coetzee and Other Writers. Ed. Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek. Frankfurt: Lang., 2014

Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers is a collection of essays on mutual influences and inspirations between authors, with a special focus on J.M. Coetzee. Bringing together a group of international scholars, the book offers a wide range of perspectives on how canonical and less canonical texts travel between literatures and cultures. Chapter One is devoted to connections between Coetzee's writings and Polish literature and theatre. Chapter Two is concerned with Dostoevsky's presence in his fiction. The essays in Chapter Three identify and analyse connections and inspirations between Coetzee and other European writers, with a special focus on Central Europe as a distinct cultural entity. The collection's scope is extended by the essays in Chapter Four, which deal with several writers for whom Africa has been a

Brno Studies in English, 2022

This article rereads J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and its intertextual bond with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the framework of cognitive poetics to shed light on the complex issue of canonicity in terms of content and form/style in Foe. To this purpose, Marie-Laure Ryan's notions of textual actual world (TAW) and accessibility relations are used along with Barbara Dancygier's concept of narrative space construction to examine how Susan Barton's narrative (the postcolonial account) anchors/accesses the already consolidated TAW of Robinson Crusoe (the colonial text) to dislocate the colonizer's secluded, monologic text by superimposing another psyche, through cognitive blending, upon it. Susan's narrative incorporates her constant awareness of the social mind to assimilate-rather than push aside-the colonizer's narrative by driving it out of its monologic state toward a dialogic, multivocal exchange in the contemporary postcolonial world where Cruso(e)'s story becomes a part of Susan's story.

Alien and Adrift: The Diasporic Sensibility in V.S. Naipaul's Half a Life and J.M.

Cultural identity is constructed through and within representation, hence the great interest of postcolonial intellectuals in its creative and ideological potential. In the present essay, I read J. M. Coetzee's novels as innovative sites of transgression that open up an alternative space of interpretation of the literary devices he employs as a source for understanding and illustrating his moral and ethical position. Although he avoids explicit positioning in a binary political thinking and does not publicly establish a relationship between his ideological views and his fiction, the narrative strategies he adopts to represent experiences of suffering and pain speak for themselves. His fiction reveals the author's special interest in the process of creation and interpretation of meaning and in the power of writing. Self-reflexiveness as one of the main features of his texts draws the reader's attention to the linguistic status of representation and suggests that our only access to past events, including historical events, is through discourse.

2015

This thesis offers readings of a number of less discussed texts by J.M. Coetzee and attempts to take as full an account as possible of the human beings that are embodied in these works. Suggesting that critical approaches are often too invested in their specific ideologies to accommodate for the protean nature of certain Coetzee’s narratives, it contends that a better ground for approaching his writing can be found in the unmediated experience of living, which Elizabeth Costello—Coetzee’s lecture alter ego—once calls ‘the body-soul.’ This study thus traces Coetzee’s fascination with what it means to be fully alive as an individual being in his writing during the period between his apartheid-era novel Age of Iron (1990) and the final fictional memoir Summertime (2009). By paying attention specifically to the living beings of the characters, or in the case of Coetzee’s fictional memoirs, that of John Coetzee himself, this thesis shows how it is possible to make better sense of Coetzee...

2014

This thesis is a literary critical investigation into the strategies of self-definition at work in the autobiographical fiction of J.M. Coetzee. My focus falls on those of his novels that have a more-orless explicit autobiographical resonance (Boyhood, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime), with supplementary forays into two additional books (Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus). My argument centres on the observation that Coetzee’s work derives its affective force from the conflict he stages, time and again, between the desire for a transcendent sense of being, Romantic in origin, and the realization that being derives its co-ordinates from the discursive formations – ideological, socio-historical, philosophical, linguistic – that provide the structure of meaning for self-expression in writing. I introduce my argument by situating Coetzee’s work according to a poststructuralist critical framework that emphasizes his strategies of subjective displacement. Ou...

This paper explores the intricate interrelationships between discourses and struggles of identity and the multiple processes associated with increasing globalisation in the modern age. Globalisation is often exclusively associated with worldwide economic integration and the emergence of a borderless global market. However, globalisation also involves sweeping changes on the social, cultural and political terrains. Globalisation furthermore entails apparently contradictory processes of, among others, homogenisation and universilisation on the one hand and localisation and differentiation on the other. As John Maxwell Coetzee points out through his novels for example in Disgrace,(1999) winner of booker prize, I found that the protagonist David Lurie struggles for his identity just because of multiculturalism in his society. He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped too and impregnated and he is violently assaulted. In Coetzee’s other novel Dusklands, published in 1974 in South Africa, also shares a common theme which is an exploration of power, or the lack of it, depending on whose side you are on. Isn’t about the power to rule that is fought for in the war, or the power that is exerted in prejudice against a group of people who are considered less than human. Isn’t about the power of the mind to conceptualize how to demean a nation of people; how to propagandize one's beliefs; or how to rationalize one's horrible and disgraceful actions. And it is about the power of survival. But power is not the only theme. Dusklands is about the power of extensive military machines or the dominance exhibited by white supremacy or the exploitation of colonization. So continuing with this, It is the contradictory processes of globalisation which has led to wide ranging changes in the processes of identity formation that have, in turn, resulted not only in flourishing of discourses on identity, but also in struggles of identity involving various minority and marginalised groups. Apart from exploring various definitions of identity, discourses of and struggles of identity are discussed on five levels, namely the individual, sub national, national, supranational and global levels. Attention is furthermore given to the role of the media and information and communication technologies in these struggles and the implications for policy-making within the media and communications sector. The far reaching implications for Africa and South Africa in particular, are furthermore considered.

The Criterion an International Journal in English, 2013

Humans are "social animals." Despite the outstretched lands open to habitation, people still tend to build their homes closer to each others. Whatever their language, culture, origins or backgrounds, human beings have an innate desire to be together. This desire to be together is a desire to survive because the human race can only survive if its individual members survive, and the individual needs the group to enhance its own odds of surviving. Further, at the most basic level, human beings are drawn together for reproduction. Built into every human being is the need to reproduce other humans. This need and the means to do it are inborn instincts. When these two instincts are disturbed, the outcome is the destruction of the individual and by extension the whole society. This paper argues that the frustration and the final collapse of the central character in J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country are caused by the unfulfillment of these two desires. It argues that Magda's mental conflict is the outcome of her desire to be a human being, to be recognized as a human being particularly a woman. Throughout the novel Magda struggles to fulfill this desire. As all the events narrated in the novel take place only in her mind /imagination, the question that really matters is what happened to her mind. This paper attempts to tackle this question in double-forked way: first, Magda is a female whose basic need is a male counterpart, and second, she is a human being whose life and property depends on his communication and interaction with other human beings in the society. In the Heart of the Country is J. M. Coetzee's second novel. This novel is set in one of South Africa's remote and isolated farms. Written in the first person's narrative style and in the form of journal entries with numbered paragraphs, the novel tells the story of Magda, an old and psychotic spinster, living in her father's isolated farm. Magda is a white European woman living in South Africa. She is an intelligent, bitter, unattractive, spinster daughter of a European sheep farmer. Magda, in other words, is not an original Boer colonizer. Rather, she is the daughter of a colonizer. Her ancestors are the conquerors of South African people. But those ancestors have left her with the responsibility of continuing their oppression. So, she represents a people who have replaced the native culture with their own. Having grown up as a member of the ruling elites, Magda should feel comfortable with this role. She should feel powerful and proud of her ancestry. But this is not what happens. She appears unsatisfied with her role. Being the daughter of the colonizer, a white European woman in an alien land, Magda feels separated from the larger society in which she lives. There is clearly a wall between her and other humans living in the farm. Magda is also a human being in need of other humans around her. The isolated life in the farm has made life so boring. It seems that she spends all her time in her room with her dairies and imagined heroes and heroines in which she attempts to create and populate her own world.

Of all J.M. Coetzee's novels, In the Heart of the Country undoubtedly has the most outstanding structure: a patchwork of entries sewn together by the strangest narration-full of repetitions, mutually excluding turnabouts. This "allegiance to the discourse of fiction rather than the discourse of politics" is seen as reflecting the author's stance on the colonial past: unwillingness to acknowledge complicity, shading the problem of the colonial guilt.