Complutense Journal of English Studies, 2017

South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has often been accused of refusing to engage with socio-political conflicts that mark his society. This paper will frame and analyse representation and conceptualization of history in Coetzee’s post-apartheid novels—Disgrace (2000) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). The central argument will be that, far from ignoring historical struggles and developments, Coetzee’s work engages with and encodes the same by using the grammar of novelistic discourse, which it positions as a rival to normative modern historical discourse.

2015

The recognition of the very act of writing as a use of power is significant. Re- writing the archive, therefore, re appropriates the very instrument of oppression as an instrument of subversion – using the written word to counter the written word. Written as a response or a counter-history to Defoe‟s classic Robinson Crusoe, the very conception and writing of a text like Foe is a political act. What makes it even more significant is that Coetzee writes a female

Canadian Social Science, 2012

This paper resists a traditional allegorical approach to one of Coetzee's major apartheid novels, Waiting for the Barbarians, by focusing more on the novel's structural and textual import rather than its discursive representation of South African politics. Although this reading is itself ultimately allegorical, it is argued that it is anti-allegorical because it points out the limitations of allegorical representation whereby we read a clear relationship between the text and its external context. Highlighting acts of reading and interpretation, often failed, the novel poses as a challenge to literary theory. As such, it is not only an allegory against itself but also a postmodern example of the relativity of truth, the indeterminacy of meaning, and the necessary textualization of experience via the written word.

2012

This paper resists a traditional allegorical approach to one of Coetzee’s major apartheid novels, Waiting for the Barbarians, by focusing more on the novel’s structural and textual import rather than its discursive representation of South African politics. Although this reading is itself ultimately allegorical, it is argued that it is anti-allegorical because it points out the limitations of allegorical representation whereby we read a clear relationship between the text and its external context. Highlighting acts of reading and interpretation, often failed, the novel poses as a challenge to literary theory. As such, it is not only an allegory against itself but also a postmodern example of the relativity of truth, the indeterminacy of meaning, and the necessary textualization of experience via the written word.

Research Journey: Multidisciplinary International E-Research Journal, 2016

J M Coetzee’s writings cover a range of various contemporary issues like modernist legacy, identity, the question of censorship, etc. The important one of these features is postcolonialism. Intellectually, he is a writer associated with the field of post-colonial writing and the context of his novels characterises him as a post colonial writer. Most of his novels are set in colonial period. He was a close witness to the oppressions of the weaker section of South African society. Through his novels he portrayed this oppression and the complex relationship between the colonsed and the colonisers. This complex relationship of powerful and powerless is extensively treated in his fiction writing. Coetzee presents a picture of colonial trauma very remarkably. His characters, setting communicate the universal struggle between colonisers and the colonised or the oppressors and the oppressed.

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.

This dissertation examines colonialism and the clash of cultures in conjunction with postcolonial problems as represented in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee by means of analyses of his novels. These analyses are contextualized against the philosophical, historical and literary background of colonialism and the response of African literature to the notion of colonialism. Therefore the introduction and chapter one focus on the rise, development and fall of colonialism, together with its philosophical premises, with special emphasis on the clash between the Judea-Christian tradition and non-European, non-western traditions. The first chapter concentrates predominantly on the African experience of colonialism, since the continent is most relevant for the subject of the dissertation, and is complemented with a critique of colonialism. The chapter also shows the social, economic and cultural consequences of colonialism, pointing out its significance for African and South African literature. The next chapter presents an overview of colonialism in African and South African literature, emphasizing the fact that colonialism is a modus vivendi of the literature because it gave rise to the development of the literature and accordingly provided it with the very subject matter in the form of innumerable exemplars of atrocities and oppression. The fiction of J. M. Coetzee is finally contextualized against this literary background. The third chapter offers a discussion of the critical apparatus employed in the analyses of J. M. Coetzee's novels. It includes a description of the concept of borderland and an overview of allegory - the writing techniques which the author extensively uses in his works in order to attain a high degree of objectivity and universality despite the fact that he deals with controversial and emotive notions such as colonialism, apartheid and racism. The other part of the chapter focuses on the clash of cultures which constitutes the pivotal theme of J. M. Coetzee's novels, and presents the writer's opinion on colonialism as published in his critical writings. Subsequently the chapters 4-9 are analyses of the six novels the author has published to date. In the conclusion a broader view of J. M. Coetzee's works as a whole is offered in the light of their universality and specificity. Then the clash of cultures in South Africa is depicted and the dissertation is ended with a discussion of a process of social change and areas of future research in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee.

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2020

J.M. Coetzee's late global fictions regularly offer formal experiments with fleetingness-works designed to become dated, superannuated-yet repeatedly return to the theme of enduring, almost transcendental, literary value. These are works that illustrate a crisis point in literary history, when the global and the digital inflict on authors an imperative to be timely while older institutional literary values demand that they be timeless. In these works, joined together in one present we find threads of timeliness (actions and ideas that are a propos of the moment), untimeliness (actions and ideas that are retrograde or avant-garde, out of joint with the times or, from the perspective of the untimely one, that reveal time to be out of joint with itself), and timelessness (intimations of everlasting , extra-temporal, permanence). This article examines these temporal figures in Elizabeth Costello, Summertime, and some of J.M. Coetzee's shorter fictions, tracing the limits of the present they produce, oppose, or, in trying to surpass, reenforce. Timeliness and Untimeliness "In 2003, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in literature. But since then, his fiction has strained mightily to repel any reader who might be interested." 1 So begins a typical review of Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus. For this reviewer, Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, but with chapters, or "Lessons" as they are called in the text, published from as early as 1997, falls just on the "right" side of the Nobel. Nevertheless, in Elizabeth Costello Coetzee's perverse mission to "repel any reader who might be interested" is well underway. It is a difficult text: a novel of parts, without sustained action, plot, or animating question; a novel that contains several occasional speeches, many of which had in fact been read aloud (as fictions about occasional speeches) in lieu of (actual, unframed) occasional speeches by the author, blurring the limits between art and life; as well as a novel that is thematically difficult, dealing with death, religion, classics, canonicity, animal rights, and ethics, some of which are hot topics for the "international" academic audience, marking Coetzee as the "trendiest" of writers, and some of which are instead entirely passé, outdated, never to be taken up in any journal article, marking Coetzee as reclusive and stubborn. Elizabeth Costello inspired as many as 224 articles listed by the MLA International Bibliography between 2009 and 2020, 2 a number second only to the 339 articles on Disgrace published during the same period. 3 Most of those articles have focused on the book's formal difficulty, or on its explicit (though opaque) interventions in ongoing academic debates. Few have speculated on the book's "global" setting, 4 though this has become an important theme for work on Coetzee's later novels. It is against this "global" backdrop, I believe, that the more familiar themes for Coetzee scholarship-authority, authorial personae, the status of the canon, "lateness," neoliberalism, animal ethics, the limits of sympathy-stand out most prominently.

NUML journal of critical inquiry, 2021

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this con...