J. M. Coetzee

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

This is a topic proposal for my researched based argument in Global Research Seminar Class with Dr. David Colon. I hope to write my researched based argument on the relationship between humans and animals in Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and there importance/significance. The relationship between the two represents the characters social, ethical and moral transformations throughout the novel by literary strategies such as symbolism and allegory.

The thesis discussed here is that a main subject of literature is evil while its main goal is good. Is it possible that depicting the evil (crime, suffering, cruelty) could causes in good consequences (for reader or author)? Three main justifications of depicting of the evil in literature claim that it could sensitize reader for it, immune for it or help to recognize its very real nature – all in order to protect against it and to not reproduce it. But all of those justifications – as it is shown by lecture of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and J. Marías Your Face Tomorrow – are at least problematic. It is impossible to determine a priori whether a reader become “a better person” after contact with the evil inscribed in literary works, or, on the contrary, will be anesthetized or even possessed by the evil. So, as a solution, author recalls a concept of a “good story”, which paradigm is a speech on deathbed, enclosing whole life of a moribund and – with the burden of finality and frankness – asking not whether you was acting good or bad, but whether the fictions you were living by them were worth it. A “good literature” shows its figures as entangled in fictions – frames of reference which provide a meaning to the world and are responsible for a essential distinctions, headed with this for good and bad things and behaviors. All depends for the fictions we entrust and affirm – it says – and our moral duty, as well as writer’s responsibility, is to be vigilant for its real consequences – the places where fiction meets real body of other human being capable for suffering.

In this article I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read
as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence
on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I
begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) andRudolfOtto’s The Idea of the Holy
(1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment
as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and
towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Le´vinas when addressing
theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and
Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments
in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in
which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to
enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.

Dans The Tempest de W. Shakespeare, Foe de J.M. Coetzee et Solaris de S. Lem, l’écriture de l’altérité est liée à celle de l’insularité. Caliban et Friday sont des figures de l’autochtonie représentatives de l’Autre colonial ; la planète Solaris, à la fois lieu et personnage, ailleurs et autre, permet d’explorer ce lien entre l’altérité et l’insularité. L’éloignement et la clôture spatiale de l’île dessinent une épistémologie de l’altérité qui est toujours pensée via ce modèle spatiale — et qui pose la question de la possibilité de la rencontre. Il s’agit dans ce mémoire d’explorer les représentations de l’autre et leurs enjeux poétiques, éthiques et épistémologiques.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

REVIEWS
“This fascinating book offers a valuable explication of Murdoch's relentless attempts to reveal what is missing in contemporary moral philosophy and culture. Greatly influenced by Kierkgaard, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil, the complexity and messiness of ordinary life, and with one's deepest commitments-many of which cannot be accessed, or altered by means of arguments intended to defend philosophical "positions." Forsberg (Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden) makes excellent use of the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall, who show how one might avoid the tendency of philosophers toward "deflection" from the "difficulties of reality." These are difficulties that people have when language fails in the face of experiences that refuse reduction to the abstraction of the clearly defined concepts sought after in philosophy--what Murdoch called its "dryness." Novelists like what it is like to struggle with the deeply confusing, distressing issues of the present without stepping aside from the emotional intensity of the encounters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--”
(S.A. Mason, Concordia University, Choice)

“A fair bang in the philosophy of literature ... Forsberg's addition to this scene is brilliant and necessary ... This [book] will reverberate.” 
(British Journal of Aesthetics)

“This is one of the most philosophically sophisticated contributions to these interlinked issues that I have come across in the last decade; the care, charity and ease with which Forsberg contests and dismantles one of the most influential current readings of Murdoch (that advanced by Nussbaum) is enough on its own to make it clear that standards in this area have just been raised.” 
(Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK)

“Can we lose our moral concepts? Can our culture and our understanding of the human occlude the background that alone makes sense of the ideals we want to live by? Niklas Forsberg argues that this is a basic insight of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. Moreover, this gives us the key to understanding the relation of Murdoch's philosophical writings to her novels. The latter hold a mirror to our lives, in which we could potentially become aware of this loss. This book is full of philosophical insight, not only about contemporary moral thinking but also about the relation of literature to philosophical thought.” 
(Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada)

Subaltern studies have explored the dynamics of relationships between various binary oppositions i.e. master-slave, white-black and man-woman etc. J.M. Coetzee has revealed the dubious relationship of such binaries. His fictional world is full of characters and places witnessing the othering and dehumanizing processes and impacts of such dehumanizing others. Present paper is an attempt to explore the dehumanizing other in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands.

One of the most distinguishing features of J. M. Coetzee's novels is their pervasive and intensive critique of Cartesian rationalism, specifically, its valorisation of the abstract mind at the expense of the physical ('animal’) body. As Coetzee recognises in his fictional and non-fictional works, such
glorification of the thinking mind and its equally abstract capacities inevitably leads to a mechanical philosophy that culminates in the devaluation and exploitation not only of nonhuman animals but also of those human beings who are denied any serious consideration because of their perceived animality. Therefore, Coetzee's narratives resist this mechanical philosophy of Cartesian metaphysics by celebrating and destigmatising the embodiedness of both animals and humans, an embodiedness attested by the corporeal body's capacity for pain and pleasure, a capacity that in turn challenges the autonomy of the Cartesian cogito. As according to the rationalist discourse nonhuman animals are marked by their corporeality, nonrationality and nonduality, and as relinquishing the Cartesian duality and rationality is considered a step towards becoming animal-like, Coetzee's novels advance this particular mode of becoming-animal as the most effective way of resisting this discourse.

J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus typify the concerns of his later writings. These concerns are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a post-secular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifice inherent to any attempt to both count, or account, for life. This dynamic is not simply thematized. Rather, through what I am terming Coetzee's literary thinking, the ethico-political import of ‘life’ in Coetzee's late works is bound up with the question of their meaning as literary works. Accordingly, Coetzee's literary thinking helps to address the interaction of life and form that is at the center of debates about affect and the body, animal and posthuman life, and the formal distinctiveness of the literary work.

In this chapter, I argue – using a number of examples from representations of non-human animals – that there are close connections between the exotic otherness of animals in Occidental representations and the othering of some human groups.  Therefore, discourse on imperialism, colonialism and postcolonialism provides a framework within which the connections between human and non-human otherness may be explored.
Moreover, I argue that there is a need for discussing new ways of representing non-human animals in order to avoid traditional othering and stereotypes. Some authors, such as J.M. Coetzee and Barbara Gowdy, have tried to grapple issues of animal alterity in their fiction and have benefitted from their postcolonial context in doing so. Yet both the traditional stereotypes of animal otherness and contemporary attempts at dispensing with these raise questions and dilemmas when it comes to representing non-human animals.

The paper points to the unique relationships among young girls and the games they play in order to belong and avoid being ostracized from social cliques in Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. The sisterhood that once was described as an ideal in the beginnings of feminism by V. Woolf, is challenged by M. Atwood. It will be depicted how Atwood went about this idea, and through the games that young girls played, she actually portrayed a reversal in feminism – a broken bond of sisterhood in female friendships affected by internalized patriarchy. Furthermore, emphasis is given to how processes of healing forge after games had been won or lost, and in this way a conclusion is provided that where sisterhood is not respected, all parties involved must suffer and heal from internalized self-hatred.

Key words: Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, women’s writing, feminism, broken sisterhood, patriarchy, ostracism, subversion.

This paper aims at giving an account of the collaboration between J. M. Coetzee, South African writer, and Berlinde De Bruyckere, Belgian visual artist. After giving a description of their co-authored hybrid works (We Are All Flesh, 2012, and Cripplewood, 2013) I analyze them against the critical backdrop of posthumanist thought and try to locate them in the panorama of contemporary intermedial arts.

Sulla falsariga delle ricerche di Sergio Zatti sull’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano, e sugli incerti destini dell’eroe della fede preda di diversioni, tentazioni e smarrimenti, si indagano alcune celebri rappresentazioni letterarie di una situazione che, quasi per suggestione, sembra costituire una tardissima declinazione novecentesca del tema dell’errore/erranza che minaccia il paladino: come un moderno Rinaldo, un intellettuale, in grado di esercitare una funzione normativo-pedagogica, si imbatte in un oggetto di desiderio che lo porta su una via di perdizione, se ne innamora e ciò innesca un processo di caduta irreversibile.

In this paper, by a focus on the representation of Michael K as a figure of silence in Life & Times of Michael K, I attempt to draw out J. M. Coetzee's assertion of a fundamental ethico-political aporia. This aporia, which derives in contemporary theory from Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot's separate work on Emmanuel Levinas and expresses the constitutive gap between any given politics and individual ethical responsibility, is developed in somewhat different terms by Giorgio Agamben, upon whose reading of Herman Melville's character Bartleby I model my understanding of Michael K. The account of Bartleby as a figure of potentiality offered by Agamben provides both an intriguing explanation of Michael K's curious irrecuperability as well as a possible prospective (utopian), euporic resolution of the antinomy that K embodies in a thinking of a "coming community." Through this reading I seek to address a misunderstanding I find in much criticism of Coetzee's novel regarding its "political" shortcomings. I then conclude with a suggestion about what Life & Times of Michael K, and Coetzee's work in general, teaches or reminds us about literature.

Elizabeth Costello and The Cry of Winnie Mandela: Becoming-Other during Authorial and Creative Processes

Elizabeth Costello and The Cry of Winnie Mandela were both published in 2003, and they both stage incoherent female characters whose identity is frail and fragmentary. Subtler similarities than this are to be found, though: both books deal with the problem of verbal representations of reality, and with the authority of authorship. Explicit opinions on those subjects were expressed in their non-creative production by Coetzee and Ndebele alike way before 2003, and even before apartheid ended. This paper aims at detecting what – if anything – is to be found of their essays on representation from the late Eighties in their fictional production on representation from the early Two-thousands. It will be argued that, in spite of some similarities, the idea of authorship is dealt with very differently by Coetzee and Ndebele. This is to be seen clearly in the essays (“Into the Dark Chamber”, 1986, and the Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech, 1987, by Coetzee; “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary”, 1986, by Ndebele), and even more so in the 2003 novels, which stage authorial and creative processes as a fundamental parts in the narratives.

Ciało jako inny, obcy, wykluczony, ciało jako przestrzeń napięcia między toż-samością a innością, ciało poza innością i tożsamością. Ciało-tekst – otwarte. Ciało o zmiennej intensywności, bez ustanku pulsujące między tym, co obce a tym, co toż-same. Ciało ustanawiające granice, by w kolejnym kroku je znieść, mówiące: „ja”, by zaraz temu zaprzeczyć, tworzące wnętrze i rozpływające się w zewnętrzności pofałdowanej powierzchni. Ciało radykalnie zróżnicowane, to zwierzęce, to ludzkie, to przestrzenne, to wirtualne, to duchowe, to materialne, to kobiece, to męskie, to dojrzałe, to dziecięce, migocące różnicami, stające-się-innym, a w efekcie niedostrzegalne, zlewające się ze światem w działaniu. Ciało tętniące życiem, ciało różnicujące świat i jednocześnie go zmieniające. Ciało będące podstawą myślenia o tożsamości, inności, podmiotowości, wspólnocie, etyce czy polityce i otwierające te kategorie na to, co nadchodzi.

""This introduction offers a guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century. Offering an overview of the author’s career, informed discussion of the novel’s setting and references, it considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory, providing discussion of the novel’s critical and popular reception, a comprehensive guide to further reading, and questions for discussion.

From the reviews:

‘Lively, succinct, and readable, Andrew van der Vlies’s handbook of key themes, contexts, and intertexts is the best reader’s guide to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on the market.’ Endorsement from Mark Sanders, New York University.

‘Andrew van der Vlies, in J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace”, testifies to the amount of intellectual activity at work in this seemingly slight novel […]. His detailed account of central themes, alongside a narrative of Disgrace’s historical context and reception, will bolster the thinking of any casual reader. He pays the text the attention it deserves […]’. Stephen Abell, ‘J. M. Coetzee and the limits of sympathy’, Times Literary Supplement 25 February 2011: 2.

‘[V]an der Vlies provides a very fine introduction to Disgrace in this volume. Readers will find especially insightful his treatment of Coetzee’s preoccupation with alterity, and the responsibility, both ethical and aesthetic, that such otherness exacts.’ Mike Marais, Review of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace & J.M. Coetzee’s Austerities, Research in African Literatures 42.4 (2011): 135-37; 135.""

The relationship between literature and the state has been controversial since the time of Plato. Until recently, however, the few scholars to write on this subject considered it an underdeveloped topic in literary studies. This survey article argues that the last 10 years that have seen marked growth in literary-critical interest in the state form of government. It explains this growth as a product of two, apparently contradictory, historical phenomena: (i) the way that government responses to political violence (especially after the 9/11 attacks) have demonstrated the awesome power of the state; and (ii) the way that, under the aegis of neoliberal economic policy, the long-standing welfare and regulatory functions of the state have been eroded. These historical patterns have given rise to two strands of critical discourse, which the article describes as the ‘critique of sovereignty’ (i.e., the inherently coercive nature of state power) and the ‘defense of social citizenship’ (i.e., the right to welfare services). The article describes these trends and exemplifies them by reference to recent books and articles in literary theory and criticism; it also demonstrates their consequences for literary interpretation through illustrative readings of fiction by J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Louise Dean, and Hari Kunzru. It concludes by pointing out the contradictory nature of state power at the present time, where the state’s resort to sovereign violence is (at least in part) a response to the loss of the legitimating power of its welfare function. For this reason, the critique of sovereignty and the defense of social citizenship should be seen as distinct responses to the same historical situation.

Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Vol.6. N. 1. March 2015   
                                                                                                                                                                          Pp.30- 49


Imperial Nationalism in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians



Shadi Neimneh
English Department
Hashemite University, Zarqa-Jordan



Abstract
In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), J. M. Coetzee interrogates the foundations of imperial states by highlighting the differences from the barbarians that the anonymous Empire maintains. The Empire defines itself and reinforces its identity by constructing a distance from the barbarians on many grounds. It maintains state institutions and keeps records, seeing itself as a modern state, an evolved version of “primitive” barbarians. Coetzee’s novel exposes the Empire’s precarious efforts at establishing the Other and its confused notions of state building. While the dominant interpretations of the novel focus on torture and the body, this article analyzes the novel’s involvement with imperial state building and nationalism. Torture and the body are important insofar as they expose the Empire’s efforts to identify itself and build a nation. The Empire’s failure in most of these respects―as suggested by the ending with the Empire losing its hold on the frontier settlement and the settlement’s people waiting for the arrival of the barbarians―makes us question the false assumptions on which many imperial enterprises are based. The Empire’s failure to protect its borders, its retreat to its heartland, and its failure to maintain civilized behavior in its treatment of its subjects and barbarian prisoners are manifestations of a chaotic, nascent administration rather than an identifiable and civilized imperial nation. In exposing the unstable distinctions colonial nations use to justify their existence, Coetzee’s work asserts an alternative ethic of engagement with the Other founded on the idea of essential humanity and tolerant recognition of difference. 
Keywords: Imperialism; Nationalism; Identity; Coetzee; Waiting for the Barbarians

The paper explores the role of literature in generating empathy for those deemed radically other. In The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee, the character Elizabeth Costello challenges Thomas Nagel’s assertion that human beings will never be able to know what it is like to be another kind of animal because our imagination is limited by our own experience. Costello, an aging fiction writer, counters that there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination and insists that if we are able to imagine the experience of fictional characters, we can imagine the experience of nonhuman animals. For Costello, literature teaches empathy. Most characters in Coetzee’s fiction, however, resist all attempts of identification and what they stage is rather the failure of the project of the sympathetic imagination. Coetzee seems therefore to be suggesting that the task of literature is to inspire attentiveness and respect for the irreducible alterity of other lives.

Coetzee's book, Disgrace, is a dynamic novel discussing many questions relevant to the social system of today.  An analysis of the author's allegorical demonstration of the contrary contradiction of the question of desire.  Deep truth's and paradigms found within this short novel are discussed to argue that desire should be disciplined.

Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which "civilization" fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others "barbarians." Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. Boletsi recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.

In this essay, I argue for “fugitive gardening” as a form of “poaching”
or “resignifying,” a radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and
practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and hygienic
possessiveness that underpin colonial culture, and articulates what
we might call a fugitive ecology: a dispossession of self in relation to
the environment, a refusal to conceive of land, soil or planet in terms
of property. Fugitive gardening sets itself in opposition to the prisons,
camps and forts that index South African political history, restorying
place, environment, and the self as grounds for community formation,
dialogue and cooperation. Through readings of Coetzee’s Life & Times
of Michael K and other examples of literary and material gardening,
I show how such cultivation represents a gesture of belonging in
a context where such claims are revolutionary, even treasonous;
but unlike farm, fort or prison, fugitive gardening stakes a claim to
belonging without possession, home without property and ecological
care without an investment in the future. As such, gardening entails
a very different understanding of self in relation to place, to nature
and to future generations, and a reconceptualisation of narrative and
language as representational modes.

J. M. Coetzee's affinity with Franz Kafka is bound up with the weakly messianic role Kafka plays in modernist aesthetic theory and the philosophical discourse of modernity. The redemptive aesthetic of modernist allegory modelled on Kafka implies a philosophy of history that, by giving metaphysical scope to the ideas of justice and guilt, puts modernity on trial. Reading Coetzee's Disgrace alongside Kafka's Trial complicates the familiar allegory of state persecution, however, and suggests the persistence of myth in modernity as an enabling device that reveals as much of the moral autonomy of the subject as it does its entrapment in the rationalised relations of modern life.

State University of Milan, Anglophone Literature 2013/14 (MA module), Teaching Unit B: South Africa - Representation Across History, Gender and Genre.

Unit B deals with the problem of textual representation and its implications in the definition of historical, social and literary categories.

- Njabulo S. Ndebele, “Rediscovery of the Ordinary” (1984)
- J. M. Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1987)
- Njabulo S. Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)
- J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003)
- Antjie Krog, “Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of ‘I’” (2007)
- Antjie Krog, “What the Hell is Penelope Doing in Winnie’s Story?” (2009)

J M Coetzee’s novel, “Disgrace” (1999) that won him the Nobel Prize and the second Booker Prize in the Literature. Disgrace portrays the black-brighten picture of the South African society with a different note where the whites are the oppressed and marginalized section of the community, and “where the hunter became the hunted.” The novel presents not only the major thematic kaleidoscopic picture of the hostilities and brutalities which prevail between the whites and the blacks, but it details the following cultural, psychological and political situations also. After the new Constitution for South Africa was adopted in 1994; Disgrace also came under the debate in the parliament of South Africa. The African National Congress party was one of the most prominent anti-apartheid movements led by Nelson Mandela, who was the first post-apartheid elected president of SA in 1994. During the ruling, the party felt and also accepted that the novel Disgrace that presented an accurate pessimistic picture of South Africa in which the thematic focus reveals the race tool that shows poverty, crime, xenophobia, bloodshed, homosexuality, and as the emerged aspects in the Post-apartheid South Africa. The significant themes of the entire novel revolve around the protagonist David Lurie, "FOR A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well", who is an old Professor of English Communications at a technical university in Cape Town.
How to Cite-
Manoj Kumar Yadav, Meenakshi Sharma Yadav. (2020). Role of Major Themes in the Novel Disgrace by J M Coetzee: The Emerged Aspects of Society in the Post-Apartheid South Africa. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 29(11s), 2681-2701.
Retrieved from http://sersc.org/journals/index.php/IJAST/article/view/22686

The devolution of the struggle for power from the centre to the periphery happens in three mutually dependent levels. First, there are power-allocating narratives made. As Joseph Conrad shows, they legitimise the dominance of the centre over the peripheries by circulating homemade “re-presentations” of the “other.” Second, the “grand narratives” are dismantled into small local ones without simultaneous dismantling of the universal “re-productions” of “the other” already existent within them. Third, the local narratives are taken to the peripheries where they are purged of their generalising “sentimental pretences” of unquestionable authority. It is John Maxwell Coetzee who, in Waiting for the Barbarians, devolves the power struggle to the peripheries to show that in the history of human conquest of the “dark” world “the outside” has been irreplaceable for this is where the authority begins. To avoid Conrad’s “tragic limitation,” he refrains from specifying what that “outside” might be. He leaves it up to the reader to decide.

This article explores disability as a trope of storytelling in by J. M. Coetzee " s 2005 novel Slow Man. Although much has been written on the novel " s narrative experiments, very little criticism to date has examined the question of disability in the novel. This article aims to remedy this gap and offers a close reading of the novel that brings together the trope of disability and metafictional elements in the novel. The protagonist " s disability and insistent refusal of prosthesis becomes the central metaphor for narrational impairment. The novel unfolds in a sequence of covering and recovering an originary lack, beginning with the supposed author Elizabeth Costello " s intervention to revitalize her tedious story, followed by a series of other transgressions. This article argues that the theme of disability allows for the examination of fictionality, subverting the power of the writer and exposing the inner workings and problems of fiction writing. It gives the novel a mode of structural freedom while violating the modes of fiction and bringing it to the point of collapse.

Confessional writing in English has been burgeoning in South Africa over the past two decades. Covering a wide social range, autobiographies of novelists to political leaders, social activists and journalists, artists and scientists have all contributed to forging a considerable repertoire of individual testimonies making up the inclusive history of South African society. Outside of the instrumentalising context of the resistance struggle, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s dissuasive tendency to subsume personal testimonies within the hegemonic national discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation, the current publishers’ increased interest in individual testimonies should not come as a surprise. Indeed, the contemporary proliferation of autobiographical writings can be seen as intrinsically embedded in the general tendency of post-millennial South African fiction to turn from the public sphere towards the private one, to reclaim space for auto-critique, self-questioning and expression of personal grief. With particular reference to the trilogy of fictionalized memoirs by J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009), this article offers a detailed analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s contribution to the flourishing field of South African autobiographical writing. While acknowledging the discursive shift towards the personal domain, this paper argues that Coetzee’s works maintain the principles of ‘committed’ writing, working largely at the level of personal ethico-political responsibility of resistance against any spiritually oppressive systems. It is through Coetzee’s formal experimentation, through the author’s radical disruption of the discourses of the autobiographical genre, what Jane Poyner terms “acts of genre,” rather than through his works’ substance, that Coetzee manages to counteract established discourses and in doing so, restores the richness of South African intellectual life, which was severely regulated and stifled under apartheid.

This thesis is a study of occluded intertextuality in two novels by South African author J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986). It examines Coetzee’s novels in concert with intertexts and archival materials to determine how Coetzee employed intertextuality as a means of negotiating his positionality as a white liberal author in late-apartheid South
Africa. In Chapter 1 I examine Coetzee’s initial intention, exhibited in a working notebook and early drafts, to rewrite Heinrich Von Kleist’s 1811 novella Michael Kohlhaas, demonstrating
how, although Coetzee ultimately moved away from this intertext, its traces remain in Michael K through an inescapable lacuna which creates an experience of hesitation for character, author,
and reader. In Chapter 2, I trace Coetzee’s attempts to rewrite Daniel Defoe’s 1724 courtesan narrative, Roxana, although Foe’s typically identified intertext is Robinson Crusoe. A
contrapuntal reading of Roxana reveals that imperialism, motherhood, prostitution, and authorship form a knot in that text, which is transferred to Coetzee’s novel via the return of
Susan Barton’s lost daughter in the novel’s final section. Chapter 2 thus seeks to supplement readings of Foe that posit Friday as the novel’s ultimate representation of ethical engagement
with alterity. This thesis establishes a relationship of comparative exchange between several kinds of intertext and in doing so aims to construct a personal ethics of reading. Derek Attridge
describes the ethics of reading as an encounter, through literature, with the other, or an other. For Attridge, “Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds” (xii) precisely because reading his work is an event. This thesis seeks to expand Attridge’s conceptualization of reading Coetzee’s work as an event beyond the borders of individual texts to consider the ethical force that results from reading text, intertext and foretext concurrently and
interactively.