Coetzee’s last novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) has an intriguing triple-voiced narrative structure and deals with the grey area of shame. The narrative is divided between a writer, his written contribution to a book called “Strong Opinions”, and his secretary’s thoughts about both the opinions in the manuscript and her employer’s circumstances. This essay explores the relation between form and theme in Diary of a Bad Year; to see in what way these two fundamental elements of the novel intervene and support each other. By doing so the narrative structure is read through Freud’s structural model of personality, whereby each narrator’s voice is related to the notions of the super-ego, the ego and the id. In other words, this essay argues that the specific threefold narrative structure in Diary of a Bad Year, by reflecting the interrelated parts of human identity, helps in creating and developing the theme of shame, which only exists connected to the human psyche. This connection in turn gives special meaning to the entire narratology of the novel.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2001. / Title from certificate page. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 174-182). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ71624.

This project is interested in developing a spatial reading of Sigmund Freud’s work to understand how psychoanalysis employs a variety of different spatial categories. Proceeding by way of a close and analytical reading of Freud’s texts, I begin by surveying theories of space coming from both philosophy and geography before applying these understandings to consider Freud’s use of topographical metaphors, the formation of the subject as presented through descriptions of the fort-da game and the oceanic feeling, and Freud’s description of the limits of phantasy and reality. Freud’s writings on religion figure prominently here. I conclude by examining the deployment of individual relations through social space in Freud’s writings and the link between place and character laid out in Moses and Monotheism. The result demonstrates the importance of space in a number of aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis and frames Freud as a thinker with important contributions to make to the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143).

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 139-143.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia, 1997. / Also available online through Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1988. / Summary in English and German. Includes bibliographical references (p. 348-369) and index.

Th. 3e cycle--Psychanalyse--Paris 8, 1985.

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