This thesis examines the writings of Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee in order to explore pressing issues that have emerged in literary, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to animal studies. These include animals as disputed objects in claims to territorial, national, and cultural belonging; and the use of animality to manage cultural difference and mobilize identity-based violence. I investigate the roles that hierarchical discourses of species, and the rhetorics of animality that mobilize them, play in cultural and social inscription, cross-cultural conflict, and cultures of violence in the writing of J.M. Coetzee. My dissertation provides historical, material, and cultural context and specificity to the entanglements of race, gender, and culture with the rhetoric and hermeneutics of species, by demonstrating how colonial, Enlightenment, and traditional humanist thought mobilizes speciesism for the cultural work of violence. Intervening in assumptions about the irreconcilability of animal- and human-endorsing approaches to animal studies, I demonstrate that human and non-human animals alike are mutually implicated in conceptual economies that employ animality as a trope; and in the material logistics that mobilize discourses that surround nonhuman animals to do violence to human and nonhuman animals. Coetzee embeds questions about what nonhuman animals mean, or more precisely are made to mean, firmly within the broader politics of interpreting and recognizing alterity, regardless of species, while asking how animals might have a place—in our worlds, in our thought, and in our interventionist strategies—as more than means to human ends. Coetzee’s fictional and critical engagements with nonhuman animals, I argue, comprise a major reassessment of the codes of, and struggles concerning, human and nonhuman animal correspondence and difference. Highlighting the complex interrelations between the cross-cultural violence that mobilizes the rhetoric of species and its attendant violations of nonhuman animal life, Coetzee challenges speciesist schemata that give nonhuman animals symbolic and material currency by imagining how we might read across species differently, in ways that affirm, rather than master, nonhuman animal life. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-04 16:52:47.618

This essay is concerned with the workings of hospitality towards the other in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man. The reading proposed here is that the bicycle accident which befalls protagonist Paul Rayment on the novel’s first page, costing him his leg and a large portion of his previous vitality, renders him momentarily “unstrung,” understood here as a state of passive openness to the unknown, of absolute  responsiveness or hospitality towards the other. The other is here defined as that which is—more or less—ungraspable in the self, in another being or in an unexpected event. A key argument put forward is that the accident also accentuates Paul Rayment’s enduring sense of unhomedness, his alienation in relation to body, language and self. The desire for home or belonging with other people brings about deliberate acts of hospitality on his part, as he tries to find a home for himself by inviting others in. The essay examines how these two strands of ideas—being unhomed and being unstrung—intersect in moments of hospitality in Slow Man, and reflects on how hospitality can and cannot succeed in creating a home for the subject. Theories of hospitality by Jacques Derrida, Derek Attridge and Mike Marais are discussed and serve as inspiration to the reading.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att identifiera och analysera maktrelationerna i J. M. Coetzees roman Disgrace. Främst analyseras genusrelationerna och då i huvudsak i anslutning till huvudkarktären David Lurie. Det har också lagts stor vikt vid hur svarta och vita förhåller sig till varandra. Studien har visat att maktrelationerna mellan romanens karaktärer både sam- och motverkar, samt är föränderliga. Huvudkaraktären besitter många betydelsefulla maktaspekter och har därför möjlighet att utnyttja den unga studenten Melanie sexuellt. Paradoxalt är detta också orsaken till att hon kan anmäla detta, då hennes underläge är så totalt att anmälan utan problem kan ses som befogad. Mellan karaktären Petrus och huvudkaraktärens dotter Lucy är maktförhållandet mer komplext då Lucy är vit och kvinna, medan Petrus är svart och man. Deras maktrelation går från Lucys fördel – då de förhåller sig som svart och vit till varandra – till Petrus fördel – som man och kvinna. Detta sker genom deras egna sociala genuskonstruktioner som i sin tur tar sin näring i Lucys fysiska upplevelser: både våldtäkten och graviditeten som den orsakar.

<p>Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life by J.M. Coetzee tells the story about John Coetzee from the age of ten until thirteen. Since many details in the story point to the idea that the protagonist might be the author, it is often said to be an autobiography. However, it is not a conventional one. A third person narrator tells the story in the present tense, which is rather different from the autobiographiy’s conventional first person narrator speaking in the past tense. The definition used in order to define the genre to which Boyhood belongs is Lejeune’s criterion author=narrator=protagonist. According to this theory, Boyhood is a biography. However, Lejeune does not take the connection author=protagonist inte sonsideration, but focuses only on the connection narrator=protagonist. Thus an additional description of the text’s generic style must be used.</p><p>Furthermore, the theme of otherness is analysed. A close reading of the novel shows that the protagonist often feels different from his family and peers. He makes a distinction between two kinds of different – a good and a bad kind. The good means that he is better than his peers, and the bad kind means that he has failed to accomplish something he thinks is important.</p><p>Although the author wrote the story about his boyhood in a rather unconventional style and the protagonist perceives himself as different, the otherness in the two do not parallel each other. What they might have in common is perfectionism. Thus, the theme of otherness is only to be found in the protagonist, whereas the author’s style of writing is merely unconventional.</p>

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust writing, and the recurrent mobilization of Holocaust imagery in Coetzee’s novels all contribute to suggest the significance of the event to the author’s work and thought. Providing Coetzee with a lens through which to view the contemporary situation, both local and global, the Holocaust offers Coetzee a means by which difficult and complex questions of ethics and historiographical truth may be approached. Above all, the Holocaust and its representation contribute to Coetzee’s exploration of the dilemmas of translating the traumatic lived experience of atrocity – including, but not limited to, life in apartheid South Africa – into narrative form. Taken as a whole, Coetzee’s oeuvre initially anticipates and later responds to, in characteristically oblique fashion, the narrative project(s) facing post-apartheid South Africa as the newly-democratic nation sought to make sense of its past through a variety of means, the most important of which was the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Implicitly challenging the TRC’s findings as well as its narrative assumptions, the Coetzean oeuvre accordingly invites being read as offering a continuous and evolving counter-narrative to the TRC and its construction of a narrative of the apartheid past for the post-apartheid nation. In utilizing the Holocaust, its representations, and the reception thereof to frame his response to apartheid, Coetzee implicates both in a critique of the Western model of modernity, suggesting, in the process, the importance of reconfiguring modernity in a more ethical shape. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-29 12:15:58.377

Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Dept. of English. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/01/14). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines how J.M. Coetzee's engagement with Christian thinkers and concepts has shaped his fiction. Through a series of close readings, I show how Coetzee, who does not identify as a Christian, reworks and reimagines concepts from key Christian interlocutors across his writings. Each close reading is informed by a consideration of what Coetzee had himself been reading during the writing process, based on evidence in interviews, essays, monographs, and archival materials. Attending to Coetzee's reading and writing, together, illuminates the distinctively self-conscious nature of his engagement with Christianity. Whereas current Coetzee criticism has given attention to specific Christian themes and lexical choices in his fiction, this thesis demonstrates that Coetzee's engagement with Christianity is more profound and pervasive than has been credited hitherto. In addition to the vast body of allusion to Scripture in his writings, Christian thinkers have in fact played a major role in his innovative approach to the novel, a genre predominantly forged in Christian contexts, and in his handling of narrative more generally. Through its explication of Coetzee's extensive dialogue with Christian thinking, and with the Bible, across the full span of his career, this thesis seeks to describe the nuanced and diverse ways in which Coetzee's writings have revised and reimagined this vast and complex religious legacy.

This study investigates J.M. Coetzee's use of the female voice in In the Heart of the Country, Foe and Age of Iron, and is based on the premise that Coetzee's position as a male author using a female voice is important for readings of these novels. Although the implications of Coetzee's strategy are examined against the theoretical background of feminist or gender-related discourses, this study does not attempt to claim Coetzee for feminism, nor to prove him a misogynist. Instead, it focuses on the specific positional and narrative possibilities afforded by Coetzee's use of a female voice. Chapter One comments on the fact that Coetzee's strategy of "textual cross-dressing" has not been given much critical attention in the past, observing that research on South African literature has largely been limited to studies of racial and colonial problematics. This introductory chapter mentions that the different female narrators in Coetzee's novels articulate aspects of a discourse in crisis, resulting in profound ambivalence in their representation. Chapter Two observes that the female voices in Coetzee's novels invoke the textual illusion of a speaking/writing female body, and explains that this is useful in expressing aspects of what Coetzee refers to as the suffering body. Although Coetzee appropriates a female narrative position and employs certain subversive textual elements associated with "the feminine", attempts made by certain critics to label Coetzee's writing as ecriture feminine are rejected as highly problematic. Instead, the study contends that the femaleness of the narrators relative to "masculine" discursive power enables Coetzee to perform a critique of power "from a position of weakness". Furthermore, the presence of certain "feminine" elements within these narrators suggests Coetzee's affiliation with characteristics derided within phallocratic discourses, and becomes a strategic means of fictive self-positioning, of figuring his own position as a dissident. Chapter Three is a study of In the Heart of the Country, and proposes that Magda is represented as a typical nineteenth century hysteric. Her hystericized narrative is linked to certain avant-garde narratives, such as the nouveau roman and "New Wave" cinematography, both cited by Coetzee as influences on the novel. Furthermore, the novel provides insight into the ambiguous role of the hysteric and dramatises the position of the dissident: on a discursive level Magda's narrative is subversive, and yet in terms of social "reality" her revolt is ineffectual. Chapter Four addresses the issue of author-ity in Foe, and draws on Coetzee's affiliation with Susan Barton, the struggling authoress, whose narrative reveals the levels of power and authority operating within, novelistic discourse when she asks "Who ,is speaking me?". The study observes that Foe also performs a critique of the power-seeking project of liberal feminism, as the novel sets Susan's quest for authorship against the background of a more radical "otherness", that of Friday. Chapter Five asserts that Age of Iron exploits the ethical possibilities of a maternal discourse. Tracing parallels between images of motherhood in psychoanalytic feminism and in Age of Iron, this chapter argues that Kristeva's theory of abjection is relevant for a reading of Elizabeth Curren's position as a mother who has cancer. The childbirth metaphor as it appears in Age- of Iron becomes an alternative and profoundly ethical way of figuring the process of novel writing.

O objetivo desta dissertação de Mestrado é analisar a representação da violência por J.M. Coetzee nos romances Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) e Disgrace (1999), o primeiro escrito numa época de grandes convulsões sociais na África do Sul devido, especialmente, à implantação do grande apartheid; e o segundo, logo após o fim do regime e a eleição do primeiro presidente negro sul-africano. Nossa pesquisa visa analisar a forma de representar o mal em épocas distintas da história do país, buscando apreender o determinismo histórico presente na construção de ambos os romances, bem como a posição do autor frente aos movimentos ocorridos na sociedade sul-africana, cujas transformações profundas ocorridas no período que vai da publicação de um romance à do outro afetaram diretamente o poder da antiga classe dominante, à qual pertence o escritor. Concluímos que a violência representada em Waiting for the Barbarians prenuncia os eventos de Disgrace, em que, segundo o narrador deste último, a história completa seu círculo. Waiting for the Barbarians apresenta a história de um Império que está se construindo ao mesmo tempo em que pavimenta o caminho de sua própria queda. Em Disgrace, de forma bastante pessimista, o autor traz ao leitor os elementos geradores da violência na atual sociedade sul-africana, propondo a negociação como a única saída para seus conterrâneos brancos que optaram por lá ficar. / The objective of this M.A. dissertation is to analyze J. M. Coetzees representation of violence in the novels Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) e Disgrace (1999); the former was written at a time of great social upheaval in South Africa, mostly due to the institution of the Great Apartheid, and the latter, immediately after the end of the regime and the election of the first Black South-African president. This research aims at analyzing the manner in which evil is represented at different times in the history of the country, attempting to capture the historical determinism present in both novels, as well as the authors position on the movements which occurred within South-African society, whose profound transformations, in the period between the publications of both novels, directly affected the power of the former ruling class, of which the author is a member. The conclusion is that the violence depicted in Waiting for the Barbarians foreshadows the events in Disgrace, in which, according to its narrator, history completes its cycle. Waiting for the Barbarians presents the story of an empire which is building itself at the same time it paves the way to its own fall. In Disgrace, in a severely pessimistic manner, the author brings to the reader the elements which have generated the violence in the current South-African society, proposing negotiation as the only answer for his White peers who decided to remain in the country.

This essay deals with sexual power abuse in J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace. The essay focuses on the two characters David and Petrus and their way of acting. The question asked is simply: how do these two men use women to gain their power? And how do they deal with women? The result can be summarized in the following way: at the beginning the male characters tear women apart till they become totally insecure and thus they can control them completely. Petrus remains this way but as time goes by, David’s thoughts of women gradually changes. The essay also focuses on how David and Petrus shift in power. David, who started out as strong, becomes weak, and Petrus develops in the opposite direction and I am going to argue that this is a result of their relations to women. The essay uses a gender perspective and it can be considered a guide to the sexual abuse in Disgrace.