J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship

Ludic effects in fiction: A case study of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and its Russian and Ukrainian translations

“…John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African novelist, critic, and translator, is one of the most renowned yet elusive author of our time. His style is marked by economy and precision [15], deceptive simplicity [16], genetic innovation [17], and innovative experiment [3,9,18,19]. Grounded on the rule-bound play [3,9], Coetzee's experiment with literary forms "hinges on certainty of method combined with uncertainty of outcome" [20] which is "genuinely new and unexpected" [ibid.…”

Subjection and Survival in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

“…19-20). This is Lurie's "crisis of authority" (Poyner, 2009). It is too painful for Lurie to see that he has lost his control and power over Soraya.…”

“…Poyner (2000), too, believes in Lurie’s “redemption through the championing of animal welfare” (p. 73), and Poyner (2009) observes that Lurie, after his affair with Melanie and having to leave university, goes through “some kind of reinvention” and argues that through his dealings with dogs, Lurie “struggles for atonement.” Poyner, moreover, argues that Lucy’s rape is “an event which forces Lurie to reassess his own relationship with women” (p. 152). The question that Poyner does not consider, however, is in what terms Lurie reassesses his relation with women.…”

Untitled

“…The critical examination of Coetzee's novel Foe (1986) is rich and complex, being centred on thought-provoking discussions on a variety of themes and concepts that inform a multifaceted understanding of the novel. An outline of the specialized literature should take into account such issues as (listed chronologically): post-colonialism and counter-discourse (Tiffin, 1987), ideology, politics and censure (Dovey, 1988), intertextual and metafictional resonances (Splendore, 1988), interpretative authoritarianism (Marais, 1989), the notion of history (Attwell, 1990), margin (Spivak, 1990), the ethics and politics of living in South Africa (Attwell, 1993), voice/voicing vs silence/silencing on the backdrop of apartheid (Attridge in Huggan and Watson, 1996;Head, 1997;Parry in Attridge and Jolly, 1998), the novel as 'a palimpsest Crusoe/Roxanna tale' (Chapman, 1996), textuality, alterity, deception, the mutilation of the colonial Other, the technique of reversal, allusion (Head, 1997), solitude and subtext, adaptation and hybridization, the triad power-language-identity (Canepari-Labib, 2005), disruption of the post-colonial canonic discourse (Kehinde, 2006), treatment of the body (Hughes, 2008;Ingram, 2008), duality, silencing the other (Head, 2009), the power impregnated in colonialist writing, discursive worldliness, the power of discourse, similarities and differences between Defoe's and Coetzee's novels, or the notion of mutilation (Poyner, 2009), the question of authorship (Clarkson, 2009), the problem of the novel's representation of reality and truth, intertextuality (and the connection with another text, namely, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (in Hayes, 2010), apart from the obvious connection with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Roxanna), the employment of the allegorical and realist modes and the re-evaluation of intertextuality (Uhlmann in Danta et al, 2011), authenticity, the question of authorship and the meanings of Friday's tonguelessness, the concept of (bodily) disability (Hall, 2012), metaphors of the body and the substantiality of the body (Kosecki, 2013), the relation between author and character, the relation between the world and storyworlds, the distinction between art and life…”