Subjectivity And Self-fashioning

As a famous novelist in the current century,Coetzee reveals the secret of humanity and exposes social evils with a stroke of sobriety,and reflects upon historical narrative from the sidelines,which is highly appreciated and well received in the world.His autobiographical novels,Boyhood,Youth and Summertime,are based on his actual past experiences,in which the written and constructed autobiographical subject reveals the conflicts between inner self and outer self and self-fashioning of middle-class in discursive negotiations.Unfortunately,the available literary criticism shows preference for his pure fictions without paying enough attention on his biographical literature.Even those who examine his autobiographical trilogy tend to start with the hybridity of the genre,in terms of language,narrative and style,probing into the boundaries between authenticity and fabrication in the text world.Nevertheless,any form of art is not a closed discourse system,and historical context offers important references to creation of art and literature.This thesis is to incorporate the text into history and discourse system from the perspective of new historicism,focusing on the reciprocal relationship between subjective initiative and social formations in Boyhood,to inquire into the process of subject"s construction of its identity through negotiations between self-consciousness and socio-historical ideologies.New historicism is adept at dissecting the effects diverse discourses exert on the author or his work.The thesis applies the theory of self-fashioning and literary function Stephen Greenblatt proposed to explore the self-consciousness and self-display of the writer.On the one hand,affected by the ideology of South African liberalism,the text underlies individual independence and combats the Afrikaans dominant value system that strangles the individual freedom.On the other hand,the author"s high identification with western cultural value ends in internalization and accomplice of its hegemony and economic system.In the text the mutual constraint is typically characterized by the subject who acts rebelliously and then accepts submission in the name of liberty.While resorting to personal memory for writing history,he deconstructs and rewrites it and simultaneously builds a new mainstream discourse.As a result,the text makes a conscious effort to learn the historical truth which proves counterproductive,as it dissolves the weight of history,thereby repeating the power mechanism.The text is interpreted from within the viewpoint of new historicism,putting it back into its historical context and social power network.It means deeply concerning about the writer"s multiple marginalized identities and his connections with the middle-class culture.These results will help readers better understand the complex self-image and the contradictory visions of class and race in Coetzee"s autobiographical novels.