J. M. Coetzee and South Africa: History, narrative, and the politics of agency

This dissertation examines J. M. Coetzee's oeuvre as a form of "situational metafiction" that critically reconstructs key discourses in the history of colonialism, imperialism and apartheid in South Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. It argues that Coetzee's achievement is to have absorbed the effects of the turn towards textuality in postmodern culture while seriously addressing the political and ethical stresses of contemporary South Africa. Beginning with a description of the theoretical, historical and intellectual contexts informing Coetzee's fiction, and drawing on Coetzee's non-fictional writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism and popular culture, it provides a developmental analysis of the corpus of six novels. The early novels are read as enacting a struggle with colonialism's violence and its discursive legacy: Dusklands (1974) parodies scientific discourse in the service of colonial power, narratives of exploration, and white nationalist, pioneer history In the Heart of the Country (1978) dramatizes the ontological instability produced by settler-colonialism's lack of social reciprocity. Coetzee's "pivotal" novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, is read as a critique of the South African State's "total strategy" of the late seventies, as a subversion of the semiotics of Empire and the transcendental subject of historical discourse. The later novels, Life and Times of Michael K and Foe, are studied as fictional interrogations of the situation of writing in South Africa, both writing in a situation of political crisis, and writing in a crisis of authority. The "politics of agency" refers to the movements of the narrative subject as it makes its way through the fragmented national context of contemporary South Africa: beginning with intervention and subversion, it undergoes a moment of disempowerment in the realization of its association with colonial discourse, and ends in renunciation. The conclusion suggests how Age of Iron represents both summation and departure: the novel explicitly judges the nation's obsessions during the States of Emergency of the late 1980s, but only by invoking the authority of the disparaged and dying.