Imitation, Transformation And Echo-An Intertextual Analysis Of J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace

John Maxwell Coetzee(1940-) is a South African born novelist, essayist, linguist and translator who had twice awarded the Booker Prize in1983and1999. In2001, Coetzee was chosen to be the year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for he "in numerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider". In recent years, the number of researches on his works increases year by year. As a white writer living in South Africa during post-apartheid time, Coetzee and the specific historical background of his work drew critics’attention. Disgrace is Coetzee’s masterpiece. This paper tries to interpret Disgrace from the point of intertextuality and intends to discuss the intertextual relationship of Disgrace and its former texts. Based on Genette’s workable narrow intertextuality, this paper, from the points of characterization, thematical analysis and ideology, demonstrates the intertextual relationship between Disgrace and other works through close reading.The paper is divided into five sections. In section1, part1introduces the life and works of J.M. Coetzee and his literary achievements. Part2is a literature review of critic studies on Disgrace. Part3gives an introduction to the theory of intertextuality generally and Genette’s theory of intertextuality in its narrow sense which is applied in this paper. Chapter I is the second section in which the author analyses the characterization of the heroes and heroin is the imitation to form texts, which mainly using the device of parody. Chapter II is the third one. The same theory of Genette’s intertextuality in its narrow sense is used in this chapter as in Chapter2to discuss the interrelation of themes between Disgrace and former texts, i.e. Loneliness and Reconciliation. The forth section is Chapter III which explains that the ideology in Disgrace is an allusion to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and The Rebuilding of The World as well as the ideology of the reconciliation of different civilization which is shown in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The fifth section is the conclusion and summarization of the paper. The intertextuality focuses on the uncertainty and unbounded textual meaning. It is thus understood as the passage is constructed out of already existent discourse, which involves an altering of the former text-the interrelationship between the former text and the text itself. If texts are made up of bits and pieces of the social text, then the on-going ideological struggles which characterize language and discourse in society will continue to reverberate in the cultural text. From the subtle relationship between the experience of authors and the forging of characters, to the connection of symbolic image that contributes to the development of the plot; from the spatial narrative pattern to the coincidental insight of the world; from the traditional writing style to the continuously reconstruct of the meaning, the signifier is never certain, thus the signified is overlapping and detonated by the text, mirroring the reflective meditation and humane concern.