Quest For Historical Reality:A Study Of Historical Representation In Foe

Rethinking the South African colonial history is one of the most important thematic concerns in the works of the contemporary South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee.His novel Foe,a skillful rewriting of the colonial canon Robinson Crusoe,reflects his deep concern about how the imperial ideology impacts the reliability of traditional representation of the colonial history,and how he,through his writing,manages to return voices to the repressed and the silenced and restore for his readers a more reliable history of the colonial narrative.In light of Hayden White's theory of historiography,and based on a careful reading of the text,this thesis atte(?)npts to analyze how Coetzee deconstructs the grand history of the mainstream colonial narrative ever since the inception of the European colonial expansion and enables the marginalized in the colonial regime to move from the periphery to the centre,so that a more authentic South African colonial history is unveiled to the readers.The Introduction of this thesis briefly summarizes the importance of historical representation as one of the major thematic concerns in Coetzee's writing.Based on a literature review of previous researches,this thesis points out that with the interference of imperial ideology,the traditional representation of colonial history has been manipulated as a tool for the colonizers to justify their brutal domination over the colonized.In order to provide an access to a more authentic South African colonial history,Coetzee through his fiction makes every effort to return voices to the marginalized who have been silenced and ignored for generations of subjugation and submission,and reveal to their European "masters" their unique dignity,vitality and even mystery of their individual and cultural identity.Chapter One discusses the ideological preference in representational means of the traditional Eurocentric historical narrative,to wit,speech and writing.Chapter Two aims to present and interpret Coetzee's means for his historical representation of colonial history in the context of his story——the language of the human body andmany other mystic signs related to the protagonists of the novel.It reveals Coetzee's attempt to defend for the marginalized and his attempt to restore the brutal and bloody reality of South African colonial history through non-linguistic expressions.Based on Coetzee's views of history and literary creation,Chapter Three discusses how Coetzee establishes a new stage for the colonized to articulate their voices by subverting the traditional temporal-spatial structure in the narrative,which is a practice of his idea of"novel as the rival of history".The Conclusion summarizes the whole thesis and reaffirms the central argument that for Coetzee,neither speech nor writing involving specifically political and ideological discourse can faithfully record the truth of the much concealed and concocted colonial history;instead,signs related to the marginalized could be a more objective and reliable vehicle,and faithful representation of history requires different voices from the marginalized.