Deconstruction Of The Authority Of History In J.M. Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians

As a novelist living in the apartheid South Africa,J.M.Coetzee has been criticized by many native writers for his reluctance to express his political stance in his works and refusal to write in accordance with the traditional social realism.They think the geography and time background in Coetzee's fiction breaks away from the contemporary situation in South Africa,which results in its lack of political competitiveness and reveals Coetzee's failure to take the responsibility as a novelist.However,Coetzee himself thinks that traditional social realism is impotent to represent the history in the apartheid South Africa.Furthermore,the single mode of writing reduces novels to the position of being supplementary to history,which makes it impossible to expose the deep structures of historical discourse.Although the historical background of his novels is usually obscured,history is always a significant topic in his works and the consideration of the relationship between history and novels runs through his novels.He does not deny historical facts,but he is more focused on the exploration of the constructiveness and authority of historical discourse.This thesis chooses one of his novels,Waiting for the Barbarians,to analyze how Coetzee deconstructs the authority of history and exposes the nature of imperial history and historical narrative.The thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the three ways that the Empire constructs the authority of history,that is through constructing the authority of superiority,the authority of law and the authority of historical writing.The second chapter demonstrates how Coetzee deconstructs the authority of imperial history from three aspects.The third chapter concludes Coetzee's demystification of history and historical narrative;he exposes the violent and unjust nature of imperial history and civilization,textuality and unreliability of historical narrative;and most importantly,he conveys his opinion on the relationship between history and novels.