Gender,Power And Politics:A Study Of Body Narrative In Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians And In The Heart Of The Country

John Maxwell Coetzee,the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature and the first writer who has won the Booker Prize twice,is regarded as one of the most important contemporary South African novelists,essayists,translators and critics.Waiting for the Barbarians and In the Heart of the Country are Coetzee's two novels,and both novels have attracted a lot of readers both at home and abroad for the unique and innovative narrative strategies and ingenious writing styles.According to the studies concerned at home and abroad,most of the critics tend to analyze the two novels from the perspectives of theme,post-colonialism,feminism,post-modernity,psychoanalysis and so on.However,in accordance with Coetzee's two novels,the body,gender,power and politics are the four basic antagonistic and interdependent elements of Coetzee's post-colonial writing context,and all of them foster the development of the plots and constitute the internal tension of the two works.Although some researchers have noticed the impacts among the body,power and imperial hegemonic politics in the author's two novels,they seem to bypass the above dimensions rather than to analyze the body narrative of Coetzee's two works systematically and profoundly.In view of the unity in content and formality of Coetzee's works,it is significant and helpful to analyze his novels by combining story connotations and narrative strategies,since this method can contribute to finding a new approach to explore and reveal the literary value of Coetzee's works.Therefore,adopting Foucault's body theory and integrating the principles of theoretical analysis and text reading,and starting with the body issues in the post-colonial context,this thesis aims to discuss and analyze the body narrative from the four dimensions of body,gender,power and politics in attempts to provide a new channel to excavate the artistic essence,aesthetic function and humanistic value in the texts.This thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction Part mainly includes the motivation and significance of thisthesis,the introduction to the author and his works,the literature review,the critical approach--theories related to body and body narrative.Focusing on the alienated body's images presented on Coetzee's two works,Chapter I analyzes the basic reasons of the existences of the social bodies under the apartheid.By probing into the metaphorical symbols and Coetzee's narrative skill of defamiliarization,this part interprets the symbolic connotations of the images of female bodies in Coetzee's two works.Chapter II deals with the narrative of female bodies in different discourse practices like race,gender and social hierarchy.By detecting the bodily issues such as discrimination,discipline,inscription and punishment in the context of patriarchy and white supremacy,this part analyzes the relationship between the narrative of female bodies and the narrative of social reality.Chapter III makes an analysis of the female bodily resistance,subversion and deconstruction of the patriarchal oppression and the colonial hegemony by focusing on the narrative of anti-traditional images of the female bodies.This part reveals the female bodily identification,return,liberation,transcendence and elaborates the significance of re-constructing self,subjectivity and history through the female body political consciousness.The conclusion part points out that Coetzee's writing of the South African reality is always set in a milieu of post-colonialism,and it is the body that carries Coetzee's meditation on South African social reality,and his sympathy for the human condition as well as exploration of the characters' self-growth.From the symbolic bodily metaphor,and the cruel bodily punishment to the decisive bodily resistance,Coetzee reproduces South African political ethical landscape and the female survival plight with exquisite narrative strategy in the context of apartheid and colonialism.Meanwhile,Coetzee's body narrative embodies his deep concern for the villainous reality in South Africa and his historical mission and political responsibility as a novelist when facing this reality.Moreover,this narrative symbolizes Coetzee's ethical care for the individual and manifests his consideration and expectation for the equal dignity in the process of human civilization.