Sympathy for the Animal(ized) Other in Selected Works of J.M. Coetzee

Sympathy, understood to be the capacity to suffer with the other, has long been regarded as one of the major vehicles to inspire an ethical communion. By minimizing differences through identification, sympathy helps us resonate with other beings and to exist in relation to them. This thesis examines the ethical endeavors on the vexed question of sympathy in four works by J. M. Coetzee--- The Lives of Animals (1999), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), all of which manifest Coetzee's notable interest in a fully-engaged sympathetic imagination into depraved and deprived human or nonhuman subjects.;Drawing on existing theoretical works on the ethics of sympathy as well as the substantial body of critical commentary on Coetzee, this thesis argues that Coetzee's presentation of the aesthetic and ethical significance of sympathy occurs in full awareness of the tensions and ambivalences that reside within it. Specifically, the concept of sympathy is revealed to be an individualist logic, often encouraging of egotism and premised on a category of the human which excludes the different other.;Chapter 1, focusing on The Lives of Animals, carries out an investigation of Elizabeth Costello's highly controversial concept of "sympathetic imagination". It is argued that notwithstanding Costello's advocacy of sympathetic imagination into the lives of animals, her theory ultimately reflects a system of exclusively human relationships concerned with human beings' duties to one another. Additionally, the ways in which sympathy and its closest cognate empathy occasionally grow into each other will be discussed.;Building on the controversial notion of sympathetic imagination discussed in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 further explores the misguided assumption that sympathetic motivation is fundamentally altruistic. This chapter argues that sympathy in Disgrace often emerges as a form of individualism, since the ostensibly altruistically-driven act is not offered to the other as an end in itself but an intermediate means for personal satisfaction.;Chapter 3, focusing on Slow Man, looks at the interrelationship between sympathy and care-giving. This chapter reflects on how the human motivation to sympathize and care can heighten the awareness of those deemed less than human as deserving of pity rather than respect. Further, the ways in which Coetzee problematizes the process of artistic creation as the vehicle for sympathy will be examined.;The final chapter of this thesis seeks continuities and divergences between The Lives of Animals and Coetzee's 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons into which the former work is incorporated. It is maintained that the lectures Elizabeth Costello delivered on other occasions demonstrate the fundamental difficulty of making a connection with the other. As such, the concept of sympathy continually encounters its own bounds, thwarting the development of both a perfect knowledge of the other and an egalitarian community. Taken together, the four chapters offer a sustained examination of the multiple ways in which sympathy may operate, with the ultimate aim of evincing a new wariness about many of the pressuppositions that underpin sympathy as an ethical construct within literary discourse.