J. M. Coetzee's 'Postmodern' Corpus: Bodies/Texts, History, and Politics in the Apartheid Novels, 1974-1990

Abstract

This dissertation examines the apartheid novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. Using postmodernism as its main theoretical framework and working at its intersections with feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, the dissertation seeks to restore the political and historical significance of Coetzee's apartheid novels published between 1974 and 1990. It closely looks at the representation of the material body and its mediation in landuage and discourse to show our textualized access to the historical real. The middle chapters problematize the representation of the body with relation to notions like metafiction, historiography, writing the body, illness narratives, self-conscious relation of pain, and individual versus collective bodies. The dissertation begins by discussing the suffering, oppressed body from a globalized persepctive and concludes by offering a new reading of Coetzee's apartheid novels, one that highlights their allegorical viscerality.