Browsing by Author "Powers, Donald"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Emigration, literary celebrity, and the autobiographical turn in J.M. Coetzee's later fiction
    (2011) Powers, Donald; Clarkson, Carrol
    Whereas commentary on autobiography in Coetzee tends to focus on the dynamics of secular confession and the idea of self-writing as 'autre-biography,' this thesis, taking the experience of emigration and literary celebrity as thematic pivots, argues that the protagonists of Coetzee's later fiction (Youth through Summertime) occasion a form of authorial self-disclosure that is not an end in itself but, with a nominal anchorage on Coetzee himself, a means of localising questions about literary genre, political complicity, the relation between author and character, the intersection of personal and collective history, and the social responsibility of the acclaimed writer. It is argued that the slippage of focus from the authorial personas in these fictions to the questions and critical voices they provoke nonetheless conspires to reaffirm the authority of the name and literary oeuvre' Coetzee. 'The thesis begins by examining the link in Youth between the protagonist's crisis of ethnic and literary identity and Coetzee's narrative strategy of subjective displacement (Chapter 1). It is shown that the refractive zone of questions in that fiction constitutes the self-qualifying reflex that becomes increasingly pronounced in the authorial surrogates and fictions that follow. Coetzee's representation of the acclaimed writer as a doubting, fallible, unheroic figure becomes in the case of Elizabeth Costello a rejection of the idea of the writer as a spokesperson for a group or cause and instead an opening for the pressures and responsibilities of living among others to be embodied and negotiated (Chapter 2). It is argued that Coetzee's Nobel Lecture provides a further example of this reserve about the reach of the writer's authority in the public realm: the deferral of authority in this text highlights by indirection an inconsistency in the Swedish Academy's invitation to Coetzee to speak for his work on the occasion of an award that celebrates its universal interpretability, its resistance to authorial meta-interpretation (Chapter 3). It is shown that in Slow Man, where the familiar metafictional interplay between the one who writes and the one who is written is framed on an emigrant history that is implicitly Coetzee's, the characters' contest of interpretation over photographs highlights the instability of the historical record - a point that holds for the text of Coetzee's personal history (Chapter 4). Emphasis on the nominal alignment of the author Coetzee and his authorial surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year governs a consideration of how the author's name- his proper name and reputation - focuses the condition of complicity with others as a reader and citizen; the question of whether the character JC speaks for Coetzee is revealed to be secondary to what it means to be held accountable for actions committed in the name of a group to which one belongs or set of interests to which one subscribes (Chapter 5). The thesis tracks the qualified textualisation of Coetzee 's authorial personas and history to Summertime, where' John Coetzee' is written out of an entanglement of acts of emigration and recollection in voices inflected with other histories than his own (Chapter 6).
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Textual solipsism in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands
    (2006) Powers, Donald; Knox-Shaw, Peter
    In this dissertation I examine through a close reading of J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974) the textual dymamic that impels the two narrator-protagonists toward the solipsist position - the ground of the true Cartesian. I show how Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are presented as products of Western print culture and children of René Descartes: literate and acutely self-conscious. I note how each conceives himself according to Descartes' mind-body dualism as primarily a thinking thing. I argue that this self-conception is reinforced by their paradoxical presence-as-absence as figures in a fiction.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Violent histories: J.M. Coetzee's dusklands and Cormac McCarthy's 'blood meridian'
    (2013) Powers, Donald
    This paper explores the resonance between Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands and McCarthy’s fifth novel Blood Meridian through a discussion of how scenes of violence are represented and rationalised in these two texts. Where Coetzee is impatient of realism and preoccupied with history as a discourse, McCarthy’s narrative seems photorealistic in its evocation of the real, but this effect is destabilised by stylised formal features and the trickster figure of Judge Holden. It is shown that in Coetzee’s egocentric protagonists the desire for detached power over others is expressed in the fantasy of an unchallenged gaze that conveys a broader anxiety about authorship and the writing of history, while in McCarthy’s text the narrator’s contextualisation of the characters’ violence against a harsh and indifferent desert environment limits psychological insight and underscores the impernanence of any historical record. Holden and Jacobus Coetzee, finally, are shown to be akin in enabling the metafictional reflections of these two novels.