Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement / Edition 1

by Laura Wright

Overview

Writing Out of all the Camps: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination—combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory—of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K , The Master of Petersburg , and Disgrace ), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands , In the Heart of the Country ), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron , The Lives of Animals ), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians ). The work has broad academic appeal in the established fields of not only literary studies—postcolonial, contemporary, postmodern and environmental—but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. Because of its broad and interdisciplinary range, this text bridges a conspicuous gap in studies on Coetzee.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415977074
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/02/2006
Series:	Studies in Major Literary Authors
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Laura Wright is Assistant Professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her primary areas of interest and scholarship include contemporary postcolonial and world literature, environmental theory, and performance studies. She has published work in Mosaic, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, African Studies Review, and Minnesota Review.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 (Dis) Placing Coetzee: An Introduction; Chapter 2 Coetzee's Dogs from Simile to Signified: South African History, Environment, and Literature; Chapter 3 Displacing the Voice: Coetzee's Female Narrators; Chapter 4 Resisting the Voice: Waiting for the Magistrate and Michael K; Chapter 5 The Performance of Displacement: Disgrace and The Lives of Animals;