(DOWNLOAD) "Subverting the Pastoral: The Transcendence of Space and Place in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace/ die Ondermyning van die Pastorale Tradisie: Die Transendering van Ruimte en Plek in J.M. Coetzee Se Disgrace." by comparative linguistics and literary studies Literator: Journal of Literary Criticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Subverting the Pastoral: The Transcendence of Space and Place in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace/ die Ondermyning van die Pastorale Tradisie: Die Transendering van Ruimte en Plek in J.M. Coetzee Se Disgrace.
- Author : comparative linguistics and literary studies Literator: Journal of Literary Criticism
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 271 KB
Description
Abstract This article investigates how J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" (1999)--portrayed as a postcolonial and postmodern fictional event--embodies, problematises and subverts the vision of the pastoral farm novel tradition by transcending traditional configurations of space and place. The novel offers a rather bleak apocalyptic vision of gender roles, racial relationships and family relations in post-apartheid South Africa and expresses the socio-political tensions pertaining to the South African landscape in terms of personal relationships. As a fictional reworking of the farm novel "Disgrace" draws on the tradition's anxieties about the rights of (white) ownership, but within a post-apartheid context. As such, "Disgrace" challenges the pastoral farm novel's "dream topography" (Coetzee, 1988:6) of the family farm ruled by the patriarch--a topography inscribed--with the help of the invisible labour of black hands--as a legacy of power and ownership to be inherited and cultivated in perpetuity. Accordingly, the concept farm" is portrayed as a contested and liminal space inscribed with a history of violence and dispossession--a dystopia. This article therefore conceptualises "Disgrace" as an antipastoral farm novel that reconfigures the concept "farm"--within the context of the South African reality--by subverting, inverting and parodying the structures of space and place postulated by the pastoral farm novel.