 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
SHI Ju-hong, HAO Wen-xuan
Full-Text PDF
XML 6 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2024.06.001
School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
In the Heart of the Country, the second novel by J. M. Coetzee, has been traditionally read as a disembodied writing that focuses on the problem of writing per se instead of the reality. This paper contends that the work is actually a body narrative that explores the visceral pain suffered by Magda whose infertile body impedes her being a qualified subject. As the heroine in a postcolonial novel, Magda is not just a body that is restricted and constructed by the politics of the body, but also a thinking and writing body that consciously questions and resists the gendered bodily norms under whose yardstick her subjecthood is barred. Written in the metafictional manner, Magda’s narrative of the body is not just a record of her corporeal experience, but also a self-conscious negotiation with, and challenge of, the bodily norms under whose yardstick her body has been debased or, in terms of Judith Butler, abjected. Taking her female bodily experience as the starting point, Magda writes a feminine text that values passion, fluidity and non-linearity to disrupt the patriarchal discourse underpinned with logical reasoning. The feminine body narrative endeavors to achieve a new way of communication through which a reciprocal cross race/gender relationship might be established.
J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, abject female body, body narrative, feminine text
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, June 2024, Vol. 14, No. 6, 395-403
Attwell, D. (1993). J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the politics of writing. Berkley: University of California Press.
Briganti, C. (1994). A bored spinster with a locked diary: The politics of Hysteria in “In the Heart of the Country”. Research in African Literatures, 25(4), 33-49
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London: Routledge.
Coetzee, J. M. (1982). In the heart of the country. Penguin Books.
Coetzee, J. M. (1988). White writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1993). Doubling the point: Essays and interviews. D. Attwell (Ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (2004). Dusklands. London: Vintage Books.
Dovey, T. (1987). Coetzee and his critics. English in Africa, 14(2), 15-30.
Dovey, T. (1988). The novels of J M Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Craighall: Donker.
Esty, J. D. (1999). Excremental postcolonialism. Contemporary Literature, 40(1), 22-59.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1984). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Gallagher, S. (1991). A story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s fiction in context. USA: Harvard University Press.
Jones, A. R. (1985). Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine. In G. Greene, and C. Kahn (Eds.), Making a difference: Feminist literary criticism (pp. 80-112). London: Methuen.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1986). Revolution in poetic language. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader (pp. 92-96). New York: Columbia University Press.
Leland, D. (1989). Lacanian psychoanalysis and French feminism: Toward an adequate political psychology. Hypatia, 3(3), 81-103.
Marais, M. (2009). Secretary of the invisible: The idea of hospitality in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Moodie, T. D. (1975). The rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, apartheid and the afrikaner civil religion. Berkely: University of California Press.
Poyner, J. (2009). J. M. Coetzee and the paradox of postcolonial authorship. Farnham: Ashgate.
Roberts, S. (1992). Cinderella’s mothers: J. M. Coetzee’s “In the Heart of the Country”. English in Africa, 19(1), 21-33.