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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Constructions of Apartheid in the International Reception of the Novels of J.M. Coetzee
Author:Barnett, CliveISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:25
Issue:2
Period:June
Pages:287-301
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:literature
Miscellaneous (i.e. Demography, Refugees, Sports)
About person:John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-)ISNI
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637604
Abstract:This article identifies some of the ways in which the meaning and referent of literary writing by white South Africans have been dependent upon the cultural mediation of texts through institutionalized discourses of criticism and theory. This is done by looking in detail at the context of reception for the work of J.M. Coetzee. His novels have been constructed in different ways by different audiences, and have thus been subjected to alternative and shifting aesthetic and political evaluations. These different audiences alight upon different features of Coetzee's texts, and in turn they construct the 'context' of his writings in different ways. The representation of Coetzee's novels in two reading-formations is addressed: in nonacademic, journalistic, literary review, and in the emergent academic paradigm of postcolonial literary theory. It is argued that in both cases South African literary writing has often been reinscribed into new contexts according to abstract and moralized understandings of the nature of apartheid. Note, ref., sum.
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