* Preface * Preface to the Paperback Edition *1. Preamble: A Post-Carpenterian Reflection *2. Lord, Praised Be Thou *3. Fugitive Island *4. The Parting of the Waters *5. Memories of the Future *6. The Pilgrim's Last Journeys * Bibliography * Select Bibliography of Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Bibliographical Supplement to the Paperback Edition * Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Index

Alejo Carpentier; The Pilgrim at Home

Critics of J. M. Coetzee's Foe have focused their scholarly attention on Susan Barton, Friday, and Foe, but Coetzee's Cruso has been largely ignored. Although many scholars have given cursory acknowledgement to the Camusian echoes in Coetzee's portrayal of Cruso, their existential implications remain to be discussed. My aim is to add to the existing feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern readings of Foe an existential critique that addresses important aspects of the novel left unexplored by these readings. In many ways, existentialist thought has anticipated those late-twentieth-century theoretical models, particularly in rejecting absolutes, in privileging existence, freedom, and self-determination, and in analyzing ideology, language, and the gaze.

Existential Doubt and Political Responsibility in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other.

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The Rhetoric of Posthumanism in Four Twentieth-Century International Novels

Esta tesis estudia la reescritura de obras canonicas de la literatura inglesa desde la mirada sesgada y colateral de escritores procedentes de las antiguas colonias del imperio britanico. Jean Rhys, una autora caribena, reescribio el clasico de Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, en Wide Sargasso Sea, la historia de la esposa loca de Rochester contada desde la perspectiva del individuo colonial. John Maxwell Coetzee, de Sudafrica, reescribio en cambio la obra maestra de Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, en una sugerente version de la robinsonada como la que se presenta en Foe. Ambas reescrituras contienen una critica a los codigos culturales implicitos en la obra canonica, ademas de un intento por hallar un discurso representativo de su identidad y que supuestamente puede darles las claves para irrumpir en el canon occidental.

En busca de un discurso identitario y canónico: la reescritura de Rhys y Coetzee en Wide Sargasso Sea y Foe

In 2004, Melissa Steyn published “Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced,” an award-winning examination of what she terms South African white talk, a discourse practiced by a select group of Afrikane...

White Talk, White Writing: New Contexts for Examining Genre and Identity in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back. (135-36)

Chris Bongie

Papers

"Lost in the Maze of Doubting": J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of (Un)Likeness

J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, and: Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer (review)