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Re-writing as a postmodern Technique in Coetzee’s Foe behind Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

28 Jun 2019-Vol. 26, Iss: 3, pp 61-79
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used the postmodern theory as a guide and tried to apply its features on Coetzee's Foe, a novel that has been built on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Abstract: Rewriting is a technique used by the writer to retell something old, in a new form. It is a postmodern technique. In this sense, rewriting is built on a readymade text that carries its own thoughts and ideology but by using this technique, the writer exposes his own perspective rather than adopting the writer's vision of the original text. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is an aspiration for many writers. It helps them create their own texts depending on the idea that Defoe has presented. This paper hypothesizes that J.M. Coetzee's Foe as a novel that has been built on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in which Coetzee rewrites the old novel into a new one, nevertheless, he has presented his vision as he intertextualizes the old novel in his. To validate this hypothesis, the paper used the postmodern theory as a guide and tries to apply its features on Coetzee’s Foe. The paper starts with an introduction to the selected novels, the theory of postmodernism and its features will be the methodology that is followed. The paper concludes the findings at the end.

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TL;DR: The authors argue for systematic textual analysis as a part of discourse analysis, and an attempt to stimulate debate on this issue between different approaches to discourse analysis has been made in the past few years.
Abstract: This paper is an argument for systematic textual analysis as a part of discourse analysis, and an attempt to stimulate debate on this issue between different approaches to discourse analysis. Two t...

957 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Coetzee's success is significant, I think, because it can be attributed to our ability, as members of the privileged world, to identify more readily with Coetzee, who is an Afrikaner, a descendant of colonizers, than with black Africans who are writing and publishing alongside coetzee as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: By G. SCOTT BISHOP Ngugi wa Thiong'o, in "The Language of African Literature," argues that African children should be taught African literature in their own African languages to preserve the cultural identity that colonization sought to destroy. A paradoxically similar assertion can be made for students of English literature. If by studying English literature we are studying our cultural identity, then we must also read postcolonial literature written in English. As Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and many feminists including Nina Auerbach, Margaret Homans, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have shown, our cultural identity has resulted in our seeing the non-Western, nonwhite, nonmale, nonChristian, non-English-speaking world as other, as deviant. The Western, white Christian world, so confident of its identity, has imposed itself on the world of others, and from that world a new Englishlanguage literature is emerging. In contrast to Ngugi's concern that the colonial mind, through the literature of the colonizers, is being "exposed to images of his world as mirrored in the written languages of his colonizers" (LAL, 18), the colonizer is now, in his or her own language, being exposed to images of the usurper and the usurped world as mirrored in the literature of the colonized, the oppressed. Postcolonial literature shows us the postcolonial world's "way of looking at the world at its place in the making of that world" (LAS, 21). If it is not our moral duty, it is at least our duty as students of English literature to study postcolonial literature. J. M. Coetzee's novels offer the privileged, predominantly white world an illuminating if not disconcerting picture of the political and moral entanglements in the complex postcolonial world. Coetzee is an Afrikaner born in Cape Town in 1940. He was educated in South Africa and the United States and is now a professor at the University of Cape Town. He has written five novels: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986). He has won a number of prestigious awards including South Africa's premier literary honor, the CNA prize, as well as the Geoffery Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Booker McConnell Prize. Coetzee's success is significant, I think, because it can be attributed to our ability, as members of the privileged world, to identify more readily with Coetzee, who is an Afrikaner, a descendant of colonizers, than with black Africans who are writing and publishing alongside Coetzee. Besides his political sympathy for blacks, his work reflects a concern for the whites' precarious position at the top of the social order. In the 9 March 1986 New York Times Magazine Coetzee's article "Tales of Afrikaners" appeared. In it he said, "Many Afrikaners, more moderate than their stereotype, still don't understand that they live on a lip of a volcano" (19). That volcano encompasses South Africa's political realities. These political realities, which necessarily mediate the conscious voice of any writer in South Africa, direct Coetzee's voice, a voice in conflict with itself. Coetzee reveals the power of language as a political tool, but at the same time he questions the validity of that power. He tells the story of oppression without pretending to speak for the oppressed. As a white man, an Afrikaner, he illustrates and questions his own voice as spokesman for the oppressed. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation, "The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis, " explores why Beckett gave up English to write in French. During Coetzee's analysis of Watt he says:

11 citations