Human Rights, Social Justice, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
In its engagement with the relative successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice. Disgrace first juxtaposes its protagonist’s “rights of desire” with human rights, thereby exposing significant liabilities of rights talk. At the same time, it contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm. However, in the end, its insistence upon the indeterminate status of justice is paradoxically what enables its ethical and political force.
Allegories of the Bioethical: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year
This essay reads J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Diary of a Bad Year, as an occasion to problematize contemporary bioethical (and neoliberal) paradigms. Coetzee’s rhetorical strategies are analyzed to better understand the “scene of address” within which ethical claims can be voiced. Drawing on Foucault’s Socratic understanding of ethics as the self’s relation to itself, self-relation is explored through the rhetorical figure of catachresis. The essay ultimately argues that the ethical voice emerges when the terms—terms by which I relate to myself, to others, to my own body, and to the bodies of others—are themselves subject to catachrestic refiguration.
"Little enough, less than little: nothing": Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee
It seems logical to assume that substantive changes in history should lead to shifts in emphasis in the preoccupations of politically engaged literature. After all, such literature usually erects history as an a priori structure. For this reason forms of social realism have usually been favored by politically engaged fiction writers in the South African context. During the apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer treated with suspicion the "disestablishment from the temporal" that results from the modernist attempt to "transform the world by style"; she concluded that the "essential gesture" of the white South African writer "can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully [. . .] that the reader can no longer evade it'" (248–50). A body of writing whose understanding of the relation between text and history is informed by a correspondence theory of truth must of necessity alter