ABSTRACT |
The aim of this paper is to analyze the inextricability between silence
and alterity in the 1986 novel, Foe, by the South African writer
J. M. Coetzee. Taking as a starting point the heated contemporary debate
between post-structuralist and post-marxist visions of literature, and
how these have affected this writer’s critical reception, I point to the
plentiful enigmas and mysteries that pervade Susan Barton’s story, and
that frustrate the reader’s desire for wholeness and revelation, and to
how these have been approached by different critics. With postcolonial
theory, on the one hand, and phenomenological and deconstructive
tendencies, on the other - Levinas, Derrida, Hillis Miller and Blanchot
- I examine the different conceptions of “the other” that clash in the
novel, and argue for a kind of critical practice that does not
domesticate the dimension of wholly other to which this novel seems to
be leading us.
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