Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil.
This study explores the tension between politics and ethics in
selected novels by J.M Coetzee. It contends that, in this
writer's fiction, ethics is conceived of in Levinasian terms as a
relation of responsibility for the other which is grounded in an
acknowledgement of the other's radical difference to the same.
The thesis examines Coetzee's self-reflexive investigation of the
problem for novelistic representation posed by this conception of
ethics. In order to contextualise this examination, the first
chapter of the study establishes that the form and medium of the
novel install a relation of correlation between same and other,
and that the novel-as-genre therefore routinely forecloses on,
rather than maintains a relation of difference to, alterity.
Chapter One also traces the various strategies through which
Coetzee's novels attempt not only to prevent the medium and form
of the novel-as-genre from reducing the other to an object and
thereby violating it, but also to impart a sense of that which
inevitably exceeds, and so transcends, this genre's
representational protocols. By means of such strategies of
excession, the study contends, Coetzee's texts endeavour to
inscribe a responsible relation to the other.
The four remaining chapters of the thesis trace Coetzee's
installation of strategies of excession, and therefore of an
ethical aesthetic, in Dusklands, Life and Times of Michael K,
Foe, Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg. They also
consider these novels' self-conscious articulation of the ethical
implications of such strategies. Chapter Four and Chapter Five
pay special attention to the inscription in Coetzee's later
fiction of a debate on the possible effect on the reader of the
individual text's ethical relation to the other. In this regard,
the thesis argues that the ultimate purpose of Coetzee's attempt
to respond responsibly to alterity in his writing is to enable
the other to approach the reader in the course of the literary
encounter. It thereby demonstrates that Coetzee's concern with
ethics is deeply political: in attempting to contrive an ethical
relation between the reader and the other, the individual text
seeks to secure a mediation of the political by the ethical.