Textualization of Context: A New Historical Reading of Coetzee’sdusklands
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Department of English
Abstract
With reference to the theoretical tools ofNew Historicism, this thesisaims to
understand J.M. Coetzee’sDusklandsas a novel of relations. From the reader’s initial
difficulty in trying to reconcile the seemingly divergent constitutive narratives to its
exploration of the failed relationships between subject and object, Self and Other, and
the corporeality of the body and the incorporeality of the mind,Dusklandsdemands
that thereaders pay close attention to the sets of associations and connections that it
establishes. And it is in this context that thisthesisargues thatDusklandspresents the
narratives of two men who begin to experience the failure of such fundamental
relationship as they begin to uncontrollably oscillate between the ontological states of
the known-subject and the incomprehensible-Other. Under such conditions, an
analysis of the relationship between the body and the “event” of pain that circulates
upon it reveals that this complex state of affairs is highly detrimental to the integrity
of the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment that underscored the structural
imperatives of European colonial discourse. Indeed, it seems certain that without the
guarantee of a conceptual Other with which to construct world reality, the claim to
“truth” maintained by scientific rationality begins to stutter.
With a gaze ofTheNew Historical approach, one can straightforwardly
unearth in the text thathistoryis unveiledhere, and the mainline history is exposed to
be mere propaganda in the service of the colonial power in the past and nuclear
superpowers at present.