HU Credits: 2

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: English

Semester: 1st Semester

Teaching Languages: English

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Louise Bethlehem

Coordinator Email: louise.bethlehem@mail.huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Monday 14-15

Teaching Staff:
Dr. Louise Bethlehem

Course/Module description:
Course description

This course offers concentrated insight into the work of Nobel prizewinner, J.M. Coetzee through considering his writings as “postcolonial metafiction.” Post-colonial theory explores the impact of European colonization upon the societies which it subjugated, recognizing that the cultural and political struggles which colonization set in motion continue to influence the present. Postcolonial literary theory investigates these concerns on the basis of texts produced in the colonial setting, whether by colonizers or by colonized subjects. Apartheid, the regime of racial segregation current in South Africa between 1948 to 1990, constituted a special form of colonialism. Coetzee’s texts address the political situation of the country of his birth obliquely, unlike the dominant forms of writing that apartheid South Africa produced. Using the notion of metafiction, we will explore the singularity of J.M. Coetzee’s writing as a response to conditions of racial and political oppression. The corpus to be investigated comprises two apartheid-era texts, _Dusklands_ (1974, with an emphasis on “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”) and _Waiting for the Barbarians_ (1980), as well as one transitional or post-apartheid text, _Disgrace_ (1998).

Course/Module aims:
Course aims

The course seeks to elucidate the paradigm of postcolonialism with special reference to postcolonial literary studies. It aims to apply a postcolonial literary analysis to a determinate instance of racial oppression, apartheid South Africa. It explores how J.M. Coetzee’s early texts, “The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee” and _Waiting for the Barbarians_ deviate from the “rhetoric of urgency” (Bethlehem 2006) associated with anti-apartheid literature. It contrasts Coetzee’s texts with short examples of dominant struggle-era writing. It then goes on to explore the singularity of Coetzee’s poetics through mobilizing literary theoretical concepts such as allegory, social realism, metafiction, and “situational metafiction” (David Attwell, 1993). Finally, it turns to Coetzee’s most celebrated, or most notorious, work—Disgrace—to inquire about the relations of continuity or rupture that hold between it as a post-apartheid text, and its predecessors.In summary, the course investigates the relations between a particular set of literary texts and the political context in which these texts are embedded.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Course outcomes

* To identify and employ the following concepts correctly: "postcolonialism,""postcolonial literary studies," "Orientalism," "discourse," "colonialism," "colonizer," "colonized," "perpetrator," "beneficiary," "apartheid," "internal colonialism of a special type," "metafiction," "allegory," "social realism," "rhetoric of urgency," "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," "post-apartheid literature," "historiography," "protest literature."

* To contextualize Coetzee’s work in its historical setting.

* To identify the characteristics of apartheid-era literature in English, and to compare Coetzee’s writing with this corpus.

* To investigate the possible relations between Coetzee’s text and the social and political settings in which they are embedded.

* To historicize works of postcolonial literature.

* To describe the singularity of Coetzee’s poetics in formal terms and to locate these in relation to metropolitan literary theoretical concepts such as "estrangement," "defamiliarization," and "metafiction."

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: Weekly seminars
Regular weekly attendance is obligatory. Roll call will be taken. Students are required to cover selected readings in the theoretical bibliography in accordance with the weekly schedule of readings.
Students are expected to show close familiarity with the primary and theoretical texts under discussion. Only students who have submitted two short response papers will be permitted to submit term papers or seminar papers in this course.

Course/Module Content:
WEEKLY SCHEDULE OF TOPICS AND READINGS

Week 1 27/10/14
Introduction: Postcolonialism, Metafiction, Apartheid
David Attwell interviews John Coetzee in the wake of the Nobel Prize 2003
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee
Said, Edward
2006 [1978] “Orientalism” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 24-27 (London and New York: Routledge).
Waugh, Patricia
1993 (1984) "What is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things about It," in Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 1-19 (London and New York: Routledge).

Week 2 03/11/14
Allegory and the struggle; Allegories of struggle
Comparative Primary Texts
Gordimer, Nadine
1976 “A Lion on the Freeway,” Quarry ’76, edited by Lionel Abrahams and Walter Saunders, 185-188 (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker).
Wilhelm, Peter
1975 “Pyro Protram,” in LM and Other Stories , 55-64 (Johannesburg: Ravan).

Secondary Bibliography
Bethlehem, Louise
2001 “’A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger’: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture Under Apartheid,” Poetics Today 22(2): 365-89.


Week 3 10/11/14
Historical and Literary Contexts
Attwell, David
1993 "Contexts: Literary, Historical, Intellectual" in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, 9-34 (Berkeley: University of California Press; Cape Town: David Philip).
Morphet, Tony
2004 “Reading Coetzee in South Africa,” World Literature Today, 78(1), 14-16.
Phillips, Caryl
1998 “Life & Times of John C.” English in Africa 25(1): 61-70.

Optional:
Crewe, Jonathan
2013 “Arrival: J.M. Coetzee in Cape Town,” English in Africa 40(1): 11-35.
DOl:htti:>://dx.doi.ofg/10.4314/cJa.v40il.l

Week 4 17/11/14
Rivalry or Supplementarity
Attwell, David
1991 “’The Labyrinth of My History’: J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25(1)” 7-32.
Easton, Kai
2006 "Coetzee, the Cape and the Question of History," Scrutiny2 11(1): 5-21.

Week 5 24/11/14
Otherness
Attridge, Derek
2004 "Modernist Form and the Ethics of Otherness: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country" in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event , 1-31 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).




Week 6 01/12/14
Into the Dark Chamber
Coetzee, J.M.
1992 “Into the Dark Chamber” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell, 361-368 (Cambridge: Harvard UP).

Week 7 08/12/14
Body
May, Brian
2001 "J.M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body," Modern Fiction Studies 47(2): 391-420.
Scarry, Elaine
1985 “The Structure of Torture” in The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Optional
Hill, Shannen
2005 “Iconic Autopsy: Postmortem Portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko” African Arts, September 2005
Valdez Moses, Michael
1993 “The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians” The Kenyon Review 15(1): 115-127.

Week 8 15/12/14
Agony and Allegory
Saunders, Rebecca
2001 “The Agony and the Allegory” Cultural Critique 47: 215-264

Optional:
Attridge, Derek
2004 “Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K” in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press).
Craps, Stef
2007 “J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and the Ethics of Testimony” English Studies 88 (1): 59-66.

Week 9 22/12/14
Liberal Funk
Marais, Mike
2001 “Very morbid phenomena: ‘Liberal Funk’, the ‘Lucy-syndrome’ and JM Coetzee's Disgrace” Scrutiny2 6(1):
Optional
McDonald, Peter D.
2002 “Disgrace Effects,” Interventions 4(3): 321-330.**
Marais, Mike
2006 "J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination," Journal of Modern Literature 29(2): 75-93.

Week 10 29/12/14
Adamastor’s Daughters
Camões, Luis Vaz de
1997 (1572) The Lusiads, translated by Landeg White (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press).
Graham, Lucy
2003 “Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” Journal of Southern African Studies 29(2): 433-444
Optional
Ahmed, Sarah
2004 “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22 (2): 117-139.
Bethlehem, Louise
2014 “Refusing Adamastor: Lucy Lurie and ‘White Writing’ in Disgrace,” in Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works, edited by Laura Wright, Jane Poyner and Elleke Boehmer, 105-111 (New York: Modern Language Association).**
Gray, Stephen
1979 “The White Man’s Creation Myth of Africa,” Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town: David Philip).

Week 11 05/01/15
Realism and Rape
Cornwell, Gareth
2002 “Realism, Rape, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 43(2): 307-322.

Optional
Boehmer, Elleke
2002 “Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace” Interventions Vol. 4(3) 342–351. **

Week 12 12/01/15
Sanders, Rebecca
2005 “Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission,” Parallax 11(3): 99-106.

Week 13 19/01/15
Eight Lessons?
Gaylard, Gerald
2005 "Disgraceful Metafiction: Intertextuality in the Postcolony" Journal of Literary /Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 21(3/4): 315-337.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
2002 “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” diacritics 32 (3-4): 17-31.

Presentation of Synthesis Matrices

Week 14 26/01/15
Coda: Reeling in Disgrace: Film Screening of Steve Jacobs’ 2008 movie, Disgrace.

Required Reading:
Primary Texts: Any edition of the text may be used.

Coetzee, J. M.
1974 _Dusklands_ (Johannesburg: Ravan Press) [“The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”]
1980 _Waiting for the Barbarians_ (New York: Penguin).
Coetzee, J.M.
1998 _Disgrace_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

See WEEKLY SCHEDULE in the Course Content bloc for required reading of SECONDARY or THEORETICAL material.

Additional Reading Material:
Recommended Reading

Coetzee, J.M.
1990 _Age of Iron_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

2003 _Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons_ (London: Secker and Warburg).

2004 “As a Woman Grows Older,” _New York Review of Books_, 15 January 2004: 11-14.

A secondary bibliography will be provided separately.

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 0 %
Participation in Tutorials 10 %
Project work 50 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 40 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
Students wishing to write a seminar paper in this course must set a topic with Dr. Bethlehem by Monday 15 December 2014 at the latest.