Autofiction and Fictionalisation: J.M. Coetzee’s Novels and Boyhood

This article tackles the issue of autobiography or self-representation in J.M. Coetzee's fictionalised memoir Boyhood in terms of the useful insights of fictionalised autobiographies to the study of fictional ones by the same author. I seek to resolve the tension between fiction and autobiography in the aforementioned works. My goal is showing how a fictionalised memoir with autobiographical value like Boyhood is a helpful tool for understanding and engaging Coetzee’s other fictions. Therefore, and using textual evidence, I draw parallels between Boyhood and other representative novels from Coetzee’s oeuvre like Life and Times of Michael K, Disgrace, and Waiting for the Barbarians. Among the intertextual clues I discuss are notions like desire/the body, animals, and farm life. The study concludes by recommending an intra-comparative approach to Coetzee’s works whereby we gain so much by juxtaposing one Coetzee work against another in a process of mirroring or doubling. This article is significant because it elaborates an intertextual model for reading Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiographies and ‘autobiographical’ novels against each other, and away from the muddle of existing theory and Coetzee criticism. The autobiographical value of Coetzee’s fiction is worth analysis, and genre distinctions between autobiographies disguised/fictionalised as novels (autofictions) and novels with autobiographical import are flimsy

Imperialism and Gender in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Considering how power relations govern the construction of race and gender, this article looks at the ambivalent relationship between the Magistrate and the "barbarian" girl in J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), exploring intersections between imperialism and gender and negotiating how issues of representation are implicated in questions of identity construction. It highlights how identities inflicted by gender are constructed in imperial discourse: first by the colonizer who speaks the language of power and inscribes on the colonized meanings serving imperialism; second by the humanist colonizer who fails to relate to the other on equal terms except for a position of "feminized" weakness; and third by the resistant colonial subject eluding imperial constructions yet still manipulated in language. Between the discourses of pain and humanism, the colonized body remains a malleable yet impenetrable object of colonial discourses. Coetzee subverts dominant gender boundaries, aligning oppressive patriarchal practices with imperialism while undermining hegemonic ideologies that construct gender through the figure of the enigmatic other

POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC FICTION REVISITED: NATURALISM AND EXISTENTIALISM IN GHASSAN KANAFANI’S MEN IN THE SUN

This article looks into the postcolonial Arabic narrative of Ghassan Kanafani to examine its underplayed existential and naturalistic aspects. Postcolonial texts (and their exegeses) deal with the effects of colonization/imperialism. They are expected to be political and are judged accordingly. Drawing on Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1963), I argue that the intersection among existentialism and naturalism, on the one hand, and postcolonialism, on the other, intensifies the political relevance of the latter theory and better establishes the politically committed nature of Kanafani’s fiction of resistance. In the novella, the sun and the desert are a pivotal existential symbol juxtaposed against the despicable life led by three Palestinian refugees. The gruesome death we encounter testifies to the absurdity of life after attempts at self-definition through making choices. The gritty existence characteristic of Kanafani's work makes his representation of the lives of alienated characters more accurate and more visceral. Kanafani uses philosophical and sociological theories to augment the political nature of his protest fiction, one acting within postcolonial parameters of dispossession to object to different forms of imperialism and diaspora. Therefore, this article explores how global critical frameworks (naturalism and existentialism) enrich the localized contexts essential to any study of postcolonial literature and equally move the traditional national allegory of Kanafani to a more realist/unidealistic level of political indictment against oppression.

“The Single Thin Ray That Fell upon the Vulture Eye”: Systemic Grammar and Its Use in Edgar A. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”

This paper argues that Edgar Allan Poe applies many linguistic techniques in his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” in order to express the dilemma of a character caught up in the trap of a confused identity, lost subjectivity, and uncontrolled performances. Poe’s story is analyzed in detail to examine the psychology of the performed actions. We analyze some aspects of clause construction, paying attention to ‘who is doing what to whom.’ This analysis is twofold: defining clause construction and discussing why this analysis is relevant and why Poe’s story was chosen for this kind of analysis. In addition, we prove through the grammatical and linguistic choices made by Poe the madness and the instability of the main character in the story. We will be selective in choosing the lines to be discussed, as we focus on the lines that show the main character’s detachment from himself and the rational world he belongs to. The language Poe uses in describing the mad act of killing the old man is highly committed to the psychology and ideology of the text along with its complexities in defining why a man would do what the narrator did

J. M. Coetzee's 'Postmodern' Corpus: Bodies/Texts, History, and Politics in the Apartheid Novels, 1974-1990

This dissertation examines the apartheid novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. Using postmodernism as its main theoretical framework and working at its intersections with feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, the dissertation seeks to restore the political and historical significance of Coetzee's apartheid novels published between 1974 and 1990. It closely looks at the representation of the material body and its mediation in landuage and discourse to show our textualized access to the historical real. The middle chapters problematize the representation of the body with relation to notions like metafiction, historiography, writing the body, illness narratives, self-conscious relation of pain, and individual versus collective bodies. The dissertation begins by discussing the suffering, oppressed body from a globalized persepctive and concludes by offering a new reading of Coetzee's apartheid novels, one that highlights their allegorical viscerality

Love and Marriage in the Work of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz

In their article Love and Marriage in the Work of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz Qusai A.R. Al-Debyan and Shadi S. Neimneh posit that love, marriage, and sexuality represent important aspects in Mu\u27nis al-Razzaz\u27s 1997 novel Alive in the Dead Sea, Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki\u27s 2000 novel Ghost Songs: A Palestinian Love Story, and Diana Abu-Jaber\u27s 2003 short story Madagascar. Issues of love, marriage, and sexuality in these texts suggest a rebellious attitude on the part of women protagonists against taboos of religion, politics, and sexuality and Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz employ descriptions of sexual intimacy to reflect the social and political conditions of characters\u27 lives. Al-Debyan and Neimneh argue that the narration of women\u27s lives and women\u27s attitudes toward love and marriage in the texts analyzed — written by two women and one male writer — reflect the emergence of a more open and liberal conception of gender relations in a changing Arab world