The Discourse of Jewish Difference in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7445261
AutoresSilverstein (autor de correspondencia), Silverstein Silverstein (autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen17
Número2
Páginas80-80
Fecha de publicación2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJewish Social Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-6704 • E-ISSN: 1527-2028
EditorialIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/jewisocistud.17.2.80
OpenAlexW2026604412
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas8

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the South African plaasroman or pastoral novel depicted white physical labor in the countryside and elided black labor, which functioned to legitimize Afrikaner ownership of African land. As J. M. Coetzee demonstrates in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), commonplace in the plaasroman is the figure of the Jew, who attempts to swindle the farm from its rightful, white owner. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) seeks to destabilize the ideological underpinnings of the pastoral novel by means of inverting its discursive elements. Therefore, in his anti-pastoral novel Disgrace, Coetzee replaces the plaasroman's white male patriarch with that genre's metaphor of otherness, the Jew. The Jew's ambivalent whiteness allows for such a transposition, whereas the protagonist's "Jewish" body results in his weakness and inability to work the land, which subverts the plaasroman's mythic inscription of the countryside as property of the white peasantry

Art · Judaism · Theology · African cultural and philosophical studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Religious studies · South African History and Culture