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

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7445261
AutoresSilverstein (autor correspondente), Silverstein Silverstein (autor correspondente)
Ano2011
Volume17
Fascículo2
Páginas80-80
Data de publicação2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJewish Social Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-6704 • E-ISSN: 1527-2028
EditoraIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/jewisocistud.17.2.80
OpenAlexW2026604412
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências 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