The Discourse of Jewish Difference in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7445261 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Silverstein (corresponding author), Silverstein Silverstein (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 80-80 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Jewish Social Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-6704 • E-ISSN: 1527-2028 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/jewisocistud.17.2.80 |
| OpenAlex | W2026604412 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 8 |
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
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |