Displacing the Voice: South African Feminism and JM Coetzee's Female Narrators

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Notes

1. The presence of a theoretical interregnum has become a defining aspect of South African literature and history as a result of Nadine Gordimer's essay, ‘Living in the Interregnum’. Despite the literal meaning of ‘interregnum’ as the interval between the end of one sovereign's reign and the accession of the next legitimate successor, in his Prison Notebooks, philosopher Antonio Gramsci redefined the term when he interpreted it within the context of Marxist revolution. The interregnum, according to Gramsci, is the temporal period during which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci 1975:32–33).