White Talk, White Writing: New Contexts for Examining Genre and Identity in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

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Notes

Steyn's essay was awarded the Ralph Cooley Top Paper Award of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association in 2003.

Given the inconclusive nature of Friday's mutilation, it remains entirely possible that, to reference Homi Bhabha's notion of mimicry, Friday's repetition of Cruso's “la” and his transformation of this “text” to “ha” is a purposeful subversion of the colonial language (and power) system in which both Cruso and Susan participate. Lewis MacLeod explores this line of thought in his essay “‘Do We of Necessity Become Puppets in a Story?' or Narrating the World: On Speech, Silence, and Discourse in J.M. Coetzee's Foe.”

See, for example, Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran's “Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J. M. Coetzee's Foe.”.

For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Coetzee fiction and the discourses surrounding South African land reform, see Jennifer Wenzel's “The Pastoral Promise and The Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform.”

For examples, see James McCorkle's “Cannibalizing Texts: Space, Memory, and the Colonial in J. M. Coetzee's Foe,” Kwaku Larbi Korang's “An Allegory of Re-Reading,” and Paul Williams' “‘Foe': The Story of Silence.”

For examples, see Chris Bongie's “Lost in a Maze of Doubting,” Marni Gauthier's “The Intersection of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial in J. M. Coetzee's Foe,” and Sheila Roberts's “‘Post-colonial, or the House of Friday'—J. M. Coetzee's Foe.”

For examples in addition to the one below from Attridge, see Richard Begam's “Silence and Mut(e)ilation,” Michael Marais' “Interpretative Authoritarianism,” and Scott Bishop's “J. M. Coetzee's Foe.”

See Albie Sachs' “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom.” For discussion of Sachs' argument in the context of post-Apartheid literary analysis, see Rosemary Jolly and Derek Attridge's introduction to Writing South Africa and David Atwell and Barbara Harlow's introduction to the spring 2000 issue of Modern Fiction Studies.

In “Oppressive Silence,” Attridge argues that Susan's silence regarding these other identities is a purposeful concealment (180).

For further discussion of Susan's feminism and the unraveling of her identity through her interactions with Cruso and Foe, see Patrick Corcoran's “Foe: Metafiction and the Discourse of Power.”

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Holly Flint

Holly Flint is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her research focuses on issues of citizenship and identity construction in contemporary literature.