Going to the Dogs in Disgraceстатья из журнала
Аннотация: When read as a coherent narrative of personal salvation, rather than as a characteristically undecidable, ethically ambiguous post modern novel, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace clarifies into an argument for the necessary co-presence of middle-aged women and nonhuman animals, in the context of the tectonic shifts in the structures of racist colonialism, as possible agents or at least figures of positive change.1 David Lurie's salvation narrative locates the possibility of hope in the alliance of middle-aged women, who function for the purpose of this ethical narrative as shamanic figures, with nonhuman animals. Dis grace can therefore be read as part of a burgeoning popular, literary, and academic set of discourses locating the possibility of hope or of the persistence of the humane in this woman-animal allegiance over the seemingly terminally destructive power of global capital, of which neoliberal neocolonialism is a key element.2 Nowhere else in his oeuvre is Coetzee so ethically decisive. This fact accounts, at least in part, I would argue, for this novel's wide readership and popular acclaim. In this essay, I will offer a close reading of the novel, made possible by the new feminist animality studies, that reveals Coetzee's bleak but coherently salvific narrative. Coetzee has let us know, in The Lives of Animals and in the ex panded version of it, Elizabeth Costello, that animals have become central to his ethical vision as a novelist.3 Much of Elizabeth Costello
Год издания: 2009
Авторы: Marianne DeKoven
Издательство: Johns Hopkins University Press
Источник: ELH
Ключевые слова: South African History and Culture, Geographies of human-animal interactions, Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 76
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 847–875