Abstract
Oliver Garrett
‘Coetzee on the Borders of Self and Ethics'.
My paper explores concepts of subjectivity and ethics in terms of the border as an organizing principle. Attending primarily to the writings of J. M. Coetzee, the paper engages with various influential approaches to the role of literature within culture - including those of Fredric Jameson, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said - to consider the fictional staging of the interface between various forms of the border and concepts of the self and ethics. Whilst arguing for the influence of the border in multifarious formulations and understandings of subjectivity, the paper also seeks to assess Coetzee's utilization of the ‘border' as a politicized zone of cultural mediation. In this respect, the paper offers an exposition of examples of the aesthetic innovation prompted by boundaries between categories and their re-presentation as loaded sites of ethical contest. Here, for example, the thesis draws on Coetzee's critical writing on censorship to assess the ideological tensions between ethically motivated literature and the disapproving political context in which it is produced. As a general principle, the paper proposes J. M. Coetzee's complex historical, cultural, and political pre/occupation with (and of) border positions. Moreover, the paper's analysis of the author's formal and thematic fictional techniques reads his writings as participating in a ‘negotiating' process, staged around a border conceit, between artistic practice and political praxis.