Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T07:53:37.054Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coetzee's Dusklands: The Mythic Punctum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Debra A. Castillo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee are frequently criticized for their lack of specific application to the social and political concerns of his country. In Dusklands, the first and least studied of these texts, the author makes an implicit response to the controversial and weakly defined question of the political value of literary works in postcolonialist discourse. For Coetzee, the inherently masculinist, aggressively terrorist underpinnings of the very concept of value urgently require demystifying; for the purposes of this paper, Roland Barthes's distinction between studium and punctum provides the analytic key.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 5 , October 1990 , pp. 1108 - 1122
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Out of Africa: Topologies of Nativism.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2.1 (1988): 153–78.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Howard, Richard. New York: Hill, 1981.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Howard, Richard. New York: Hill, 1979.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Lavers, Annette. New York: Hill, 1957.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817.” Gates 12.1: 144–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Smock, Ann. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. “Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding.” Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 72–81.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J.M. “Alex La Guma and the Responsibilities of the South African Writer.” New African Literature and the Arts. Ed. Okpaku, Joseph. New York: Third, 1973. 116–24.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J.M.Dusklands. 1974. London: Seeker, 1982.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J.M. “The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess's The Strike.” English in Africa 3 (1976): 47–48.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J.M. “A Note on Writing.” Daymond et al. 11–13.Google Scholar
Daymond, M.J., Jacobs, J.U., and Lenta, Margaret, eds. Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Pieter-maritzburg, S. Afr.: U of Natal P, 1984.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “But, beyond … (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon).” Gates 13.1: 155–70.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Racism's Last Word.” Gates 12.1: 290–99.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Spec, issue of Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1–299; cont. in 13.1 (1986): 100–210.Google Scholar
Gillmer, Joan. “The Motif of the Damaged Child in the Work of J.M. Coetzee.” Daymond, Jacobs, and Lenta 107–20.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. “Animals and Us.” New York Review of Books 34.11 (1987): 20–25.Google Scholar
Gray, Stephen. Southern African Literature. New York: Barnes, 1979.Google Scholar
JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Gates 12.1: 59–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knox-Shaw, Peter. “Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence.” Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (1983): 65–81.Google Scholar
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. Nichols, James H. Jr. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Nkosi, Lewis. “Home and Exile” and Other Selections. New York: Longman, 1965.Google Scholar
Nkosi, Lewis. Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature. New York: Longman, 1981.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Scratches on the Face of the Country: Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” Gates 12.1: 119–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rive, Richard. “Storming Pretoria's Castle: To Write or Fight?” New York Times Book Review 17 Jan. 1988: 1 + .Google Scholar
Soyinka, Wole. “This Past Must Address Its Present.” PMLA 102 (1987): 762–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strauss, Peter. “Coetzee's Idylls: The Ending of In the Heart of the Country.” Daymond, Jacobs, and Lenta 121–28.Google Scholar
Watson, Stephen. “Colonialism and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee.” Research in African Literatures 17 (1986): 370–92.Google Scholar
Wood, W.J.B.“Dusklands and ‘The Impregnable Stronghold of the Intellect.‘” Theoria 54 (1980): 13–23.Google Scholar