Metafiction In J M Coetzee S Foe

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Introductory Seminar Literature (year 2), 32 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The main aim of this paper is to discuss metafiction in J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), which is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe's literary classic Robinson Crusoe (1719). I shall deal with the intersection of postcolonialism and postmodernism in Coetzee's works, give (a) brief definition(s) of metafiction and consider the origins of this term and its general functions. I will finally take a rather detailed look at metafiction and the discourse of power in Coetzee's deconstruction of the Crusoe myth.

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2, , language: English, abstract: The main aim of this seminar paper is to introduce the novel “Foe” by J. M. Coetzee and to give an overview about the forms and functions of it. Therefore, a closer look at metafiction, historiographic metafiction and meta-narrative techniques is necessary, due to the fact that the novel is “meta-narrative”. Since the story of the island, narrated by the protagonist Susan Barton, is important for an analysis, it is not enough just to focus on that. Susan’s island story serves as a kind of framework because the novel is about “the art of writing and story-telling”. Firstly, the author, J. M. Coetzee, his biography and his many works will be presented. Secondly, the term metafiction, its definition and different forms will be discussed. After that there will be a short overview of the novel, including plot, characters and narrative techniques, which are important to understand the meaning of the book. This will be followed by the chapter “metafiction”, in which some forms of metafiction as well as some elements of the story, supported by some examples, will be presented. The final section will give an overall picture of Coetzee’s story “Foe”.

Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Leipzig (Institute for Anglistics), course: Postcolonial Literatures, language: English, abstract: J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel Foe leaves its reader in a tumble of a multi-layered reality, confused about literary original and copy, and, maybe most grave, confronted with the question: what is historical truth and how can it be recognised. The veils that unfold and reveal the facets of fiction and reality through the novel are many, and they are intricately woven into each other. We, the readers, however educated and experienced with fictional texts, may find ourselves slightly confused after a first reading. Coetzee has written a parody1 of a classic of world literature: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 17192. The simple fact that Coetzee's work of fiction was first published in 19863 makes it evident that it was based on the older classic. Yet the content of the novel claims the very opposite when the female protagonist Susan Barton tells how the story really was before Mr Foe sat down to turn it into a novel of his own intentions, altering and falsifying it. She tells her own story in the Iperspective, in terms of the 'plot' even before the writer Mr Foe would have completed his 'Robinson Crusoe'. Through this, Coetzee creates the illusion that Susan Barton's report might have indeed been the antecessor of the literary classic Robinson Crusoe. Nevertheless, we are talking of a work of fiction here, so there is no doubt that Coetzee marvellously plays with the means of storytelling instead of telling the world 'how it all really was'. There is no such Robinson Crusoe as depicted both in Defoe's and Coetzee's novel - there is merely fiction, and one should not confuse fiction and reality, however many layers of both seem to be mingled into each other in Coetzee's novel. 1 A parody according to Linda Hutcheon is an: "imitation characterised by ironic inversion", or "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than simularity"; in: Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen, 1985, p.6 2 See: Bibliographical Note; in: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. London: Dent, 1975, p. xiii 3 First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg 1986; here it will be referred to the Penguin paperback edition of 1987 when quoting passages from the text.

Robinson Crusoe explores Defoe's story, the legend it captured, the universal desire which underlies the myth and a range of modern re-writings which reveal a continued fascination with the problematic character of this narrative. Whether envisaged as an heroic rejection of the old world order, a piece of pre-colonialist propaganda or a tale raising archetypal problems of 'otherness' and 'inequality', the mythic value of Crusoe has become a pretext over many centuries for an examination of some of the fundamental problems of existence. This collection of essays examines, from a wide range of critical and philosophical perspectives, the cultural manifestations of Robinson Crusoe in different centuries, in different media, in different genres.

David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee by arguing that Coetzee has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing the ethical tensions of the South African crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's writing reconstructs and critiques some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, it takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced. Attwell begins by describing the intellectual and political contexts surrounding Coetzee's fiction and then provides a developmental analysis of his six novels, drawing on Coetzee's other writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism and popular culture. Elegantly written, Attwell's analysis deals with both Coetzee's subversion of the dominant culture around him and his ability to see the complexities of giving voice to the anguish of South Africa.

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.

Metafiction and the Postwar Novel is a full-length reassessment of one of the definitive literary forms of the postwar period, sometimes known as 'postmodern metafiction'. In the place of large-scale theorizing, this book centres on the intimacies of writing situations - metafiction as it responds to readers, literary reception, and earlier works in a career. The emergence of archival materials and posthumously published works helps to bring into view the stakes of different moments of writing. It develops new terms for discussing literary self-reflexivity, derived from a reading of Don Quixote and its reception by J.L. Borges - the 'self of writing' and the 'public author as signature'. Across three comprehensive chapters, Metafiction and Postwar Fiction shows how some of the most highly-regarded postwar writers were motivated to incorporate reflexive elements into their writing - and to what ends. The first chapter, on South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, shows with a new clarity how his fictions drew from and relativized academic literary theory and the conditions of writing in apartheid South Africa. The second chapter, on New Zealand writer Janet Frame, draws widely from her fictions, autobiographies, and posthumously published materials. It demonstrates the terms in which her writing addresses a readership seemingly convinced that her work expressed the interior experience of 'madness'. The final chapter, on American writer Philip Roth, shows how his early reception led to his later, and often explosive, reconsiderations of identity and literary value in postwar America.