"A Face without Personality": Coetzee’s Swiftian Narrators
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Gillian Dooley [1] ; Robert Phiddian [1]
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[1] Flinders University
Flinders University
Australia
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- Localización: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ISSN 0004-1327, ISSN-e 1920-1222, Vol. 47, Nº. 3, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: articles on magic realism, and affect theory, and continuing postcolonial engagements with the British tradition), págs. 1-22
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships of J.M. Coetzee’s novels to previous works by writers such as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Beckett and, especially, Defoe. Relatively little has been written, by comparison, about any relationship with Defoe’s great contemporary, Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee’s novels and Swift’s works – nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. What we do claim, however, is a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narratorial stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the quite extensive evidence of Coetzee’s attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism), and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee’s oeuvre in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year
