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The Failure of Sympathy in the Recent Works of J.M. Coetzee

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The Failure of Sympathy in the Recent Works of J.M. Coetzee The failure of sympathy in the recent works of JM Coetzee Warwick Ian Shapcott A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts (Research) School of English University of New South Wales July 2006 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT 'I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.' Signed ......... Date ........................ ..~~.l.~.l~.7 ......................... COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.' SigrM!d ....... Date ......................\~-l\\~J ......................................... AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT 'I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.' Signed ············· Date ............................\~.\.\1~7 ................................... Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like thank my dedicated supervisor, Professor Peter Alexander, for his assistance in the writing of this thesis, in particular during the protracted and somewhat difficult final stages. Thanks also to my previous supervisor, Associate Professor Sue Kossew, who helped in the development of my topic and encouraged me to keep going when I thought I'd had enough. Next, thanks to Dr Dominic Fitzsimmons, a Leaming Adviser at the UNSW Leaming Centre, with whom I met regularly throughout the final year of my research. Dom's thoughtful advice taught me how to write like an academic, in the process of which I also learned how to think like one. Moreover, his genial optimism and enthusiasm for the ideas discussed in this thesis kept me writing on those days when I lacked both. Thanks also to the postgraduate students with whom over the years I have shared offices, eaten lunches, argued incessantly and laughed uproariously. In the beginning, there was Diana Jenkins, Sandra Knowles, Claire Potter, Will Martin and Barret Skuthorpe, followed in subsequent years by Tim Roberts, Justine Saidman, Katherine Russo and Dr Bronwyn Rivers (technically a postdoc, but very much at home among the postgrads). Special thanks to Luisa Webb, whose friendship and advice during the first year of my candidature helped me adjust to postgraduate life at UNSW. Likewise, special thanks to Ian Collinson, intellectual provocateur and friend. It was he, more than anyone else, who challenged me to think critically about all the things I might otherwise have taken for granted. Thanks also to Olivia Harvey, Carol Sullivan and Roger Patulny, from the UNSW School of Sociology, for allowing a curious English student to join their reading group in poststructuralism. Thanks, finally, to those postgraduates further afield who have on various occasions, in one way or another, helped me in my research, in particular John Attridge, Melinda Harvey and Olwen Pryke, all based at the University of Sydney. Lastly, I wish to thank my family, especially my parents, whose love and support throughout the course of my studies made this work possible. Warwick Shapcott July 2006 Table of contents Introduction ......................................................................................... p. 1 Chapter 1 Critical method: content-centred ethical criticism . .. .. p. 6 Chapter 2 Literature review: sympathy & ethics in Coetzee studies . p. 20 Chapter 3 Models of sympathy . .. p. 34 Chapter 4 Elizabeth Costello ......................................................... p. 49 Chapter 5 Disgrace . p. 65 Conclusion ............................................................................................. p. 81 List of references ... ... ... ... ... .. .. ... ... ... .. .. .. .. ... ... .. ... ... ........................ p. 85 Introduction JM Coetzee is arguably one of the most important novelists writing today. As Dominic Head (1991, p. ix) rightly asserts, Coetzee's 'importance ... to the direction of the late twentieth-century novel can scarcely be overstated'. To a large extent, this importance lies in the way Coetzee artfully engages with the practice of literature while interrogating this practice at the same time. Not content, however, to simply indulge in formal game-playing, Coetzee turns this interrogation of form to other, extra-aesthetic, ends, and the result is an unusual and very powerful collection of novels that are perhaps best described as 'a form of postmodem metafiction' (Atwell 1993, p. 1). These novels, moreover, engage with some of the most pressing historical, political and ethical concerns of the day. In this thesis, I consider Coetzee's approach to sympathy in two of his more recent works, Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Disgrace (2000), in an attempt to understand these novels as a form of ethical literature. Proceeding via a content­ centred analysis of sympathy's role in the ethical lives of the novels' characters, this thesis argues that Coetzee problematises sympathy to such an extent as to suggest it is unable to provide an adequate foundation for an ethical life. In Chapter 1, I outline the critical method employed in the subsequent chapters to make sense of Coetzee's approach to sympathy. In this chapter, it is argued that despite the rise of postmodem relativism over the last forty years, ethics continue to play an important role in both life and literature. Ethics here is broadly defined as that which is concerned with the question of how a human life ought to be lived (Freadman and Miller 1992, p. 52). This definition of ethics is then used to distinguish between moral literature, on the one hand, and ethical - 1 - literature on the other. Whereas moral literature tells the reader how a human life ought to be lived, ethical literature interrogates the question without attempting to provide definitive answers. It is in this sense that Coetzee's novels can be regarded as ethical literature. His novels thus require a form of ethical criticism, one that is not satisfied with reductive or simplistic answers to ethical questions but instead is willing to work through the ambiguities and complexities of the works in question. Moreover, since sympathy is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the self and the other, in order to make sense of Coetzee's approach to sympathy in these novels, it is necessary to consider closely his characters and their interactions. Chapter 2 then proceeds with a review of the critical literature that addresses sympathy and ethics in Coetzee's work to date. While most of this literature is concerned solely with ethics, there is a small number of critics who address the topic of sympathy, and there is an even smaller number of critics that deal with both. While the importance of ethics in Coetzee's novels has been recognised by critics for a number of years, the most significant work in this area adopts a form­ centred mode of ethical criticism that does not directly address the relationship between sympathy and ethics. These 'form-centred' critics, it should be noted, unanimously regard Coetzee's work as an affirmation of the possibility of ethics. Other critics, however, have adopted a content-centred approach to ethics in Coetzee's novels, but these critics have likewise ignored the role of sympathy, preferring instead to focus upon the role of the body. Like the form-centred critics, they view Coetzee's work as an affirmation of the possibility of ethics. With regard to sympathy itself, there is now a small but growing number of critics who - 2 - recognise the importance to Coetzee's work of sympathy, but, of these, only a handful have considered the relationship between sympathy and ethics. Again, these critics regard this relationship in a positive light, arguing that the treatment of sympathy in Coetzee's novels suggests that it is able to provide a foundation for ethical relationships between individuals. Thus, Coetzee's interrogation of sympathy and its relationship to ethics have yet to receive sustained
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