Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: Rereading J.M. Coetzee's Foe

The novels of J.M. Coetzee both invite and reward multiple readings, and Foe (1986) remains one of Coetzee's most deliberately innovative and literary of novels. In a prescient act, a conference on Foe was hosted by the Theory of Literature Department at Unisa as early as 1988, only some two ye...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of literary studies (Pretoria, South Africa) South Africa), 2008-12, Vol.24 (4), p.44-62
Main Author: England, Frank
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:The novels of J.M. Coetzee both invite and reward multiple readings, and Foe (1986) remains one of Coetzee's most deliberately innovative and literary of novels. In a prescient act, a conference on Foe was hosted by the Theory of Literature Department at Unisa as early as 1988, only some two years after its publication, which resulted in the perspicacious and incisive scrutiny of this aesthetically strategic work. More recently, Attridge (2005) has revisited his 1992 examination of Foe, and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon. Following Attridge's (2005) insightful essay, this article also returns to Foe, and appropriates Gräbe's (1989: 176) observation that "the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience" informs the work, and therefore rereads it as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, "La Pharmacie de Platon".
ISSN:0256-4718
1753-5387
DOI:10.1080/02564710802220887