Lucy Valerie Graham
MA (Rhodes University)
Dissertation Abstract
The Use of Women's Voices in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee
This study focuses on J.M. Coetzee’s use of white women narrators in three of his apartheid-era novels: In the Heart of the Country (1977), Foe (1987) and Age of Iron (1990).
The investigation is based on the premise that Coetzee’s position as a white male author scripting white women's voices is important for readings of these novels. The implications of Coetzee’s strategy are examined against the theoretical background of feminist and gender-related discourses, and the thesis focuses on the specific positional and narrative possibilities afforded by Coetzee’s use of first-person white women’s voices in his apartheid-era fiction.