Lucy Valerie Graham
MA (Rhodes University)
Dissertation Abstract

The Use of Women's Voices in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee

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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.