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Adaptations
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Waiting for the Barbarians
2014
single work
screenplay
— Appears in: Two Screenplays 2014;
Notes
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Dedication:
For
Nicolas and Gisela
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Editions and translations have been updated for Waiting for the Barbarians by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 scholar's internship.
Given the international popularity of Coetzee's work, however, this record is not yet comprehensive. Due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is also not complete.
- Other formats: Also braille, sound recording, and e-book.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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The Communion of Clouds : Becoming-Woman in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , February vol. 33 no. 1 2018;'In her well-read work on contemporary feminist theory titled Nomadic Subjects (2011), Rosi Braidotti gets to grips with the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming-woman’. Noting that the concept has experienced a good deal of criticism in feminist circles (and from some important feminists too, such as Luce Irigaray), Braidotti argues that there is still something of extreme importance in this concept for the feminist to recover. For Braidotti, ‘becoming-woman’ allows for ‘a nonunitary and multi-layered vision’ of the subject. That is to say, it allows for the description of ‘a dynamic and changing entity’ (5) – one that challenges the striated formulations of ‘woman’ found in phallo- and Euro-centric master codes. Importantly, however, it does so not by posing an essentialised subject position of ‘woman’ for others either to mimic or aspire to (often the grounds for the misreading of the concept), but rather by referencing ‘woman’ as an intensity of sorts, an intensity that is the pre-condition for both revolutionary thought and action (249-250).
'This paper takes the Deleuzian concept of ‘becoming-woman’ and uses it as a way to understand the enigmatic relationship that develops between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl in Coetzee’s early novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Beginning with a brief characterisation of the barbarian girl as an agent of transformation, this paper goes on to offer an explanation for why the encounter between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl necessarily results in the Magistrate’s turn away from the State.' (Publication abstract)
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'The Coming of the Storm' : Imperial Empiricism and Ecological Indifference in Waiting for the Barbarians
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Ariel , April vol. 48 no. 2 2017; (p. 1-23) 'This article rereads J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians through an ecocritical lens, eschewing a postmodernist interest in a "metaphysics of absence" (Olsen 53) in favour of a materialist engagement with ecological presence. Readings of the novel that cite the absence of the eponymous "barbarians"-and Empire's refusal to acknowledge this absence-as a central feature of the text routinely fail to recognize the presence of ecological forces that ultimately undermine Empire's colonial project. By rectifying this critical oversight, this article's rereading avoids endowing Empire with a problematic surfeit of narrative agency; moreover, it illuminates a relationship between Empire and ecology that cannot be reduced to the simplistic terms of binary difference and is better conceptualised as a dynamic of what I call "ecological indifference." Finally, the article highlights parallels between the myopia of Coetzee's Empire and a brand of critical imperialism that persists in "seeing through" literary ecologies. In this way, Barbarians can be read as a cautionary tale for the Anthropocene.' (Publication abstract) -
Coetzee in China
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Texas Studies in Literature and Language , Winter vol. 58 no. 4 2016; (p. 450-468) -
Power and the Subject in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
2016
single work
— Appears in: Ariel , October vol. 47 no. 4 2016; (p. 103-134) 'This essay draws on Judith Butler’s politically promising notion of a critical “desubjectivation” to examine the possibilities for agency and individual responsibility within the state of exception as staged in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Even though he ostensibly occupies a position of power in Empire, the novel’s Magistrate-narrator finds himself subordinated by an objectionable law. This raises a question: If, as individuals, we achieve social identity only through subjection to the dominant discourse, then what possibilities are there for opposing the workings of power? Moreover, to what extent are our individual ethics conditioned by dominant schemes of value that cast certain lives as ungrievable? Although the Magistrate, unlike Colonel Joll, realizes his complicity with the torturers of the Third Bureau, he misrecognises his interpellation and does not see himself as the subject of a law that casts barbarian lives as unworthy of mourning. The novel thus functions as a literary model for resisting power’s normative horizons and inaugurating the ethical principles of a future democracy based on the recognition of a shared precariousness of life.' (Publication abstract) -
Acts Without Agents : The Language of Torture in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Ariel , July vol. 46 no. 3 2015; 'This article draws from J. M. Coetzee’s linguistic work on the passive sentence to analyze his representation of torture in the novel Waiting for the Barbarians. It argues that Coetzee’s complex use of the short passive (also known as the “agentless sentence”) counters the transparent connection between truth and language by creating critical gaps in the narrative that disrupt the process of interpretation. Given how “truth” is perceived as having a certain “tone” by the torturer Colonel Joll in the novel, the question of how truth is represented in language becomes critical to undermining the logic of torture Joll explicates. Throughout the novel, Coetzee exploits the ambiguity created by the short passive to not only illustrate the grammatical fictions that undergird our assumptions while reading the text, but also to challenge the linguistic certainties of “truth” to which the torture chamber owes its existence.' (Publication abstract)
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Hunting Animals in JM Coetzee's Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , vol. 32 no. 4 2013; (p. 15-20)‘J.M. Coetzee’s early novels Dusklands (1974) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) outline the Western imperialist project to colonise and subjugate ‘other’ people, animals and the environment. The masculine colonising subject (in Cartesian terms, res inextensa) has separated itself from the world (res extensa) and seeks to conquer and subjugate in order to subsume it. Dusklands comprises two narratives: one, that of Jacobus Coetzee who hunts human and nonhuman animals and leaves a destructive trail behind him as he blazes a frontier in 1800s South Africa; and two, Eugene Dawn, an American mythographer, who advocates his ‘Vietnam Project’ to win the US war in Vietnam in the early 1970s by defoliating the environment and hunting the Vietcong ‘like animals’. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll deals with the Barbarian ‘threat’ to his Empire by similarly destroying the environment, hunting barbarians, and torturing woman and children. Each character is locked into a Cartesian ‘self’ consciousness that cannot interact with the ‘other’ (female, nonhuman animal, ‘indigenous’) except through violence and destruction. Hunting is a manifestation of this disease and the protagonists make no distinction between human, animal or vegetable in their path of destruction in the name of colonial expansion.' (Publication abstract)
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The Gate Deferred : J.M. Coetzee and the Battle Against Doubt
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 73 no. 3 2013; (p. 90-111) 'Esposito writes of Coetzee's characters (it is not Elizabeth Costello alone) in effect morally naked at the Gate, awaiting admission after - or so they think - the passing of a last judgement, but what is it that is expected of them, and what is this a gate to? (David Brooks, 'Editorial' p. 6) -
Teaching Coetzee’s Subject : Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works 2014; (p. 59-66) -
Open to Interpretation : Politics and Allegory in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works 2014; (p. 146-151) -
Sven Hedin's “Vanished Country” : Setting and History in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians,
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Scrutiny2 , vol. 20 no. 1 2015; (p. 103-127) 'Since J.M. Coetzee’s manuscripts, notebooks and miscellaneous other archival materials have become available for study at the Harry Ransom Centre (HRC) in Texas in 2013, it has become possible to shed new light on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Coetzee’s early fictions, namely the origins of the setting and landscape of Waiting for the barbarians. With his previous two novels, Dusklands (1974) and In the heart of the country (1977), Coetzee had established himself as a significant avant-garde South African writer, but the next novel, Barbarians (1980), on the face of it, seemed to veer off-course as an engagement with the historical trauma of his country. When the book was published, readers and critics found Coetzee’s choice of a richly detailed yet seemingly invented non-South African setting both attractive and puzzling. Irvin Howe wrote in the New York times that the novel’s landscape was an “unspecified place and time, yet recognizable as a ‘universalised’ version of South Africa”, and Bernard Levin, in an influential London Sunday times review, thought that the story appeared to indict the repressive South African political situation, “[b] ut that beneath the surface it is timeless, spaceless, nameless and universal” (1980: n.p.). A reviewer in Newsweek thought that Coetzee’s “terrain is African” but that “subtle dislocations in time and geography, however, make it clear that his political parable is set in a mythical realm” (Clemons 1980: 55). Peter Lewis (1980: 1270) also recognized allusions to South Africa, but concluded that “the place cannot be located on any map”. In many critical responses there was a tension between a desire to read the novel as a South African narrative, and a simultaneous recognition of the story’s non-specific emplacement which transcended the political oppression of late apartheid. It was precisely the text’s sense of geographical and historical dislocatedness that made it a compelling reading experience, as for example articulated by Peter Wilhelm: “The strange landscapes, part-African, part a country of the mind; the sense of action and thought scarcely disturbing the flux of time; the crystalline lucidity of the language – these will haunt the reader long after the novel has been set aside” (cited in Kannemeyer 2012: 345). ' (Author's introduction)
Awards
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cSouth Africa,cSouthern Africa, Africa,
