Concrete Cushions: Re-Imagining Empire in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
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Authors
Dular, Travis Ryan
Issue Date
2012-11-19
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
J.M. Coetzee , Waiting for the Barbarians , Travis Ryan Dular , Spring 2012 , English Department , Heterotopia , Lacanian Theory
Alternative Title
Abstract
J. M. Coetzee’s 1981 novel Waiting for the Barbarians chronicles the
problematized relationship between a deliberately ambiguous empire and its marginalized
subjects. This paper examines the novel’s narrative practice through a combination of
(post)dialectical lenses: Foucault’s heterotopia, Lacanian theory, and various Twentieth
Century ideas on indeterminacy, economics, and knowledge. The text begins with the
Magistrate as integrated-subject; he is part of the empire. The text ends with the
Magistrate as a physical artifact of the empire’s history. To resist the empire presented in
Coetzee’s text, its protagonist—the Magistrate—follows a debilitating trajectory toward
alterity (a state of otherness) as means of escaping the Empire/Subject system. The
Magistrate ‘alters’ himself (physically and psychically) by recording his empire’s
unspeakable ‘history.’ The Magistrate records a specific expression of his imperial
history on his body; to resist empire’s hegemony, the Magistrate becomes a physical
marker of his empire’s (not-spoken-about) brutality.
Description
Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences, Thesis by Travis Ryan Dular, May 2012.