Interpretative authoritarianism : reading/colonizing Coetzee's foe (original) (raw)

English in Africa, 1989

Abstract

Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on the political left. l Her survey of the censure which Coetzee's work has received from this quarter reveals that the grounds for rejection are generally of an ideological nature, ranging from accusations that his "writing is preoccupied with problems of consciousness, thus betraying an idealist rather than a materialist stance" to the contention that in "failing to delineate the economic complexities of oppression, [he] has got his history all wrong."2 To her list could be added the accusation levelled at Coetzee's Foe* at a recent seminar on the novel, that it is divorced from South African social and political realities - another essentially ideological complaint.4 Dovey argues that this type of criticism, with its desire that Coetzee "write in some other way,"5 exemplifies what Eagleton calls the "normative illusion," defined as follows...

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