Acts without Agents: The Language of Torture in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Loại tài liệu:

Article

Tác giả:

Adams, Kelly

Đề mục:

South African literature

Nhà xuất bản:

Johns Hopkins University Press

Ngày xuất bản:

July 2015

Định dạng:

pdf

Nguồn gốc:

Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 46, Number 3, July 2015, pp. 165-177

Ngôn ngữ:

eng

Lượt xem:

Lượt tải:

Nội dung

This article draws from J. M. Coetzee's linguistic work on the passive sentence to analyze his representation of torture in 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 in the novel by creating critical gaps in the narrative that disrupt the process of interpretation. Given how the torturer in the novel, Colonel Joll, perceives "truth" as having a certain "tone," 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 challenge the linguistic certainties of "truth" to which the torture chamber owes its existence.

Tập tin đính kèm

Loại file Tên file Dung lượng Chi tiết
201503ARIEL165-177.pdf 441129 Kb Xem Tải

Acts without Agents: The Language of Torture in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

THƯ VIỆN ĐẠI HỌC KHOA HỌC HUẾ