英文摘要 |
Within the past decade or so, there has been an ethical turn in the criticism of J. M. Coetzee's writing, a critical turn beyond the historical and political reading that has greatly constrained the potentiality of Coetzee's works. This ethical turn is embodied in Coetzee's resistance to the institutional demand on literature and his commitment to the responsibility for the other in his writing. Coetzee's writing at the limit not only displaces the linguistic boundaries and literary conventions, but also exceeds the onto-epistemological totality of literature, thus challenging readers to rethink literature. The constellation of the various ethical issues in Coetzee's writing-hospitality and responsibility toward the other, forgiveness, animal rights, memory, and singularity-disrupts the rigidified moral and political discourses and demands that readers explore what promise literature holds on the question of the other. In this article, I will investigate the literary event in Coetzee's writing and writer's responsibility in his (re)invention of the writer-figures of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994) and Elizabeth Costello in the eponymous novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), through Jacques Derrida's understanding of literature as a "duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one's thought or writing to constituted powers." In Part I, I will look into the ethical turn in the scholarship on Coetzee. In Part II, I will turn to the discussion of the literary event that comes as both a performative act that disrupts the grounds of fixed moral and cultural assumptions and a response toward the unknown other by reading The Master of Petersburg, with the focus on its last chapter "Stavrogin." In Part III, I will examine Coetzee's act of responsibility in Elizabeth Costello. If responsibility means anything other than the parochial understanding of duties and obligations, it is the promise to and welcome of the other. |