Four writers being political on their own terms
Subtitle: feminist, class and cultural identity discourses across continents (Mia Couto, Jose Saramago, Clarice Lispector, J. M. Coetzee).
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 356
Description: This study is a discussion revolving around three different issues: class, feminist and cultural identity discourses (the latter in relation to race, nation, colonialism and economic imperialism). I analyze works by four different writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese Jose Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the South African J.M. Coetzee. My intention is to demonstrate that all these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront important issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent and debate issues related to the postcolonial subject, the poor Other, and the feminine subject.The second section, entitled "The Deeper Politics of Agency in Lispector and Cotezee" addresses two works by the aforementioned writers and aims at illustrating how they are also political, but in a different way. Here the focus of analysis is on the meta-discursive as the main politics of agency. I show how Lispector and Coetzee use their novels as the site to question the limits of the power of narrative representation. On the one hand, I argue that due to class and racial differences, the narrator/implied author cannot represent the poor and coloured Other accurately. On the other hand, I argue that because language is a medium that potentially imprisons the individual in artificial, constructed categories linked to power structures---a medium always polluted by socio-political ideologies that often discriminate against one group (or quality) in favor of another---the writer has no possibility of telling the ultimate truth about the narrated subject through conventional, discursive, narrative strategies and thus needs to resort to paradoxical narrative strategies such as silence, music, poetic language, and ambivalent metaphors.The theoretical approach used for my analysis is multifaceted relying on post-colonial, feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, Levinasian, Heideggerian, Buddhist and various language theories. The use of different theories serves to illustrate how different theoretical traditions (from West, East, North and South) share several commonalities. Specifically, I point to some of the commonalities between Western psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology,  ecriture feminine, Levinasian, Irigaraian and Heideggerian philosophy, Buddhism and African epistemologies.The first section, entitled "The Bolder Politics of Agency in Couto and Saramago" addresses the politicality of two works by these writers: Couto's collection of short stories Contos do Nascer da Terra ('Stories of the Birth of the Land') and Saramago's novel O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis ('The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis'). In this section I argue that Couto and Saramago take a bolder political stand vis-a-vis socio-political concerns, when compared with Lispector and Coetzee. I suggest that the former are politically more direct in their works than the latter in the sense that they seem generally to see their writings as a medium which can more or less fairly represent and critique the reality of the oppressed person, be it the colonized/postcolonial subject, the woman, or the poor Other.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3636.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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