The Art of Deferral: Ethics and the Other in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

A literary text, as a work of art, presents itself as an attempt to convey a story based on an author’s subjective representation of things and events. It is regarded as a vehicle to arrive at meanings or elicit messages.

This thesis, however, embarks on a deconstructive reading of J. M. Coetzee’s texts that seeks to pursue a transgressive vision of the expectation of a literary text by highlighting the self-cancelling nature of Coetzee’s literary texts.
Drawing on both cognitive theory and Levinasian ethics, this thesis develops the concept of a deferral of meaning that brings the cognitive and the ethical together in the demesne of imaginative art.

Applying some key concepts of Levinasian ethics together with theories of cognitive science, it aims at demonstrating how such an approach effectively destabilises the rigid framework that the relationship between text-meaning,
text-reader, text-author and accordingly self-Other, human-animal and bodymind has been built on.

The thesis also challenges conventional perspectives on the concepts of certainty, absolute truth, and closure by reconceptualizing the concepts of uncertainty, the Other, and infinity.

Approaching Coetzee’s writing through a framework of Levinasian ethics and contemporary cognitive theory, the thesis explores the capacity of J. M. Coetzee’s literary texts in eluding hermeneutics by rejecting the notions of
absolute meaning and finite understanding.

Finally, the thesis, in cancelling the concepts of certainty and absolute meaning, and in demonstrating Coetzee’s metareflective performance of such cancellation, seeks a redress for the failed recognition of the possibility of the encounter with the literary text as an encounter with the Other, the infinite.