Apocalyptic futures: Inscribed bodies and the violence of the text in twentieth-century culture (Franz Kafka, Austria, Joseph Conrad, J. M. Coetzee, South Africa)

"Apocalyptic Futures" examines the violent figure of the inscribed body in twentieth-century literature and literary theory. While this figure has been critically treated in terms of narrative theory, feminist theory, issues of race, identity and spectacular punishment, no one, to my knowledge, has raised the question of the relationship of this figure to a text's future reception. In considering the relationship of the figure of the inscribed or mutilated body in an apocalyptic text to a future apocalyptic event, the first half of my dissertation demonstrates how "In the Penal Colony" and Heart of Darkness program their future receptions by incorporating the bodies of future holocausts into their textual fields. My concern is with the power of this figure in these texts to overcode or re-inscribe the marks or wounds of catastrophic material bodies, thereby establishing itself as a site of textual embodiment. The figure of the inscribed body, I claim, thus possesses a performative power that allows a text to absorb material events into its textual field in the accrual of a violent legacy. The second part of my project takes on the ethical task of countering such cases of apocalyptic incorporation and asking just how such a program of embodiment might be disarmed. Focusing on J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, my dissertation attempts to set a limit to the power of a text to capture a material body. Some aspect of the body, I argue, must remain outside the scope of inscription by language, yet it is equally true that the body is also articulated and therefore possessed by language. Opening up this paradox allows for a reading of the body as resistant to the inscriptional powers of apartheid and of a consideration of ways in which the oppressed body in South Africa might be said to "take its power."...