Foe Or Defoe: A Study Of J. M. Coetzee’s Rewirting Of Robinson Crusoe From A Postcolonial Perspective

John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-) is a prominent white South African novelist,literary critic and translator in today’s literary world. Coming from the third world, hehas witnessed the distress and oppression of South African people under the apartheidpolicy. Thus, Coetzee has a natural advantage to rewrite colonial works, criticizingapartheid policy and discussing such issues as colonialism, racism, violence, oppression,identity issues, and imperialistic cultural hegemony existing in the apartheid era. With hisconcern for the discourse of the marginalized people and his confrontation with thecentral authority, his works have gained readers from all over the whole world. He notonly received Booker Prize twice, but also won Nobel Prize for Literature in2003. Inselecting him as the winner, the award words of Nobel Prize notes:"There is a greatwealth of variety in Coetzee’s works. No two books ever follow the same recipe.Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiraling journeys heconsiders necessary for the salvation of his characters."(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/press.html)Foe (1986), Coetzee’s fifth novel, won him Jerusalem Prize for fiction in1987andis one of his most popular and controversial novels. It is considered to be a postcolonialrevision of Defoe’s masterpiece Robinson Crusoe. In Foe, Coetzee deals with the issuesof gender, race, class, and power, expressing his sympathy for the marginalized peopleand achieving his purpose of subverting Western mainstream culture. Through studyingthe rewriting of Robinson Crusoe in Foe from a postcolonial perspective, this thesis aims to conduct a detailed analysis of how the rewriting in Foe achieved the subversion of thewhite’s cultural hegemony in Robinson Crusoe. The elaboration will focus on threeaspects, namely narrative voice, master and slave relationship and authorial authority.This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One serves as an introduction,which covers literary achievements and the life experience of Coetzee, the plots of Foeand Robinson Crusoe, and the latest studies about these two novels at home and abroad.In the end, it is followed by the thesis statement.The theoretical framework of this thesis is in Chapter Two. It is devoted tointroducing postcolonialism, Edward Said and the writing and rewriting of the East inOrientalism and Culture and Imperialism. This chapter mainly explores the themes ofdomination and resistance in the West’s writing and rewriting of the East in literaryworks and other Medias. The two works are taken as the theoretical basis so as to help toillustrate how Coetzee’s Foe rewrites and subverts Defoe’s colonial novel RobinsonCrusoe. This chapter paves the way for analyzing Foe’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoefrom a postcolonial perspective.Chapter Three, the main body, focuses on the detailed analysis of rewriting ofRobinson Crusoe in Foe by examining the narrative voice, master and slave relationship,and authorial authority. Through a postcolonial rewriting of canonical work RobinsonCrusoe in Foe, this chapter focuses on the ways of Coetzee’s subversion of the colonialcultural hegemony.The thesis concludes with chapter Four, a reverberation of the main thoughts.