A Postcolonial Interpretation Of Coetzee's Writing Strategies In Elizabeth Costello:Eight Lessons

John Maxwell Coetzee,the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in2003,is a famous white writer born in South Africa.As a diaspora intellectual,Coetzee pays much attention to the problems about imperial colonialism all the time.Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons is an experimental text different from his early works.Coetzee changes his writing strategies to suit the postcolonial situation and express his own postcolonial focus more effectively.The author links eight lectures by the form of storytelling,covering various problems about literature,religion,animals,etc.Though loosely organized,both its form and content challenge traditional novels and the mainstream of western thought.Therefore,Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons is an innovation in artistic form,the conclusion of the author's philosophical thinking and the embodiment of his postcolonial focus in the context of globalization.The paper firstly analyzes the genre of this work,which is neither a collection of essays,nor a traditional fiction.The combination of fiction and non-fiction makes the text a kind of “fiction-as-lecture” and metafiction.It refuses the narrative pattern in English realistic novels,an accessory to history narrative which working as a part of colonial history.By this means,Coetzee is exploring an independent structure for narrative fiction in order to subvert the historical truth constructed by colonial writing.Then it discusses the writing strategy of multiple dialogues.Generally,there are dialogues between Elizabeth and othersand that between Elizabeth and herself throughout the text.This complicated dialogic relationship makes it a polyphonic novel.The author makes voices of different levels heard and intermixed,establishing a Utopian of discourse on the basis of equality.It is a rather ideal state in Coetzee's work when it comes to the exploration of the right of discourse for “ the other” by many postcolonial writers.Besides,this thesis interprets the author's attitude as a double point,or a transcendental one from the protagonist's amoral standpoint.On one hand,it is an independent viewpoint of literature regardless of morality,leaving historical truth to be judged by readers.On other hand,this perspective may be much more objective and transcendental beyond human experience and writing influenced by various powers.Therefore,Coetzee finds a proper point out of centralism to introspect western and human civilization,which is derived from Coetzee's marginalized position and life experience as a diaspora writer.In conclusion,in Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons Coetzee not only arranges lots of discussions about postcolonial problems,but also uses writing strategies themselves to deliver his postcolonial concern.Thus the form of this novel agrees much with its content,both of which contain the development of Coetzee's own postcolonial theory.