The Animal Writing And Spiritual Salvation In J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace

J.M.Coetzee is one of the most creative and influential white South African writers in contemporary era.He has won the Booker Prize twice and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.Disgrace,published in 1999,is an excellent portrait of the state of South Africa in the post-apartheid era,telling the story of the countless misfortunes and shames that the white professor Lurie went through from the city to the countryside,which shows his escaping from colonial consciousness and obtaining salvation in the precipitous decline of life journey.The animals frequently featuring in this novel play an indispensable role in Lurie’s consciousness transformation.Based on the theories of postcolonial zoocriticism,this paper expounds the changes of Lurie’s attitude towards animals in post-apartheid society,and probes into Lurie’s fierce confrontation with colonial consciousness in the process of living with animals.This thesis is mainly composed of three parts.The first part introduces J.M.Coetzee and his works,and literature review from domestic and foreign scholars on this novel.Besides that,theory of postcolonial zoocriticism is also included in this part.The second part is the main part,including three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the long-held western view of animals by white South Africans in early period.From the three aspects of poetic animal object,irrational animal other and racialized animal image,this chapter expounds the white peoples’ prejudice towards animals,showing the deep remnants of colonial consciousness.The second chapter analyzes how Lurie’s getting along with animals in the South African countryside.Lurie’s attitude toward the animal changes from the blindness to the affirmation of animal subject,and then to the response to the animal gaze.His reorientation in the attitude to the animal implies the wavering of white colonist’s colonial consciousness.The third chapter proposes anticolonial salvation strategies.Through white people’s empathy with animals in postcolonial society,both physical and spiritual,cross-species emotions are established and colonial consciousness is further disintegrated.The third part is the conclusion of the whole thesis.This thesis takes animal writing in the post-colonial context as a starting point,reflecting the process in which the protagonist’s colonial consciousness is eliminated while introspecting on the human-centered speciesism.The relationship between man and animal resembles the relationship between the colonists and the colonized in the novel,in another word,both are essentially the embodiment of hegemony.Therefore,the descendant of the white colonists reconstructs the equal relationship between man and animal,and at the same time they remove the racist and colonialist thought from white hegemony.In this way,Lurie not only obtains individual spiritual salvation,but also expresses the hope of building a post-colonial harmonious society in South Africa.