"Reading" and "constructing" space, gender and race

Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and J. M. Coetzee's Foe

Attie de Lange

pp. 109-124

in: Attiede Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe, Attie de Lange (eds), Literary landscapes, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

John Barth's novel Giles Goatboy (1967) starts in a rather unusual and striking way: being "prefaced" by a so-called "Publisher's Disclaimer", in which the four "publishers' — because of the problematic and provocative issues presented in the novel — provide the reasons for their decision to publish such a "wicked" book, and one publisher and partner in the firm voices his opposition to the publication and announces his resignation from the firm on account of the decision to publish it. I cannot but start this chapter with a rather nervous disclaimer: I am not a would-be male feminist, nor am I trying to "muscle in" on "the one cultural and intellectual space" created by female feminist critics as Moi would have it (1991, p. 208). What follows is merely an attempt at responding to the concluding remarks made by Andrew Michael Roberts in the introductory essay of a special edition of The Conradian dealing with the topic of Conrad and gender (Spring 1993), in which he argues that [the concept] of gender, distinguishing as it does patterns of social differentiation from biological difference, evokes both the setting up of distinctions and their unsettling. This combination can be especially productive to literary readings, since the processes of fiction seem to be based on the structures of opposition and differentiation and the transformation or dissolution of those structures. If gender in Conrad is a theme which challenges and provokes, it is also one which illuminates. (1993, p. xi)

Cited authors

Barth John

Roberts Michael

Roberts Andrew Michael

Conrad Joseph