From Postcolonial Rewriting to Contemporary Rereading: Coetzee to the Contemporary. The Albertsburg Judgement: A Novel

Blackman, Matthew (2019) From Postcolonial Rewriting to Contemporary Rereading: Coetzee to the Contemporary. The Albertsburg Judgement: A Novel. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis attempts to trace the progressive nature of ‘the post-colonial rewrite’. That is from the method of dialectical correction of a monologic reading of the originary work towards a more open dialogical acceptance of the ‘parent’ text. The thesis follows the progress from J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe; to Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana (2010) a rewriting of Conrad’s Nostromo; to Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), a rewriting of Camus’s The Outsider. It argues that the rewrites have relied on a critically mediated reading of the text on which an intimated ‘correction’ is based. At the centre of these critical readings is, I suggest, the notion that the ‘parent’ work is one rooted in realism – the idea of realism popularised by Ian Watt. This, it is argued, is true in the particular case of Coetzee’s Foe. However, both Vasquez and Daoud, in their more recent post-colonial rewrites, intimate a notion of a ‘rereading’ of the ‘parent’ text, a rereading that opens it to a Bakhtinian dialogical interpretation. This twist in the rewrite goes some way to abjuring the more monologic realist readings that inspire the notion of ‘correction’. It also suggests something a little more than simply the correction method of rewriting. The creative work, The Albertsburg Judgement, although not a rewrite of a singular novel, is in many ways a rewrite (or as I have framed it a ‘rereading’) of several colonial and post-colonial texts. Many of the characters in the novel are based on, and appropriated from, colonial and postcolonial fiction. In these ways I have tried to theoretically engage with my critical work, bringing in voices dialogically from other novels and allowing them to converse with each other so as to be reread.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	14 Dec 2022 14:29
Last Modified:	14 Dec 2022 14:29
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90007
DOI:

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