Dust
( dir. Marion Hänsel
)
France
Belgium
:
Daska Films
Flach Film
France 3 Cinéma
Man's Films
,
1986
8035726
1986
single work
film/TV
The isolated lives of a white father and daughter on a South African farm are disrupted by the arrival of black farm-workers, and the resulting racial and sexual tension.
Editions and translations have been updated for Disgrace by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 scholar's internship. The selection and inclusion of these editions and translations was based on their availability through the search facilities of Libraries Australia andTrove (National Library of Australia), as well as UNESCO's Index Translationum.
Given the international popularity of Coetzee's work, however, this record may not yet comprehensive. Due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is also not complete.
'In ‘Orders of Discourse’ Foucault raises the deeply embedded opposition between reason and folly: ‘From the depths of the Middle Ages a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men’. This discursive rule becomes magnified in the case of women and of the colonised. In Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, Magda and Theodora demonstrate the precarious marginality of the colonial woman. They are doubly marginalised as colonial women, existing outside settler history, which is the narrative both of the masculine responsibilities of settlement and an attendant sense of displacement. In Coetzee’s novel, Magda plays out a version of The Tempest in which she is subjected both to the Law of the Father and to Caliban, while in The Aunt’s Story Theodora plots a determined path out of the discourse of men into the ambivalently liberating horizon of madness. The differences between the women say as much as the similarities, but both offer a compelling version of the layered marginalities of the female colonial subject. In the writers’ hands the place outside discourse, the peculiar language of the colonial women, becomes the potential location of counter discourse. This essay proposes that the women demonstrate a radical interiority, a capacity to inhabit the lives of others in a way that is considered madness but which enacts the utopian function of literature itself.' (Publication abstract)
'This essay offers a new spatial reading of In the Heart of the Country. It explores J. M. Coetzee’s interest in grounding white female narrators in heterotopic spaces which, while marked by terror and racial divisions, simultaneously enforce proximity and intimacy across the racial bar. It shows that grounding Magda within the specific phenomenology of the farm enables Coetzee to explore a set of traumatic double-binds which are not only discursive but also sensorial, psychic as well as affective. It concludes by arguing that the strong self-referentiality of the novel can itself be read as an affective symptom, the trace of psychic parceling which happens at the intersection of space, symbol and traumatic power relations.' (Publication abstract)
