Following the publication of Foe, J.M. Coetzee was confronted by some for allegedly ignoring the political reality of South African racial politics, which had reached a crucial crisis at the time. However, more benevolent critics have brought out the ethical rigour with which Coetzee addresses the role that story telling and silence play in the representation and sense of identity of those marginalized and repressed (see Spivak, Parry, Attridge, Attwell). This debate over the politics of fiction, and implicitly about the efficacy of particular formal strategies, accompanies much of Coetzee’s writing. He has been described, quite succinctly, as “a first-world novelist writing out of a South African context” (Huggan and …
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Citation: Bayer, Gerd. "Foe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5090, accessed 21 November 2024.]
