BÜYÜKTUNCAY, Mehmet Celal Bayar University - School of Foreign Languages, Turkey

Scenes from Provincial Life: Authenticity and Ethics of (Auto) Biographical Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Trilogy of Auto-fiction

22409

Contemporary life-writing, exercised within various cultural, political and ethnic backgrounds, have made questionable authenticity and referentiality in respect to the collapse of the monumental notion of the wholeness of the self. Likewise, in his trilogy of fictionalized autobiography, J. M. Coetzee indulged in homo-diegetic experiments based upon the transitivity between the autobiographical mode and fictional discourse. The alternation of conflictual identities and the fluctuating identity models in Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), which are third person narratives, underscores the auto-biographer’s protean selves. The last in the trilogy, Summertime (2009), is in the form of a collaborative project of biography after Coetzee’s fictitious death conducted by a fictitious biographer and five interviewees accounting for different segments of his life. This study aims to examine the interplay between the auto- biographer’s multifarious subject positions and the multiplicity of discursive modes employed in Coetzee’s trilogy. Subsequently, the ethics of representing the other will be evaluated from the perspective of representing the self-as-the-other. That Coetzee ends up being reduced to partial and provisional appearances in the life-stories of the others implies that his overall project targets a gradual self-diminishment, instead of reaching towards a gratifying portrait of self-realization.

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Authenticity , referentiality , self , representation , identity , self , other

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities

69