Chapter 9 - Framing the Other in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K

One central theme running through the “western” tradition is the tension between self and other, or between sameness and difference. This tension seems to have intensified today under the pressure of a growing resistance to the homog- enizing logic of globalization in its various manifestations. The urgency to enter in a different rapport with the other — whether human or non-human — has indeed become not only a political requirement but an ethical imperative. There is a dominant tendency in the language of contemporary literary criticism to respond to such challenge by praising literature’s vocation to radically disrupt and undermine the established forms of discourse. On this view,  the literary  is given a privileged role in representing alterity. While mainly drawing on the “post-critical turn” in literary studies, my aim in this essay is to draw attention to the limitations of such a view by reflecting on the literary fortune of one of

1. M. Coetzee’s early novels, Life and Times of Michael K. By mimicking the very language of criticism that tends to frame the other according to a grandiose rhetoric of subversion, the novel seems to cast suspicion on the transformative potential of literature.