• SAMIM REZA

J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre with metafictional narrative simultaneously engages and disengages, locates and dislocates a reader and does not allow him to forget his ‘readerly’ position within a fictive world. Foe (1986) offers a metafictional narrative that engages a reader within the thematic tangle of the fiction and at the same time disengages him out of the fiction. The engrossed reader gets busier in formulating the theoretical stance of authorship and authority instead of basking in the fictive world. Coetzee’s non-theorised and un-ceremonial opinion against Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault finds vent in this novel. It questions the very concept of Foucauldian idea of Discourse and its exercise of power i.e. authority. It further challenges Barthes’ as well as Foucauldian claim of the death of the author. In Foe, Coetzee devises his story as the hitherto untold and unknown story prior to the publication of Daniel Defoe’s classic travelogue Robinson Crusoe (1719), a story spoken by a male narrator (Crusoe), wherein the original female voice and experience remain unheard. Coetzee fictionalises Defoe as Foe and prepares us to see him as a tyrannical author who supposedly worked upon the female experience and invented a story by excluding whatever that was ‘female’ in it; whereupon, Coetzee delves deeper into authorial anxiety of a female narrator who intends to let the world know the unique experience of her castaway life through a book which she cannot write herself but has to depend on Foe, the author. This paper, within its limited scope, intends to inspect how the issue of authorship and authority is projected, and how theoretical stances of both Foucault and Barthes are challenged.

Author, Authority, Narrative, Discourse.

"AUTHORSHIP & AUTHORITY: FAILURE OF DISCOURSE & RESURRECTION OF AUTHOR IN J.M. COETZEE’S FOE", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 12, page no.459-463, December-2018, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1812966.pdf

"AUTHORSHIP & AUTHORITY: FAILURE OF DISCOURSE & RESURRECTION OF AUTHOR IN J.M. COETZEE’S FOE", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 12, page no. pp459-463, December-2018, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1812966.pdf