TROPES OF DISABILITIES, MOTIFS OF SURVIVAL IN JOHN MAXWELL COETZEE’S AGE OF IRON AND DISGRACE

Akanmode, Olushola Ayodeji and Kayode, Niyi Afolayan TROPES OF DISABILITIES, MOTIFS OF SURVIVAL IN JOHN MAXWELL COETZEE’S AGE OF IRON AND DISGRACE. Sokoto Journal of Language, Literature and Linguistics.

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Abstract

Readers and critics of South African Literature, until 1990, are very familiar with the literature of that country which gave due attention to the malaises of chronic racial abuses and other vices that prevailed while the apartheid system subsisted. With the official closure of that regime in 1994, the engagement naturally diverts to the survival of a nation that was coming out of decades of social injuries and strife. This paper, in an intertextual study of Age of Iron (1990) and Disgrace (1999), picks out John Maxwell Coetzee as one of the writers of South Africa descent that has responded to the experiences of the nation in the aftermath of the apartheid experience. The paper interrogates Coetzee’s uses of tropes and motifs in his concern about the survival of his nation in the nascent post-apartheid era as reflected in his mirroring of the crimes of apartheid and its ramified consequences. After isolating the diverse tropes deployed by the novelist to objectify the inhuman experience and the consequent personal and national traumas of that era, the paper concludes by aggregating the tenets of acceptance, forgiveness, and atonement as core indispensable values for a nation in search of healing

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