Christina Turner

This thesis is a study of occluded intertextuality in two novels by South African author J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986). It examines Coetzee’s novels in concert with intertexts and archival materials to determine how Coetzee employed intertextuality as a means of negotiating his positionality as a white liberal author in late-apartheid South
Africa. In Chapter 1 I examine Coetzee’s initial intention, exhibited in a working notebook and early drafts, to rewrite Heinrich Von Kleist’s 1811 novella Michael Kohlhaas, demonstrating
how, although Coetzee ultimately moved away from this intertext, its traces remain in Michael K through an inescapable lacuna which creates an experience of hesitation for character, author,
and reader. In Chapter 2, I trace Coetzee’s attempts to rewrite Daniel Defoe’s 1724 courtesan narrative, Roxana, although Foe’s typically identified intertext is Robinson Crusoe. A
contrapuntal reading of Roxana reveals that imperialism, motherhood, prostitution, and authorship form a knot in that text, which is transferred to Coetzee’s novel via the return of
Susan Barton’s lost daughter in the novel’s final section. Chapter 2 thus seeks to supplement readings of Foe that posit Friday as the novel’s ultimate representation of ethical engagement
with alterity. This thesis establishes a relationship of comparative exchange between several kinds of intertext and in doing so aims to construct a personal ethics of reading. Derek Attridge
describes the ethics of reading as an encounter, through literature, with the other, or an other. For Attridge, “Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds” (xii) precisely because reading his work is an event. This thesis seeks to expand Attridge’s conceptualization of reading Coetzee’s work as an event beyond the borders of individual texts to consider the ethical force that results from reading text, intertext and foretext concurrently and
interactively.

This article reads John Steffler's 1992 novel about British explorer George Cartwright under the frame of transatlanticism. I argue that Steffler's Cartwright dramatizes the late eighteenth century shift from feudalist to capitalist economy, the rise of speculative finance and international trade, and the links between cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the epistemological violence of slavery. Cartwright is cast into a global trade network and comes to occupy a cosmopolitan sensibility, which is demonstrated in the novel through a system of metaphors linking land, sea, and textiles. Cartwright's cosmopolitanism is continually challenged by different versions of nation-state politics, including nascent American nationalism and the American revolution. His status as a ghost in an eternal present forges a link between historical imperialism and contemporary, American-dominated globalization. Ultimately, the novel poses significant questions about how ideas about transatlanti...

Abstract This article examines the use of literary genre in Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions on Indigenous land rights (Aboriginal title) and in Métis playwright Marie Clements’ 2003 play Burning Vision. I argue that legal decisions on Indigenous rights in Canada take on the features of specific literary genres, and that the genre of these decisions changes over time in response to broader sociopolitical shifts. In response to Section 35(1) of the 1982 Constitution Act, Aboriginal title decisions took on the structural features of comedy, a genre in which reconciliation is facilitated by the disclosure of previously hidden family relationships. This can be seen in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), a decision wherein the SCC reconciles the uneasy coexistence of two legal systems (Indigenous and common law) within the same national space by making these systems members of the same legal family. Clements’ play critiques this form of genealogical reconciliation by demonstrating how Indigenous law is forced to join the “family” of settler-colonial common law, and by exposing the violence that is elided through such processes of genealogical reconciliation. This article contributes to critical conversations about the relationship between law and genre and about the legal recognition of Indigenous rights.

This article reads John Steffler’s 1992 novel about British explorer George Cartwright under the frame of transatlanticism. I argue that Steffler’s Cartwright dramatizes the late eighteenth century shift from feudalist to capitalist economy, the rise of speculative finance and international trade, and the links between cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the epistemological violence of slavery. Cartwright is cast into a global trade network and comes to occupy a cosmopolitan sensibility, which is demonstrated in the novel through a system of metaphors linking land, sea, and textiles. Cartwright’s cosmopolitanism is continually challenged by different versions of nation-state politics, including nascent American nationalism and the American revolution. His status as a ghost in an eternal present forges a link between historical imperialism and contemporary, American-dominated globalization. Ultimately, the novel poses significant questions about how ideas about transatlantic trade and cosmopolitanism circulate within the Canadian national imaginary.