부산대학교 도서관

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novelThe Master of Petersburg(1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novelDemons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]