Waiting for the barbarians in the heart of the country

This blog is an assignment for a graduate level Literature course at the California State University Northridge. The course is devoted to the studying of Nobel Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee's work.


Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Link to the Final Paper- Story

https://sites.google.com/site/jmc620hs/
Posted by Hudit Simonyan at 1:07 AM No comments:
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Dusklands (1974) In the Heart of the Country (1977)
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) Foe (1986)
Life & Times of Michael K (1983) Age of Iron (1990)
The Master of Petersburg (1994)
The Lives of Animals (1999) Disgrace (1999)
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Slow Man (2005)
Diary of a Bad Year (2007) Boyhood (1997)
Youth (2002)
Summertime (2009)

I am a hole crying to be a whole.
There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me.
I am conserver rather than a destroyer, perhaps my rage at my father is simply rage at the violations of the old language, the correct language...
The language that should pass between myself and these people was subverted by my father and cannot be recovered. What passes between us now is a parody.
[I feel] Like a great emptiness, and emptiness filled with a great absence, and absence which is a desire to be filled, to be fulfilled. Yet at the same time I know that nothing will fill me, because it is the first condition of life forever to desire, otherwise life would cease.... Only stones desire nothing.
The soldiery tyrannizes the town. They have held a torch-light meeting on the square to denounce "cowards and traitors" and to affirm collective allegiance to the Empire. WE STAY has become the slogan of the faithful...
And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness ... is similarly preoccupied. Everyone but the children! The children never doubt that the great old trees in whose shade they play will stand forever, that one day they will grow to be strong like their fathers, fertile like their mothers, that they will live and prosper and raise their own children and grow old in the place where they were born.

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Hudit Simonyan
I am a graduate student and Teaching Associate in the English Department at the California State University Northridge.
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