"Autre"-Biography

This study explores the poetics and politics of self in J. M. Coetzee's "autre"-biographical works "Scenes from Provincial Life". The author provides a detailed analysis of Coetzee's conception of self in his fictionalized memoirs, as well as of philosophical, aesthetic and political implications of "autre"-biography. She reads these works as literary figurations of an estranged self, maintaining that they engage with deeply historical but also universal questions of the relation between self and power. Coetzee's fictionalized memoirs, she argues, are thus not merely dramatizations of the inherent elusiveness of the self but a critique of systems and discourses of normativization and oppression.