| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores the ethical meaning of the literary, sympathetic imagination in the novel by reading George Eliot and J. M. Coetzee. They share the idea that the novel can convey a fictional truth and, at the same time, contribute for the expansion of sympathy. My research undertakes the theoretical project of asking, first, how the two writers’ engagements with alterity proceed to the question of literary forms that contain their perspective on otherness and, secondly, whether the work of sympathy through the literary imagination has some limits in figuring otherness. Focusing on the ethical account of the novel in terms of the sympathetic imagination, the dissertation articulates the distinction between the writers’ self-consciousness about truth-telling and its literary representation in the novel. George Eliot’s Adam Bede shows eclectic aspects of the Victorian realism in which the aesthetic representation of eighteenth-century English country life, particularly for the effect of sympathy, depends on some literary conventions including tragedy. My research analyzes that Eliot’s perspectival view in creating the landscape of sympathy in her country novels necessarily uses stereotyped images and unfolds ideological inclinations. Like George Eliot, Coetzee’s strong self-consciousness about truth-telling yields confessional voices in his novels. The issue of authorial sincerity is examined particularly in his memoirs. In the context of apartheid South Africa, Coetzee’s struggle with truth-telling and alterity in literature has a significance. The animal issue and taste discussed in the final chapter of this dissertation testify that figuring otherness is related to the matter of the sympathetic imagination, which implies a social feeling that is based on the concept of inter-subjectivity. | en |
