AustLit

'This essay offers a new spatial reading of In the Heart of the Country. It explores J. M. Coetzee’s interest in grounding white female narrators in heterotopic spaces which, while marked by terror and racial divisions, simultaneously enforce proximity and intimacy across the racial bar. It shows that grounding Magda within the specific phenomenology of the farm enables Coetzee to explore a set of traumatic double-binds which are not only discursive but also sensorial, psychic as well as affective. It concludes by arguing that the strong self-referentiality of the novel can itself be read as an affective symptom, the trace of psychic parceling which happens at the intersection of space, symbol and traumatic power relations.'  (Publication abstract)