Romaneskno propitivanje identiteta (Roman Foe J. M. Coetzeea)
Novelistic questioning of identity (novel “Foe” by J. M. Coetzee)

Summary/Abstract: The central sphere of this paper is the analysis of the novel Foe (J. M. Coetzee) as another contribution to the pondering upon the practice of reading in which the attention is directed towards the questioning of the novelistic articulation of identity. The very idea of this analysis is to point to one of the possible strategies of reading, which is anticipated by a kind of search which does not exceed the boundaries within which the novel as a genre is not reduced to a mere discussion on transgression but it itself is rather a transgression, both of language and relations that exist within the language or are set by it. The theoretic grounds of the paper are based on the postcolonial literary theory since it is a very wide interdisciplinary field in which the consequences of colonialism in our understanding of history, politics, culture and literature are questioned. The analysis is directed to a very careful reading of a text as well as to recognizing of the basic aspects of the impact construed by Derrida’s Deconstruction, Foucault’s Discourse Theory and Lacan’s Reinterpretation of Psychoanalysis. The practical application and relevance of this perception are warning and thus devised only as one of possible strategies of drawing closer to literary texts, since any imposed methodology discloses itself as a deliberate reaching for a position in which we are hypothetically victims of “the meanest cunning of power“, where our reading slides with difficulty within a constant process of redefinition of the peripherical and central.

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