Totalitarian politics and individual responsibility: Revising Hannah Arendt’s inner dialogue through the notion of confession in J. M. Coetzee’sWaiting for the Barbarians
Abstract:Abstract:Hannah Arendt's writings concerning individual responsibility create an important-and underexamined-context for reading J. M. Coetzee's oeuvre, particularly his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. For Arendt, when a society fails to offer ethical codes of conduct to follow, people should determine those codes by themselves, since morality concerns people in their individuality during totalitarian times. Arendt's ideas bear important similarities to Coetzee's representation of the magistrate in the novel… Show more
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