The Secret Aria on Shame : An Analysis of Narrative Structure and Theme in Coetzee's "Diary of a Bad Year"

Coetzee’s last novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) has an intriguing triple-voiced narrative structure and deals with the grey area of shame. The narrative is divided between a writer, his written contribution to a book called “Strong Opinions”, and his secretary’s thoughts about both the opinions in the manuscript and her employer’s circumstances. This essay explores the relation between form and theme in Diary of a Bad Year; to see in what way these two fundamental elements of the novel intervene and support each other. By doing so the narrative structure is read through Freud’s structural model of personality, whereby each narrator’s voice is related to the notions of the super-ego, the ego and the id. In other words, this essay argues that the specific threefold narrative structure in Diary of a Bad Year, by reflecting the interrelated parts of human identity, helps in creating and developing the theme of shame, which only exists connected to the human psyche. This connection in turn gives special meaning to the entire narratology of the novel.

Vilhelm Ekelund och det litterära fältet 1897-1949

Vilhelm Ekelunds och det litterära fältet 1897-1949 [Vilhelm Ekelund and the literary field 1897-1949] The theoretical background of this study is Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to literature. I use his theory concerning the importance of cultural (and other forms of symbolic) capital for the individual artist – and his description of the literary field as a place characterized by continuous conflict between different categories of participants. In the article, I argue that as a young poet, Ekelund held a position in the field that was with the intellectual group as opposed to the group of commercial authors – and among the young avant-garde as opposed to among the consecrated and well-established writers. However, this position changed somewhat during the years Ekelund spent in exile (1908-1921), and it continued to change after his return to Sweden. His reputation as a thoroughly intellectual writer was accentuated and, as time passed, he himself became a consecrated artist with certain privileges – e.g. grants and awards – to defend.