Abdolmohammad Movahhed

Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), is a novel that deals with the complex and intertwined relationship between the colonized and colonizer. In this regard, the present thesis aims to discuss the novel and its respective adaptations through the lenses of Edward Said’s concepts of worldliness and materiality, as espoused in his The World, The Text, The Critic (1983). Thus, this dissertation examines different aspects of the worldliness in the novel and its film adaptations. In the first chapter, Said’s filiative/affiliative framework through which the story is perceived in this thesis will be explained. In the affiliative level, the novel’s setting, the significance of borders between the civilized country and the similarity and difference of the Colonel Joll and Magistrate are examined. The second chapter is devoted to the novel’s capacity for challenging the binary relationships between the colonized (the Nomad girl) and the oppressor (the Magistrate), the affective relationship between them and the analysis of the notion of empire. The third chapter investigates the similarity and differences of the novel and the two movie adaptations, Ciro Guerra’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Nick Park’s Early Man. These two movies, with varying degree of assimilation, demonstrate the colonized and colonizer relationship as we observe in the movie. The focus of this chapter will be on the symbolic references that embody ideas of worldiness, as well as the binary between the civilized and barbaric and the universal sense of colonialism. Ultimately, Coetzee presents the materiality and worldliness in his work as a universal experience by placing them beyond and above a particular context while rejecting the tropes of realistic fictions.