타자의 공간 - 쿳시의 『예수의 어린시절』

The purpose of this study is to analyze The Childhood of Jesus, the latest novel of J. M. Coetzee as the ethical novel which makes both an author and a reader participate responsibly in hospitality of text. Although allegory often has been used from his earlier works, the interpretation should not be limited only to the political or social context in J. M. Coetzee’s novels. Many contemporary literary criticism and readers tend to make works of literature into a kind of tool for delivering a message of the political and the social by use of allegory. But Derek Attridge argues that allegorical reading in general, and allegorical reading of Coetzee in particular, are in a way misleading by being unliterary. In this context, Coetzee uses the title of The Childhood of Jesus as a kind of anti-allegorical strategy to inhibit inauthentic reading via reductive generalization of the conventional allegory as readers are inclined to find a religious meaning in its title. And the background of Novilla in The Childhood of Jesus can be interpreted as the space of literature where both an author and a reader should receive not only characters but also text itself hospitably. After all, the open ending of this novel is open to creativity of literature while characters begin a new journey toward another literary place as in other Coetzee’s novels.