Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech Analysis

Perspectives in relations in society In the text “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech (1987)” J.M Coetzee, speaks about the Apartheid. The Apartheid was a system of racial discrimination which limited freedom for the South Africans. Apartheid caused chaos and created tensions in South Africa. I agree with J.M. Coetzee’s speech about the disapproval of Apartheid. Coetzee voice’s his perspectives on the limitations of politics, fiction, and the imagination in South Africa. In his speech, he talks about the limits that were put on the South African’s as a fear of the white people losing their power over them. In his speech Coetzee uses the metaphor “masters and slaves” to refer it to as the whites in power and the South Africans who are without a say in society and are controlled …show more content…
Coetzee describes the limitations of literature because of Apartheid. In his speech he says, “ South African literature is a literature in bondage, as it reveals in even its highest moments, shot through as they are with feelings of homelessness and yearnings for a liberation.”(98). This quote means that South African literature is being oppressed because of Apartheid and the readers can feel the hopelessness that the writers feel. Also, he says, “ As you would expect in a so...vast a country…, there is a South African literature of vastness. Yet even that literature of vastness, examined closely, reflects feelings of entrapment..”(98). Coetzee describes how despite the vast amount of literature that is offered the reader can’t help but to be able to feel the feeling of entrapment from the author. In his speech he also says, “It is a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power.”(98). According to Coetzee it means that the literature itself isn’t what the writer themselves want to express and they cannot express what they feel because everything is already set in