The present dissertation seeks to closely investigate JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K in terms of Fredric Jameson's concept of the political unconscious. The central Argument of the present research is to demonstrate how JM Coetzee’s waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K are in close association with the core idea of the political unconscious. Jameson believes that any work of art could be read in a context of its historical circumstances, that is to say, its socio-economic determinants. To this end, the present dissertation has been colored to enrich itself by investigating other code words such as totality, narrative and interpretation, ideologeme(s), mode of production, and the ideology of the form. Jameson’s dialectical aesthetic in The Political Unconscious is the corollary of the confluence of Freud and Marx’s fundamental premises of unconscious and sociopolitical anxieties respectively. Fredric Jameson’s intellectual hermeneutic lies in uncovering the way in which the contradictions and antinomies as well as sociopolitical and cultural anxieties are to be unfolded within his three semantic horizons of interpretation, namely, ‘the political’ or ‘the textual’, ‘the social’ and ‘the historical’. The present dissertation argues that Coetzee’s selected novels, through the political unconscious analysis, reveal the repressed desires encoded in the unconscious of the narratives. To unravel the underlying contradictions and antinomies beneath the surface of the text, the narrative demands interpretations so as to pierce into the latent meaning of the novels. Coetzee’s selected novels depict the cultural and sociopolitical anxieties by which the south Afrikaners’ collective consciousness is determined and shaped.
