Transmodern Ethos in J.

M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

Abstract

This paper analyses South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee’s The Master of
Petersburg as a transmodern fiction that shows how transmodern ethos is a sensible choice
in the transformed transmodern world. Issues like trans-modernity, globalization, and alterity
are associated with the issue of inclusive ethics. To carry out the analysis, I use theoretical
insights from Transmodern Studies which deal with inclusive ethical concerns to define the
need for the transmodern world: the globalized world after the 1980s characterized by
technological advancements, accelerated globalization, cultural hybridity, and shifts in
political dynamics with the end of cold war. This paper analyses how Coetzee’s The Master of
Petersburg redefines the notion of ethics and explores transmodern ethos about the concepts
of responsibility, alterity, narrative, and trauma through the central agency of the major
protagonist, Dostoevsky. Coetzee portrays his fictional character Dostoevsky in a trans
modern context not only to critique Eurocentric ethos- a discourse that focalizes on universal
and totalitarian ethics applicable to the whole world- but also to emphasize the need for a
paradigm shift in terms of ethics beyond univocal universality to analogical pluriversity for
the transmodern countries like South Africa.

Keywords: Alterity, Ambivalence, Analectic method, Allegory, Empathic Unsettlement, Ethical

consciousness, Eurocentric ontology, Proximity, Transmodern Studies