Patrick Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199587957
- eISBN:
- 9780191723292
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587957.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long ...
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‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long tradition of the novel, from Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoevsky to Richardson, Defoe, and Cervantes, this book argues that Coetzee's significance lies in the acuity with which he has explored the resources of that tradition as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and this book describes and evaluates the ways in which his fiction draws upon aspects of modernist writing to address the major questions posed by late twentieth‐century politics. The unsettling comic energy of Beckett's prose, especially its insistent complication of tone and register, was, as Coetzee put it, nothing less than ‘a secret…that I wanted to make my own’, and Patrick Hayes brings to the fore the little‐discussed comedic dimension of Coetzee's writing. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and nuanced fiction that its important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.Less
‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long tradition of the novel, from Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoevsky to Richardson, Defoe, and Cervantes, this book argues that Coetzee's significance lies in the acuity with which he has explored the resources of that tradition as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and this book describes and evaluates the ways in which his fiction draws upon aspects of modernist writing to address the major questions posed by late twentieth‐century politics. The unsettling comic energy of Beckett's prose, especially its insistent complication of tone and register, was, as Coetzee put it, nothing less than ‘a secret…that I wanted to make my own’, and Patrick Hayes brings to the fore the little‐discussed comedic dimension of Coetzee's writing. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and nuanced fiction that its important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.
Russell Samolsky
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234790
- eISBN:
- 9780823241248
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment by arguing that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. ...
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This book sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment by arguing that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, it examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event—and marked or mutilated bodies—into its future reception. The book is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the book focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman. Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, it argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works' “apocalyptic futures” in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.Less
This book sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment by arguing that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, it examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event—and marked or mutilated bodies—into its future reception. The book is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the book focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman. Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, it argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works' “apocalyptic futures” in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.
J. M. Coetzee
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199288076
- eISBN:
- 9780191713439
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288076.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Exchanges between the novelist J. M. Coetzee and a number of his translators (including those into German, French, Dutch, and Serbian) illustrate some of the problems typical of literary translation. ...
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Exchanges between the novelist J. M. Coetzee and a number of his translators (including those into German, French, Dutch, and Serbian) illustrate some of the problems typical of literary translation. For instance, choosing among semantically equivalent terms that carry differing cultural connotations, or rendering sentences whose syntactic structure bears part of the semantic load.Less
Exchanges between the novelist J. M. Coetzee and a number of his translators (including those into German, French, Dutch, and Serbian) illustrate some of the problems typical of literary translation. For instance, choosing among semantically equivalent terms that carry differing cultural connotations, or rendering sentences whose syntactic structure bears part of the semantic load.
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity ...
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The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.Less
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
South Africa under apartheid presented some of the issues of this book in concentrated form: whether it was possible to construct an alternative grammar of identity; whether a closed system could be ...
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South Africa under apartheid presented some of the issues of this book in concentrated form: whether it was possible to construct an alternative grammar of identity; whether a closed system could be transformed. In this light, the chapter approaches three novels, occupying three iconic settings. In Gordimer's July's People it is the ‘village’, where in the context of imagined revolutionary breakdown the future is apocalyptic. In Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians it is Empire, a totality beyond which any alternative syntax has been ‘deleted’. Gordimer's The Pickup, published during the post-apartheid era, finds the desert—an existential as well as literal site, a vision of transnational possibility. These settings constitute not only topography but topology, where we understand the link between the grammar of identity and the nature of the boundary. The South African novels are significant for a wider world as we think our way towards the future.Less
South Africa under apartheid presented some of the issues of this book in concentrated form: whether it was possible to construct an alternative grammar of identity; whether a closed system could be transformed. In this light, the chapter approaches three novels, occupying three iconic settings. In Gordimer's July's People it is the ‘village’, where in the context of imagined revolutionary breakdown the future is apocalyptic. In Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians it is Empire, a totality beyond which any alternative syntax has been ‘deleted’. Gordimer's The Pickup, published during the post-apartheid era, finds the desert—an existential as well as literal site, a vision of transnational possibility. These settings constitute not only topography but topology, where we understand the link between the grammar of identity and the nature of the boundary. The South African novels are significant for a wider world as we think our way towards the future.
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The Conclusion presents a meditation on some of the key motifs of the book, turning on the idea of the nature of the boundary. It considers questions of self, place, the global, and the ...
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The Conclusion presents a meditation on some of the key motifs of the book, turning on the idea of the nature of the boundary. It considers questions of self, place, the global, and the transnational, where ‘difference is not the barrier but the space of crossing, where navigation is essential to the story we wish to become.’ Similarly it returns to the Levinasian ‘difference in height’, which affects the nature and implications of the boundary as well. There is an excursion into Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, which provided some of the initial impetus of this book, and a reconsideration of sacrifice through Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The book ends with a contemplation of the idea of the Promised Land.Less
The Conclusion presents a meditation on some of the key motifs of the book, turning on the idea of the nature of the boundary. It considers questions of self, place, the global, and the transnational, where ‘difference is not the barrier but the space of crossing, where navigation is essential to the story we wish to become.’ Similarly it returns to the Levinasian ‘difference in height’, which affects the nature and implications of the boundary as well. There is an excursion into Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, which provided some of the initial impetus of this book, and a reconsideration of sacrifice through Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The book ends with a contemplation of the idea of the Promised Land.
Rita Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112863
- eISBN:
- 9780199851058
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112863.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, ...
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This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.Less
This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.
Rita Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112863
- eISBN:
- 9780199851058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112863.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
At first reading, Youth may strike one as the gloomy tale of its protagonist's failure to become a poet. But the book is uniformly legible as the story of his steady commitment to prose—of his ...
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At first reading, Youth may strike one as the gloomy tale of its protagonist's failure to become a poet. But the book is uniformly legible as the story of his steady commitment to prose—of his growing understanding that, unlike the poet, the fiction writer is a located creature, perhaps even “a person unable to live without a country.” All the happy moments in Youth are ones in which we see him nearing his true passion. And all the new insights he stumbles on manifest something about the art of fiction and mold the work Coetzee was eventually to write. The most important of these insights arises from John's first venture into fiction: a short story about a young man who finds out that his love has been unfaithful to him.Less
At first reading, Youth may strike one as the gloomy tale of its protagonist's failure to become a poet. But the book is uniformly legible as the story of his steady commitment to prose—of his growing understanding that, unlike the poet, the fiction writer is a located creature, perhaps even “a person unable to live without a country.” All the happy moments in Youth are ones in which we see him nearing his true passion. And all the new insights he stumbles on manifest something about the art of fiction and mold the work Coetzee was eventually to write. The most important of these insights arises from John's first venture into fiction: a short story about a young man who finds out that his love has been unfaithful to him.
Rita Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112863
- eISBN:
- 9780199851058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112863.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Lars Engle's essay “The Novel without the Police” categorizes the work of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard according to Raymond Williams' usual triad of the dominant, emergent, and ...
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Lars Engle's essay “The Novel without the Police” categorizes the work of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard according to Raymond Williams' usual triad of the dominant, emergent, and residual forces visible in any given cultural formation—including that of academic literary criticism. Coetzee's fiction signifies what Engle sees as the dominant trend: an anti-positivist, anti-humanist practice of negative hermeneutics, doubtful of all essentialisms and master narratives. Coetzee challenges such notions as self-identity, sincerity, and truth-telling, as do the European theorists of whose work he is an incisive reader. Gordimer's fiction signifies for Engle certain emergent possibilities.Less
Lars Engle's essay “The Novel without the Police” categorizes the work of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard according to Raymond Williams' usual triad of the dominant, emergent, and residual forces visible in any given cultural formation—including that of academic literary criticism. Coetzee's fiction signifies what Engle sees as the dominant trend: an anti-positivist, anti-humanist practice of negative hermeneutics, doubtful of all essentialisms and master narratives. Coetzee challenges such notions as self-identity, sincerity, and truth-telling, as do the European theorists of whose work he is an incisive reader. Gordimer's fiction signifies for Engle certain emergent possibilities.
Christopher Peterson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245208
- eISBN:
- 9780823252602
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245208.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a ...
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In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.Less
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.
John Ó Maoilearca
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816697342
- eISBN:
- 9781452952291
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816697342.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This looks at arguments made by Alexander Galloway, Matthew Goulish, and J. M. Coetzee on what it means to be called an “animal”, a “nonhuman”, or a “perfect human” in regards to a non-standard or ...
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This looks at arguments made by Alexander Galloway, Matthew Goulish, and J. M. Coetzee on what it means to be called an “animal”, a “nonhuman”, or a “perfect human” in regards to a non-standard or standard utopia.Less
This looks at arguments made by Alexander Galloway, Matthew Goulish, and J. M. Coetzee on what it means to be called an “animal”, a “nonhuman”, or a “perfect human” in regards to a non-standard or standard utopia.
Christopher Prendergast
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199215850
- eISBN:
- 9780191706912
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199215850.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that ...
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Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.Less
Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.
Michael Bell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199208098
- eISBN:
- 9780191709227
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208098.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to ...
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J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to translate the authority of his writing into its supposed political or ideological equivalents. This chapter is devoted mainly to a close reading of The Lives of Animals in its original form and context as one of the 1998 Tanner lectures at Princeton. Costello herself is far from being a simple mouthpiece for the author and her account of the novelist's sympathy is vulnerable as well as eloquent. Although it is often discussed, and not inappropriately, for its thematic contribution to public debate on the human relation to animals, the mutual embedding of formal lecture and fictional narrative gives the work a philosophical focus on the incommunicability of all radical conviction that falls outside conventional norms.Less
J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to translate the authority of his writing into its supposed political or ideological equivalents. This chapter is devoted mainly to a close reading of The Lives of Animals in its original form and context as one of the 1998 Tanner lectures at Princeton. Costello herself is far from being a simple mouthpiece for the author and her account of the novelist's sympathy is vulnerable as well as eloquent. Although it is often discussed, and not inappropriately, for its thematic contribution to public debate on the human relation to animals, the mutual embedding of formal lecture and fictional narrative gives the work a philosophical focus on the incommunicability of all radical conviction that falls outside conventional norms.
Rosemary Jolly
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312137
- eISBN:
- 9781846315244
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315244
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical ...
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This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.Less
This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226677019
- eISBN:
- 9780226677293
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226677293.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This concluding chapter examines Coetzee’s enigmatic novel, The Childhood of Jesus, and considers how reading literature “after Wittgenstein” offers a better understanding of the way modernism’s ...
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This concluding chapter examines Coetzee’s enigmatic novel, The Childhood of Jesus, and considers how reading literature “after Wittgenstein” offers a better understanding of the way modernism’s guiding obsessions with difficulty, oblique ethical instruction, and the work of ethical self-transformation continue to shape works of contemporary literature. A point of synthesis of many of this book’s overarching concerns, the chapter examines Coetzee’s investment in teaching through obscurity, and quests for guidance in perplexity and salvation in the context of his treatment of an unrelenting longing for new ways of seeing and being at home in language and world. It attends to Coetzee’s allusions to Plato’s dialogues, Jesus’s parabolic teaching in the gospels, Cervantes’s quixotic quests, Tolstoy’s confessional writing, Kafka’s parables, the works of Beckett and Dostoevsky, and Wittgenstein’s remarks, and considers how Coetzee’s latest works represent his response to resolute Wittgensteinians who have long drawn from his work in their own thinking. He develops his own complex brand of ethical teaching by drawing intertextually on the form of the parable, and also on Wittgenstein’s thought and instructive method in his own attempt to use his own suggestive parabolic text to train us therapeutically to be more attentive readers and ethical thinkers.Less
This concluding chapter examines Coetzee’s enigmatic novel, The Childhood of Jesus, and considers how reading literature “after Wittgenstein” offers a better understanding of the way modernism’s guiding obsessions with difficulty, oblique ethical instruction, and the work of ethical self-transformation continue to shape works of contemporary literature. A point of synthesis of many of this book’s overarching concerns, the chapter examines Coetzee’s investment in teaching through obscurity, and quests for guidance in perplexity and salvation in the context of his treatment of an unrelenting longing for new ways of seeing and being at home in language and world. It attends to Coetzee’s allusions to Plato’s dialogues, Jesus’s parabolic teaching in the gospels, Cervantes’s quixotic quests, Tolstoy’s confessional writing, Kafka’s parables, the works of Beckett and Dostoevsky, and Wittgenstein’s remarks, and considers how Coetzee’s latest works represent his response to resolute Wittgensteinians who have long drawn from his work in their own thinking. He develops his own complex brand of ethical teaching by drawing intertextually on the form of the parable, and also on Wittgenstein’s thought and instructive method in his own attempt to use his own suggestive parabolic text to train us therapeutically to be more attentive readers and ethical thinkers.
Ankhi Mukherjee
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804785211
- eISBN:
- 9780804788380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804785211.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted ...
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T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.Less
T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.
Russell Samolsky
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234790
- eISBN:
- 9780823241248
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234790.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter begins by considering what is at stake in Coetzee's ascription of his novel Waiting for the Barbarians to his doppelgänger JC from Diary of a Bad Year. How might we regard the changes ...
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This chapter begins by considering what is at stake in Coetzee's ascription of his novel Waiting for the Barbarians to his doppelgänger JC from Diary of a Bad Year. How might we regard the changes that accrue to Barbarians when it is abstracted from the context of late apartheid in which it was written, and brought into the context of the revelations of torture in the chambers of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and “enhanced interrogation” at the Guantánamo camp? The chapter then proceeds to analyze Waiting for the Barbarians in relation to Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology and his concept of the materiality of the letter. This allows for an examination of the way in which Coetzee's text resists an accrual of spectacular power that was offered by the exposure of state torture in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.Less
This chapter begins by considering what is at stake in Coetzee's ascription of his novel Waiting for the Barbarians to his doppelgänger JC from Diary of a Bad Year. How might we regard the changes that accrue to Barbarians when it is abstracted from the context of late apartheid in which it was written, and brought into the context of the revelations of torture in the chambers of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and “enhanced interrogation” at the Guantánamo camp? The chapter then proceeds to analyze Waiting for the Barbarians in relation to Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology and his concept of the materiality of the letter. This allows for an examination of the way in which Coetzee's text resists an accrual of spectacular power that was offered by the exposure of state torture in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
Kathryn Lachman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380307
- eISBN:
- 9781781387290
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380307.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Borrowed Forms examines the use of music by contemporary novelists and critics from across the francophone, anglophone, and hispanophone worlds. Through readings of Nancy Huston, Maryse Condé, J. M. ...
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Borrowed Forms examines the use of music by contemporary novelists and critics from across the francophone, anglophone, and hispanophone worlds. Through readings of Nancy Huston, Maryse Condé, J. M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar, and other late twentieth-century novelists, the book shows how writers deploy musical strategies to expand the possibilities of the novel in response to the demands of transnational citizenship. The book transcends disciplinary boundaries to reveal the entanglement of musical and narrative forms in ethical, historical, and political questions. Critics from Mikhail Bakhtin to Edward Said established musical forms as an indispensable framework for understanding the novel. This study argues that the turn to music in late twentieth-century fiction is linked to new questions of authority and representation, as writers seek to democratize the novel, bring marginalized voices into fiction, articulate increasingly hybrid subjectivities, and negotiate the conflicting histories of the diverse groups that make up today's multicultural societies. The book traces the influence of four musical concepts on literary theory and the contemporary novel: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, equal voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of a given theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Borrowed Forms is both a vital reference for those seeking to understand the influence of music on twentieth-century literary theory, and a rigorous and interdisciplinary framework for considering the transnational novel.Less
Borrowed Forms examines the use of music by contemporary novelists and critics from across the francophone, anglophone, and hispanophone worlds. Through readings of Nancy Huston, Maryse Condé, J. M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar, and other late twentieth-century novelists, the book shows how writers deploy musical strategies to expand the possibilities of the novel in response to the demands of transnational citizenship. The book transcends disciplinary boundaries to reveal the entanglement of musical and narrative forms in ethical, historical, and political questions. Critics from Mikhail Bakhtin to Edward Said established musical forms as an indispensable framework for understanding the novel. This study argues that the turn to music in late twentieth-century fiction is linked to new questions of authority and representation, as writers seek to democratize the novel, bring marginalized voices into fiction, articulate increasingly hybrid subjectivities, and negotiate the conflicting histories of the diverse groups that make up today's multicultural societies. The book traces the influence of four musical concepts on literary theory and the contemporary novel: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, equal voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of a given theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Borrowed Forms is both a vital reference for those seeking to understand the influence of music on twentieth-century literary theory, and a rigorous and interdisciplinary framework for considering the transnational novel.
Kevin Newmark
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240128
- eISBN:
- 9780823240166
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240128.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Can contemporary fiction be read simultaneously as socio-political act and as reflective thought, as both empirical reality and philosophical speculation? A good example of a novel situating itself ...
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Can contemporary fiction be read simultaneously as socio-political act and as reflective thought, as both empirical reality and philosophical speculation? A good example of a novel situating itself within this uneasy convergence of theory and action is Coetzee's Disgrace. The explicit theme concerns the referential history of post-apartheid S. Africa, but the fiction also stages an allegory of aesthetic judgment confronting its own status as a bridge between knowledge and freedom. Rather than confirm the reliability of its power to mediate between cognition and action, the literary text bears witness to its lack of authority in joining the two. Disgrace involves the exposure of a mysterious blank precisely at the point where an articulation between history and reflection should be found. This typographical dash inscribes an ironic resistance to any attempt at compelling literary fictions to say all they know or to know fully what they can from now on do.Less
Can contemporary fiction be read simultaneously as socio-political act and as reflective thought, as both empirical reality and philosophical speculation? A good example of a novel situating itself within this uneasy convergence of theory and action is Coetzee's Disgrace. The explicit theme concerns the referential history of post-apartheid S. Africa, but the fiction also stages an allegory of aesthetic judgment confronting its own status as a bridge between knowledge and freedom. Rather than confirm the reliability of its power to mediate between cognition and action, the literary text bears witness to its lack of authority in joining the two. Disgrace involves the exposure of a mysterious blank precisely at the point where an articulation between history and reflection should be found. This typographical dash inscribes an ironic resistance to any attempt at compelling literary fictions to say all they know or to know fully what they can from now on do.
Kathryn Lachman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380307
- eISBN:
- 9781781387290
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380307.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace offers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to ...
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Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace offers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to stage the problems of writing. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is an aging English professor at Cape Town University who attempts to write an opera about Lord Byron's late romance with an Italian countess. A failed affair with a student, followed by the loss of his job and a brutal attack on his daughter's farm, challenge Lurie's assumptions about justice, entitlement, violence, and representation in post-apartheid South Africa. While critics have generally read the opera as an embedded narrative that sheds light on Lurie's developing ethical sensibilities, this chapter reads the opera against feminist music criticism, Coetzee's broader work, and French theory, to argue that it constitutes a far more radical disruption in the text. The opera opens a space of opacity and unreadability in the narrative, staging the problem of representing the other. Coetzee draws on opera to re-evaluate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary South Africa—and in literature itself.Less
Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace offers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to stage the problems of writing. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is an aging English professor at Cape Town University who attempts to write an opera about Lord Byron's late romance with an Italian countess. A failed affair with a student, followed by the loss of his job and a brutal attack on his daughter's farm, challenge Lurie's assumptions about justice, entitlement, violence, and representation in post-apartheid South Africa. While critics have generally read the opera as an embedded narrative that sheds light on Lurie's developing ethical sensibilities, this chapter reads the opera against feminist music criticism, Coetzee's broader work, and French theory, to argue that it constitutes a far more radical disruption in the text. The opera opens a space of opacity and unreadability in the narrative, staging the problem of representing the other. Coetzee draws on opera to re-evaluate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary South Africa—and in literature itself.
