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.
Rebecca Roach
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198825418
- eISBN:
- 9780191864094
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198825418.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Criticism/Theory
This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through ...
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This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through their opposition to creative writing. Drawing on the examples of Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and J. M. Coetzee, the chapter demonstrates that interviews have become the quintessential example of uncreative, instrumental, authorial labour. However, in a time in which literature is frequently conceived in opposition to information, interviews also become a productive site for authors to reflect on the nature of literary representation and contemporary creative work. In their opposition to creative writing, interviews can also become an example of ‘uncreative writing’. As information surplus and networked digital computing make traditional, primarily print-based, norms of authorship, creativity, and inscription less tenable, for some of the authors discussed here the interview offers a generative site for exploring new modes of creative expression fit for the twenty-first century.Less
This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through their opposition to creative writing. Drawing on the examples of Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and J. M. Coetzee, the chapter demonstrates that interviews have become the quintessential example of uncreative, instrumental, authorial labour. However, in a time in which literature is frequently conceived in opposition to information, interviews also become a productive site for authors to reflect on the nature of literary representation and contemporary creative work. In their opposition to creative writing, interviews can also become an example of ‘uncreative writing’. As information surplus and networked digital computing make traditional, primarily print-based, norms of authorship, creativity, and inscription less tenable, for some of the authors discussed here the interview offers a generative site for exploring new modes of creative expression fit for the twenty-first century.
Alys Moody
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198828891
- eISBN:
- 9780191867361
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198828891.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this ...
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Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this consensus, maintaining a commitment to aesthetic autonomy through his investment in a European modernist tradition that incorporates the art of hunger. In a context where hunger itself was highly politicized, Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K produces an anti-politics of hunger, whose autonomy rests in the disjuncture between its white author and its Coloured protagonist. Pursuing this argument through a genetic reading of the novel’s drafts, this chapter shows how this novel was written out of and against both the debates about art and politics in apartheid-era South Africa, and the emerging theoretical positions that governed Coetzee’s international anglophone academic context at this moment.Less
Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this consensus, maintaining a commitment to aesthetic autonomy through his investment in a European modernist tradition that incorporates the art of hunger. In a context where hunger itself was highly politicized, Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K produces an anti-politics of hunger, whose autonomy rests in the disjuncture between its white author and its Coloured protagonist. Pursuing this argument through a genetic reading of the novel’s drafts, this chapter shows how this novel was written out of and against both the debates about art and politics in apartheid-era South Africa, and the emerging theoretical positions that governed Coetzee’s international anglophone academic context at this moment.
Denis Sampson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198752998
- eISBN:
- 9780191816000
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752998.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both ...
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Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both narrators are complicit in barbaric activities and their voices represent a compulsive deception. ‘The Narrative’ is presented as an authentic document of an Afrikaner ancestor, recovered in a pseudo-scholarly edition by ‘the author’s father’ and translated by the novelist, or one who bears the same name. The novella’s larger concern is with ideas of narrative/authorial voice, especially in traditions of fictional realism and historical writing, in particular the representation of Africans. That concern, rooted in Coetzee’s own academic work in linguistic and textual study (notably, of Beckett), translation and anthropology, becomes central to much of his fictional career, especially in his experiments in the confessional genre. Its personal origins are explored in the trilogy, Scenes of Provincial Life.Less
Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both narrators are complicit in barbaric activities and their voices represent a compulsive deception. ‘The Narrative’ is presented as an authentic document of an Afrikaner ancestor, recovered in a pseudo-scholarly edition by ‘the author’s father’ and translated by the novelist, or one who bears the same name. The novella’s larger concern is with ideas of narrative/authorial voice, especially in traditions of fictional realism and historical writing, in particular the representation of Africans. That concern, rooted in Coetzee’s own academic work in linguistic and textual study (notably, of Beckett), translation and anthropology, becomes central to much of his fictional career, especially in his experiments in the confessional genre. Its personal origins are explored in the trilogy, Scenes of Provincial Life.
David James
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198789758
- eISBN:
- 9780191831447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789758.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots ...
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Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots sketch preparations for mortality, testing consolation’s sufficiency without stripping its contribution to the role fiction can ‘play’ in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the apprenticeship of dying’. Testaments to what writing itself might conserve in advance of what cannot be altered, these epistolary fictions of expectation place the perceived consolations of religion in critical conversation with the ethically contestable consolations of style. They confirm Ricoeur’s warning that when ‘consolation’ emerges in fiction, ‘one must not cry self-delusion too hastily’, even if the unpicking of self-delusion is part of a novel’s economy of affect—as Disgrace (1999), the chapter’s third selection, powerfully exemplifies, a work that interrogates its own redemptive language of the soul at a juncture for South African culture characterized by pervasive disappointment and the irreparable pain of apartheid’s legacy.Less
Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots sketch preparations for mortality, testing consolation’s sufficiency without stripping its contribution to the role fiction can ‘play’ in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the apprenticeship of dying’. Testaments to what writing itself might conserve in advance of what cannot be altered, these epistolary fictions of expectation place the perceived consolations of religion in critical conversation with the ethically contestable consolations of style. They confirm Ricoeur’s warning that when ‘consolation’ emerges in fiction, ‘one must not cry self-delusion too hastily’, even if the unpicking of self-delusion is part of a novel’s economy of affect—as Disgrace (1999), the chapter’s third selection, powerfully exemplifies, a work that interrogates its own redemptive language of the soul at a juncture for South African culture characterized by pervasive disappointment and the irreparable pain of apartheid’s legacy.
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.
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.
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.
Elizabeth S. Anker
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451362
- eISBN:
- 9780801465635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451362.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which tackles the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) experiment in human rights—in particular its agenda of ...
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This chapter offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which tackles the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) experiment in human rights—in particular its agenda of uncovering stories of violation and holding them up for public scrutiny. Located explicitly in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace challenges the philosophical and practical wisdom of using the language of rights either to condemn wrongdoing or to instigate sociopolitical recovery. This chapter examines Disgrace's use of the animal world as a surrogate approach to social justice, its focus on the ambivalences of human rights rhetoric within and in the aftermath of the project of South African reconciliation, its explanation for why rights logic has failed to meaningfully reverse the many injustices of the apartheid era, and its condemnation of what it considers to be more systemic failures afflicting the liberal articulations of selfhood that consolidate dominant discourses of human rights.Less
This chapter offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which tackles the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) experiment in human rights—in particular its agenda of uncovering stories of violation and holding them up for public scrutiny. Located explicitly in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace challenges the philosophical and practical wisdom of using the language of rights either to condemn wrongdoing or to instigate sociopolitical recovery. This chapter examines Disgrace's use of the animal world as a surrogate approach to social justice, its focus on the ambivalences of human rights rhetoric within and in the aftermath of the project of South African reconciliation, its explanation for why rights logic has failed to meaningfully reverse the many injustices of the apartheid era, and its condemnation of what it considers to be more systemic failures afflicting the liberal articulations of selfhood that consolidate dominant discourses of human rights.
Elleke Boehmer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846317453
- eISBN:
- 9781846317187
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317187.013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetics of his shift from an agonistic settler tradition within South African writing, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode ...
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This chapter examines the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetics of his shift from an agonistic settler tradition within South African writing, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode of realist writing that came with his move to that country in the early 2000s. It considers how a shift of national location within the international republic of letters might impinge on a settler or colonial tradition within postcolonial poetics; or whether it is rather the case that such a strand or tradition operates in cross-border, transnational ways, freely making itself available to writers from different postcolonial domains.Less
This chapter examines the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetics of his shift from an agonistic settler tradition within South African writing, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode of realist writing that came with his move to that country in the early 2000s. It considers how a shift of national location within the international republic of letters might impinge on a settler or colonial tradition within postcolonial poetics; or whether it is rather the case that such a strand or tradition operates in cross-border, transnational ways, freely making itself available to writers from different postcolonial domains.
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.
Peter D. McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198725152
- eISBN:
- 9780191792595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198725152.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the ...
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Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the traditions of the European novel, whether in its ‘realist’ or in its ‘modernist’ modes. It begins by examining the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1958), arguably the most prescribed novel of the apartheid era, which included a curiously high-minded supplementary essay by the leading Afrikaans literary critic A. P. Grové who also happened to be an influential censor. Through detailed readings of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986), it then shows how Coetzee sought to distance himself and his ideal reader from the European novel, taking issue with its representational powers, its claims to knowledge, and its apparent cultural mobility.Less
Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the traditions of the European novel, whether in its ‘realist’ or in its ‘modernist’ modes. It begins by examining the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1958), arguably the most prescribed novel of the apartheid era, which included a curiously high-minded supplementary essay by the leading Afrikaans literary critic A. P. Grové who also happened to be an influential censor. Through detailed readings of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986), it then shows how Coetzee sought to distance himself and his ideal reader from the European novel, taking issue with its representational powers, its claims to knowledge, and its apparent cultural mobility.
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804782760
- eISBN:
- 9780804785372
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804782760.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter examines the critical potential of the barbarians' absence by focusing on the topos of “waiting for the barbarians” through a comparative reading of C. P. Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the ...
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This chapter examines the critical potential of the barbarians' absence by focusing on the topos of “waiting for the barbarians” through a comparative reading of C. P. Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) and J. M. Coetzee's homonymous novel (1980). It assesses the implications of the barbarians' failure to arrive in both works and considers repetition as a barbarian operation linked with foundational categories of civilization. Using a multiplying, kaleidoscopic lens, the chapter highlights barbarism in repetition and as repetition and discusses the ways in which the overdetermined name “barbarian” can be repeated into new senses in the space of literature. It also looks at the concept of repetition in relation to two other concepts: “history” and “allegory.”Less
This chapter examines the critical potential of the barbarians' absence by focusing on the topos of “waiting for the barbarians” through a comparative reading of C. P. Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) and J. M. Coetzee's homonymous novel (1980). It assesses the implications of the barbarians' failure to arrive in both works and considers repetition as a barbarian operation linked with foundational categories of civilization. Using a multiplying, kaleidoscopic lens, the chapter highlights barbarism in repetition and as repetition and discusses the ways in which the overdetermined name “barbarian” can be repeated into new senses in the space of literature. It also looks at the concept of repetition in relation to two other concepts: “history” and “allegory.”
Allison Carruth
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195394429
- eISBN:
- 9780190252809
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195394429.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within ...
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This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within the larger discourse of citizenship and rights. It offers a reading of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to show how human compassion, which is necessary to act on behalf of other animals, might come at the expense of human affinities with other human beings. The chapter also considers an essential component of postcolonial ecocriticism: the human consumption of the other-than-human world and, by extension, human complicity in perpetuating those systems.Less
This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within the larger discourse of citizenship and rights. It offers a reading of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to show how human compassion, which is necessary to act on behalf of other animals, might come at the expense of human affinities with other human beings. The chapter also considers an essential component of postcolonial ecocriticism: the human consumption of the other-than-human world and, by extension, human complicity in perpetuating those systems.
Simon During
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199980963
- eISBN:
- 9780190910846
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the ...
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This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005) ultimately take an ethical turn, in which the style is engaged rather than detached, authorial figures develop sympathy for marginalized groups, and central characters become members of subaltern communities. In other words, Coetzee’s commitment to postcolonialism both complicates and qualifies his commitment to Kafka’s modernism.Less
This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005) ultimately take an ethical turn, in which the style is engaged rather than detached, authorial figures develop sympathy for marginalized groups, and central characters become members of subaltern communities. In other words, Coetzee’s commitment to postcolonialism both complicates and qualifies his commitment to Kafka’s modernism.
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.
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312137
- eISBN:
- 9781846315244
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315244.003
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first ...
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In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace (1999), he paints a remarkably bleak scenario of South Africa. In particular, it portrays the relations between communities in a negative light, which Derek Attridge argues is a hindrance to, rather than a support of, the enormous task of reconciliation and rebuilding of South Africa. The African National Congress objected to the novel's supposed racism, but ignored the extent to which it explores the systemic aspect of the rape epidemic in South Africa. This chapter compares Disgrace with another Coetzee novel, The Lives of Animals (2001), and shows how the former tackles social violence and the extent to which ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’ are intertwined with the culture of patriarchy. It also examines how the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission containing the testimony of victim-survivors highlight the similarity between the perverse uses of non-human animals in place of humans.Less
In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace (1999), he paints a remarkably bleak scenario of South Africa. In particular, it portrays the relations between communities in a negative light, which Derek Attridge argues is a hindrance to, rather than a support of, the enormous task of reconciliation and rebuilding of South Africa. The African National Congress objected to the novel's supposed racism, but ignored the extent to which it explores the systemic aspect of the rape epidemic in South Africa. This chapter compares Disgrace with another Coetzee novel, The Lives of Animals (2001), and shows how the former tackles social violence and the extent to which ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’ are intertwined with the culture of patriarchy. It also examines how the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission containing the testimony of victim-survivors highlight the similarity between the perverse uses of non-human animals in place of humans.
Stephen Morton
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846318498
- eISBN:
- 9781781380758
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318498.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chapter three considers how the writing of Richard Rive, Alex la Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zoë Wicomb highlighted the role of emergency legislation in the formation of South Africa’s apartheid state, ...
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Chapter three considers how the writing of Richard Rive, Alex la Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zoë Wicomb highlighted the role of emergency legislation in the formation of South Africa’s apartheid state, and the enforcement of the ruling apartheid ideology. Starting with a consideration of South Africa’s emergency legislation, and the socio-historical context in which it emerged, the chapter examines how literary texts contested the apartheid government’s emergency legislation by exposing the sovereign power and force, which underpins the apartheid state – in particular through practices such as indefinite detention and torture. The chapter then considers how, by publicly articulating the conditions of writing in a state of emergency, writers such as Rive, la Guma, and Coetzee question the political autonomy of art and writing, and foreground the importance of writing as a public discourse through which to express the experience of violence sanctioned by the apartheid state.Less
Chapter three considers how the writing of Richard Rive, Alex la Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zoë Wicomb highlighted the role of emergency legislation in the formation of South Africa’s apartheid state, and the enforcement of the ruling apartheid ideology. Starting with a consideration of South Africa’s emergency legislation, and the socio-historical context in which it emerged, the chapter examines how literary texts contested the apartheid government’s emergency legislation by exposing the sovereign power and force, which underpins the apartheid state – in particular through practices such as indefinite detention and torture. The chapter then considers how, by publicly articulating the conditions of writing in a state of emergency, writers such as Rive, la Guma, and Coetzee question the political autonomy of art and writing, and foreground the importance of writing as a public discourse through which to express the experience of violence sanctioned by the apartheid state.
Kathryn Van Wert
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056289
- eISBN:
- 9780813058078
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056289.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Kathryn Van Wert’s chapter entertains modernism’s experiments with depersonalization, looking to Rainer Maria Rilke and J. M. Coetzee in conversation with political theorist Jean Comaroff to address ...
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Kathryn Van Wert’s chapter entertains modernism’s experiments with depersonalization, looking to Rainer Maria Rilke and J. M. Coetzee in conversation with political theorist Jean Comaroff to address the body as living “with an open wound” at the height of colonial empire and within post-apartheid discourse. In these wounded modernist bodies, she argues, we may find an emergent material-affective response to the failed ethics of a juridico-political rhetoric dependent on a closed model of mind and body. Van Wert concludes by theorizing an ecological body politic whose openness—affectively and materially—must accept risk and contingency in order to gain vitality within modernity.Less
Kathryn Van Wert’s chapter entertains modernism’s experiments with depersonalization, looking to Rainer Maria Rilke and J. M. Coetzee in conversation with political theorist Jean Comaroff to address the body as living “with an open wound” at the height of colonial empire and within post-apartheid discourse. In these wounded modernist bodies, she argues, we may find an emergent material-affective response to the failed ethics of a juridico-political rhetoric dependent on a closed model of mind and body. Van Wert concludes by theorizing an ecological body politic whose openness—affectively and materially—must accept risk and contingency in order to gain vitality within modernity.
Carrol Clarkson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823254156
- eISBN:
- 9780823260898
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823254156.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s ...
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This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.Less
This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.