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"Coetzee, J. M., 1940- Authorship."
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J.M. Coetzee and the life of writing : face-to-face with time
\"J.M. Coetzee is one of the most intriguing of authors in all of world literature. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell illuminates the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee's manuscripts, notebooks and research papers - recently deposited at the Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin - Attwell produces a fascinating story of the creative trajectory and the life out of which the fiction was engendered. He shows convincingly that all of Coetzee's work is autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with self-conscious and never-ending reflection. This is a moving and readable account which is bound to change the way Coetzee is read, by the critics and general reader alike.\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Precarious Author, Diary of a Bad Year, Slow Man
The idea of the author and the \"authority\" on which works of fiction might be based has long been precarious, as evinced by the first modern novel, Don Quixote, when it challenged such authority. This precarity in turn is transferred to the very idea of meaning itself, and the possibility of somehow approaching the \"truth.\" Two of Coetzee's later novels, Diary of a Bad Year and Slow Man shed light on the complex nature of authorial intention. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation and his engagement with New Critical, structuralist, and post-structuralist theory serve to frame the question. Like much of Coetzee's fiction, these works directly engage with the figure of the writer and provoke us to think about the ethical and epistemological implications of literary authority.
Journal Article
Corporeal Suffering: Performing Resistance and Resilience in Slow Man
Slow Man (2005), a novel about migration, dislocation, and belonging, marks Coetzee's withdrawal from the socio-political landscapes of South Africa coinciding with his move to Australia, and his preoccupation in writing fiction with the conflicting demands of representation, auto/biography, and realism. The leg amputation and home nursing of the protagonist, Paul Rayment, following an accident, introduce a discourse on the various meanings of care and the ethics of caring that also acknowledges Rayment's corporeal enfeeblement, aging, and mortality. An intersecting meta-commentary generated by Rayment's dialogue with the metafictional character Elizabeth Costello complicates Coetzee's \"compromised resilient narrative\" of Rayment's hesitant trajectory of resistance, adaptation, and renewal. The focus on the migrant's place in the life of the nation, represented by Rayment's French origins and his recently arrived Slovakian carer, Marijanna Jokic and her family, represents a new departure for Coetzee.
Journal Article
Social Mind as Author(ity) in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we examine J. M. Coetzee’s
Foe (1986) to explain how the conceptual metaphor “ARGUMENT
IS WAR” is central to the novel’s thematics and to the fictional “staging” of
debates concerning authorial emplotment through the workings of the “social
mind”—here the prospective readership. We focus on the inter-character discourse
staged during the civilized confrontation between Susan barton (the character
attempting to be an author) and Daniel Foe (the author) in an attempt to have
their intended stories told. Thus the socially aware minds of both parties
involved greatly contribute to the formation of the well-known plot of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719). As a result of this argumentative
path (ARGUMENT IS WAR), Susan and her framing narrative lose ground to the
impositions by Foe and the exigencies of the social mind. A reading of the novel
in terms of social mind with a focus on CMT reveals the cognitive complexity of
the functioning of the social mind as a controlling medium in
Foe.
Journal Article
\Did This Really Happen?\: Amit Chaudhuri's Acknowledgement of the Autobiographical
In a recent online lecture, the acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri responded to an accusation that has greeted his fiction since the start of his literary career: that since, as he openly admits, his novels contain people and events that are drawn from his own life, they are better thought of as thinly disguised memoirs—as not really novels at all. In this paper, I discuss this charge by drawing on an account by the philosopher Stephen Mulhall of the work of another distinguished novelist—J.M. Coetzee (more specifically, that work which features the character Elizabeth Costello). In particular, I want to establish the pertinence to Chaudhuri’s lecture of Mulhall’s analogy between aspects of that work and the work of the influential art historian and critic Michael Fried on the history of modernist painting. In so doing, I aim to show that the commitment to the projects of literary modernism and realism which Mulhall sees in Coetzee (and Costello), can also be seen in Chaudhuri’s understanding of the sense in which his novels both are, and are not, autobiographical.
Journal Article
Postcolonial studies and the literary : theory, interpretation and the novel
Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.
eBook
Inter-imperiality: An Introduction
This introduction outlines the theory and method of inter-imperiality, then highlights four threads running through this special issue: the longue durée imensions of literary-political history shaped by interacting and successive empires; the understudied philosophies and aesthetics of communities that have endured successive colonizations; the sedimentation of language politics in inter-imperial zones; and, in these contexts, the intertwining of economics with cultural and state formations. This introduction sets the stage for essays on diverse authors, hailing from different hemispheres and imagining in Turkic, Slavic, Arabic, Farsi, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as in French and English.
Journal Article
Reading the Coetzee Papers
The acquisition of J. M. Coetzee's papers by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin represents a turning point in Coetzee studies, the effects of which will be felt for generations. For current readers, the most significant effect will surely be that the evidence of the creative process that has produced Coetzee's authorship will begin to influence how he is read, both within and beyond academic circles. The claims that we as critics make about what and how these texts signify will from now on have to be qualified by what we will come to know about how the novels came into being, and the evidence we have about Coetzee's distinctive forms of creativity. The manuscript entries and revisions are meticulously dated, conveniently so for those who wish to follow their development. In the context of Coetzee criticism, the author would speak of four surprises in the papers.
Journal Article
Trauma's internal transformation: anticipating unconsciousness in The Master of Petersburg
This article parts ways both with conventional application of trauma theory to J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and with critical evaluations that focus primarily on metafiction and allegory. Instead, I argue that Dostoevsky's attempts to mourn Pavel involve a sustained meditation on the traumatized mind examining the conditions of its own trauma, figured in a character suffering from unexpected fits of epilepsy (as the real-life Dostoevsky did). First, I demonstrate how working through trauma in literary studies is predicated on psychoanalytic precepts of active focus and temporal unity. I then read the topic of unconsciousness through Jean-Luc Nancy's theorization of sleep as a passive \"endomorphosis\" that suggests the approach of transformation without actualizing that transformation. Finally, I argue that by focusing on Dostoevsky's imminent loss of consciousness, The Master of Petersburg compels the reader to inhabit what Dominick LaCapra describes as an intermediary zone between acting out and working through trauma, a zone characterized by the productive dispersal of readerly focus. In so doing, The Master of Petersburg offers a critique of institutional and political modes of reconciliation that, in post-apartheid South Africa, tend to substitute the expediency of institutional justice for the complexity of lived traumatic experience.
Journal Article
UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: ‘A BRAVE NEW WORLD’ AND THE CASE OF JM COETZEE
In this paper, I make a case for the need to re-evaluate JM Coetzee’s novel, The Master of Petersburg, in the global context of today, a context of ever increasing authoritarian populisms and erratic acts of violence. Published in 1994, the novel by the Nobel Laureate is set in Russia of the 1860s, against a backdrop of anarchist opposition to the Tsarist state. Critics have been puzzled by the writer’s apparently ‘escapist’ choice of fictional setting at a time when his own country was in a turbulent transition from one dispensation to another. Central to my analysis is the danger of living in radicalised political times, while treading a precarious path between the utopia of revolutionary fervour and unpredictable dystopian unfoldings.
Journal Article