Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351759981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the ‘real’ and ‘fictions of the real’, and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms). In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee’s works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
J.M. Coetzee: Fictions of the Real
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351759981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the ‘real’ and ‘fictions of the real’, and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms). In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee’s works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351759981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the ‘real’ and ‘fictions of the real’, and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms). In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee’s works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing
Author: David Attwell
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198746334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee is one of the world's most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores 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 Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin--Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee's work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection. Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and given early access to Coetzee's archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is a fresh, fascinating take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198746334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee is one of the world's most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores 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 Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin--Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee's work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection. Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and given early access to Coetzee's archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is a fresh, fascinating take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.
A Story of South Africa
Author: Susan V. Gallagher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa. Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's people. Her story reaches from the beginnings of Afrikaner nationalism to the recent past: the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, and the Soweto uprising. As a result of his rejection of liberal and socialist realism, Coetzee has been branded an escapist, but Gallagher ably defends him from this charge. Her cogent, convincingly argued examination of his novels demonstrates that Coetzee's fictional response is "apocalyptic in the most profound Biblical sense, obscurely pointing toward ineffable realities transcending discursive definition." Viewing Coetzee's fiction in this context, Gallagher describes a new kind of novel "that arises out of history, but also rivals history." This analysis reveals Coetzee's novels to be profound responses to their time and place as well as richly rewarding investigations of the storyteller's art.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa. Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's people. Her story reaches from the beginnings of Afrikaner nationalism to the recent past: the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, and the Soweto uprising. As a result of his rejection of liberal and socialist realism, Coetzee has been branded an escapist, but Gallagher ably defends him from this charge. Her cogent, convincingly argued examination of his novels demonstrates that Coetzee's fictional response is "apocalyptic in the most profound Biblical sense, obscurely pointing toward ineffable realities transcending discursive definition." Viewing Coetzee's fiction in this context, Gallagher describes a new kind of novel "that arises out of history, but also rivals history." This analysis reveals Coetzee's novels to be profound responses to their time and place as well as richly rewarding investigations of the storyteller's art.
Disgrace
Author: J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Disgrace
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Disgrace
Elizabeth Costello
Author: J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705500
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705500
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.
J.M. Coetzee
Author: J.C. Kannemeyer
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1921942975
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1424
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee: a life in writing is the first biography of Nobel prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. A global publishing event of the rarest kind, the book has been written with the full co-operation of Coetzee, who granted the author interviews, and put him in touch with family, friends, and colleagues who could talk about events in Coetzee’s life. For the first time, Coetzee allowed complete access to his private papers and documents, including the manuscripts of his sixteen novels. J.C. Kannemeyer has also made a study of the enormous body of literature on Coetzee, and through archival research has unearthed further information not previously available. The books deals in depth with Coetzee’s origins, early years, and first writings; his British interlude from 1962–65; his time in America from 1965–71; his 30 years back in South Africa, when he achieved international recognition and won the Booker prize; and his Australian years since 2002, during which time he won the Nobel Prize. J.M. Coetzee: a life in writing is a major work that corrects many of the misconceptions about Coetzee, and that illuminates the genesis and implications of his novels. This magisterial biography will be an indispensable source for everybody concerned with Coetzee’s life and work.
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1921942975
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1424
Book Description
J.M. Coetzee: a life in writing is the first biography of Nobel prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. A global publishing event of the rarest kind, the book has been written with the full co-operation of Coetzee, who granted the author interviews, and put him in touch with family, friends, and colleagues who could talk about events in Coetzee’s life. For the first time, Coetzee allowed complete access to his private papers and documents, including the manuscripts of his sixteen novels. J.C. Kannemeyer has also made a study of the enormous body of literature on Coetzee, and through archival research has unearthed further information not previously available. The books deals in depth with Coetzee’s origins, early years, and first writings; his British interlude from 1962–65; his time in America from 1965–71; his 30 years back in South Africa, when he achieved international recognition and won the Booker prize; and his Australian years since 2002, during which time he won the Nobel Prize. J.M. Coetzee: a life in writing is a major work that corrects many of the misconceptions about Coetzee, and that illuminates the genesis and implications of his novels. This magisterial biography will be an indispensable source for everybody concerned with Coetzee’s life and work.
Here and Now
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124919
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
“[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . It’s a pleasure to be in their company.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “An extended meditation on the processes of friendship, [Here and Now] has something substantive to offer.”—The New York Times Book Review After a meeting at an Australian literary festival brought them together in 2008, novelists Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee began exchanging letters on a regular basis with the hope they might “strike sparks off each other." Here and Now is the result: a three-year epistolary dialogue that touches on nearly every subject from sports to fatherhood, literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, death, marriage, friendship, and love. Their high-spirited and luminous correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and reveal their delight in each other’s friendship on every page.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124919
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
“[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . It’s a pleasure to be in their company.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “An extended meditation on the processes of friendship, [Here and Now] has something substantive to offer.”—The New York Times Book Review After a meeting at an Australian literary festival brought them together in 2008, novelists Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee began exchanging letters on a regular basis with the hope they might “strike sparks off each other." Here and Now is the result: a three-year epistolary dialogue that touches on nearly every subject from sports to fatherhood, literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, death, marriage, friendship, and love. Their high-spirited and luminous correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and reveal their delight in each other’s friendship on every page.
Strong Opinions
Author: Chris Danta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441137149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzee's most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzee's decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzee's direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzee's explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441137149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzee's most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzee's decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzee's direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzee's explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.
Secretary of the Invisible
Author: Mike Marais
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
How do individuals, who are part of a community, respond to the stranger as a stranger: i.e. without simply positioning this outsider in opposition to the community in which they are located? How may individuals receive something unknown and therefore surprising into their world without compromising it by identifying it in the terms of that world? In this study, Mike Marais traces the various ways in which Coetzee's fiction, from Dusklands through to Slow Man, repeatedly poses such questions of hospitality. It is shown that the form of ethical action staged in Coetzee's writing is grounded not in the individual's willed and rational achievement, but in his or her invasion and possession by the strangeness of the stranger. This ethic of hospitality, Marais argues, has a strong aesthetic dimension: for Coetzee, the writer is inspired to write by being acted upon by a force from beyond the phenomenal world. The writer is a secretary of the invisible. She or he is responsible to and for the invisible. Marais maintains that this understanding of writing as an involuntary response to that which exceeds history is evident from the first in Coetzee's fiction. In readings of the novels of the apartheid era, he traces this writer's rueful, ironic awareness of the limited, even incidental, form of political engagement that may emanate from such an aesthetic. He then goes on to argue that if it is the writer's obligation to render visible the invisible, writing must be a task that can never be completed. What is more, such writing is thus bound to be iterative in form. With this in mind, he traces the structural similarities between Coetzee's writing of the apartheid period and his post-apartheid and Australian writing, arguing that the later texts are self-reflexively aware of their endlessly repetitive nature. These contentions are developed incrementally through close readings of the individual novels that focus on recurring metaphors of hospitality - visitor, the stranger, the house, the castaway, the invisible, the dream, and the child.
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
How do individuals, who are part of a community, respond to the stranger as a stranger: i.e. without simply positioning this outsider in opposition to the community in which they are located? How may individuals receive something unknown and therefore surprising into their world without compromising it by identifying it in the terms of that world? In this study, Mike Marais traces the various ways in which Coetzee's fiction, from Dusklands through to Slow Man, repeatedly poses such questions of hospitality. It is shown that the form of ethical action staged in Coetzee's writing is grounded not in the individual's willed and rational achievement, but in his or her invasion and possession by the strangeness of the stranger. This ethic of hospitality, Marais argues, has a strong aesthetic dimension: for Coetzee, the writer is inspired to write by being acted upon by a force from beyond the phenomenal world. The writer is a secretary of the invisible. She or he is responsible to and for the invisible. Marais maintains that this understanding of writing as an involuntary response to that which exceeds history is evident from the first in Coetzee's fiction. In readings of the novels of the apartheid era, he traces this writer's rueful, ironic awareness of the limited, even incidental, form of political engagement that may emanate from such an aesthetic. He then goes on to argue that if it is the writer's obligation to render visible the invisible, writing must be a task that can never be completed. What is more, such writing is thus bound to be iterative in form. With this in mind, he traces the structural similarities between Coetzee's writing of the apartheid period and his post-apartheid and Australian writing, arguing that the later texts are self-reflexively aware of their endlessly repetitive nature. These contentions are developed incrementally through close readings of the individual novels that focus on recurring metaphors of hospitality - visitor, the stranger, the house, the castaway, the invisible, the dream, and the child.
On J. M. Coetzee
Author: Ceridwen Dovey
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1743820658
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 43
Book Description
‘I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.’ For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1743820658
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 43
Book Description
‘I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.’ For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.