Old Myths-modern Empires


Book Description

This study gives substantial coverage and close critical attention to a wide range of Coetzee's published writings, in the attempt to situate his oeuvre within the framework of both postmodernist and postcolonial theory and criticism. In addition, it links the political and social aspects of Coetzee's work, its South African provenance and its often oblique engagement with contemporary issues, with formal questions regarding structure, rhetoric and narrative strategies as tackled in his novels. By approaching Coetzee's fiction from a variety of critical angles and taking into account both the transformations in the socio-political context of South Africa, and the recent changes in critical reception (exemplified by the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 2003) this book therefore offers a thorough assessment of the author's oeuvre.




A.S. Byatt


Book Description

A.S. Byatt has always alternated novels with shorter fiction. Different literary and linguistic models are applied here to analyse how she guides her readers' understanding of vital, complex issues within her perennial themes of life, creativity and death. This study focuses on certain stories from the six volumes of short fiction she has produced to date. The two novellas of Angels and Insects are scrutinised for their intertextuality, while stories from Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice and Little Black Book of Stories are novel discussions of creativity and related gender issues.




Raced Markets


Book Description

Despite rich archives of work on race and the global economy, most notably by scholars of colour and Global South intellectuals, the discipline of Political Economy has largely avoided an honest confrontation with how race works within the domains it studies, not least within markets. By way of corrective, this book draws together scholarship on the material function of race at various scales in the global political economy. The collective provocation of the contributors to this volume is that race has been integral to the formation of capitalism – as extensively laid out by the racial capitalism literature – and takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of neoliberalism. The chapters within this volume also reinforce that the current political conjuncture, marked by the ascension of neo-fascist power, cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal. Raced Markets will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in political economy and racial capitalism as well as those willing to explore how race takes on new forms in the novel market spaces of contemporary neoliberalism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the New Political Economy.







Intertextuality, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Identity


Book Description

Intertextuality, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Identity presents recent findings and opens new vistas for research by mapping the potential interconnections of intertextuality and intersubjectivity across a range of fields. Multidisciplinary in its focus, it incorporates various research foci and topoi across time and space. It is largely orchestrated around issues of identity in the fields of narration, gender, space, and trauma in British, Irish, American, South African, and Hungarian contexts. The contributions here centre on narrative identity, mediality, and spatiotemporality; modernism and revivalism; cultural memory, counter-histories, and place; female Künstlerdramas and war testimonies; and parasitical intersubjectivity, trauma, and multiple captivities in slave narratives. The volume brings together the seasoned insight of established researchers and the vivacious freshness of young scholars, providing an engaging read. Ultimately, it will prove to be relevant to researchers, teachers, and the general public given its unique approaches and the diversity of the topics explored.




The Body, Desire and Storytelling in Novels by J. M. Coetzee


Book Description

Asserting that Coetzee’s representation of the body as subject to dismemberment counters the colonial representation of the other’s body as exotic and erotically-charged, this study inspects the ambivalence pertaining to Coetzee’s embodied representation of the other and reveals the risks that come with such contrapuntal reiteration. Through the study of the narrative identity of the colonial other and her/his body’s representation, the book also unveils the author’s own authorial identity exposed through the repetitive narrative patterns and characterization choices.




J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power


Book Description

“For I was not, as I liked to believe, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.” Thus the Magistrate confesses in Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. The present study looks closely into the unsettling effects Coetzee’s novels have on the reader and explores the interconnectedness between stylistic choices and moral insights. Its overall aim is to disclose the effectiveness of Coetzee’s narrative strategies to prompt the reader to engage in self-questioning and radical revisions of personal and social moral assumptions. “This is an original and ground-breaking study of Coetzee’s work. Dr Tegla’s insightful close-readings highlight the ways in which Coetzee fictionalizes a variety of moral dilemmas. In particular, she shows how he turns narrative into an instrument for moral discernment. Her narratological approach advances our understanding of his achievements, and I can state without reservation that this book will be referred to as a landmark in Coetzee criticism.” — Richard Bradford, Research Professor and Senior Distinguished Research Fellow, University of Ulster




J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel


Book Description

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognized as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of postcolonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas, Austin). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee's project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee's false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world's most celebrated authors.




J. M. Coetzee


Book Description

J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction illuminates the intellectual and philosophical interests that drive Coetzee's writing. In doing so, it makes the case for Coetzee as an important and original thinker in his own right. Whilst looking at Coetzee's writing career, from his dissertation through to The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and interpreting running themes and scenarios, style and evolving attitudes to literary form, Anthony Uhlmann also offers revealing glimpses, informed by archival research, of Coetzee's writing process. Among the main themes that Uhlmann sees in Coetzee's writing, and which remains highly relevant today, is the awareness that there is truth in fiction, or that fiction can provide valuable insights into real world problems, and that there are also fictions of the truth: that we are surrounded, in our everyday lives, by stories we wish to believe are true. J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction offers a revealing new account of one of arguably our most important contemporary writers.




Acts of Visitation


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- Critical Appropriations and Hermeneutic Resistance -- Penetration: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country -- Resistance: Waiting for the Barbarians -- Parasitism: Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron -- Visitation: Disgrace -- Secrecy: Foe -- (Un)belonging: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime -- Intrusion: The Master of Petersburg and Slow Man -- Fidelities: Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year -- Works Cited -- Index.