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“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 a...
This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth ofliterature, philosophy, and theory, this book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions.It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being',...
The first critical survey of its kind devoted solely to literary evaluation Companion to Literary Evaluation bridges the gap between the non-academic literary world, where evaluation is deeply ingrained, and the world of academia, where evaluation is rarely considered. Encouraging readers to formulate and articulate arguments that balance instinctive judgment and reasoned assessment, this unique volume addresses key issues regarding literary values from the perspective of analytical aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. Bringing together a diverse panel of contributors, the Companion explores competing theories of literary evaluation, the reasons for evaluating theater and lyric poetr...
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.
An authoritative review of literary biography covering the seventeenth century to the twentieth century A Companion to Literary Biography offers a comprehensive account of literary biography spanning the history of the genre across three centuries. The editor – an esteemed literary biographer and noted expert in the field – has encouraged contributors to explore the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the writing of biographies of writers. The text examines how biographers have dealt with the lives of classic authors from Chaucer to contemporary figures such as Kingsley Amis. The Companion brings a new perspective on how literary biography enables the reader to deal with t...
When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again. Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove’s time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters—an older woman navigat...
A bold and brilliant new treatment of blackness in ancient Greek literature and visual culture as well as modern reception.
This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii, which followed the dissolution of the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown, the former transitioned from a ‘sovereign’ to a ‘disciplinary’ mode of administration of their peripheries, the latter from the merciless assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition, prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the writer of the second. In a series of close...
This book links the questions people ask about why things exist, why the world is the way it is, and whether and how it is possible to change their society or world with the societal myths they develop and teach to answer those questions and organize and bring order to their communal lives. It also is about the need for change in western societies’ current organizing concept, classical (Lockean) liberalism. Despite the attempts of numerous insightful political thinkers, the myth of classical liberalism has developed so many cracks that it cannot be put back together again. If not entirely failed, it is at this point unsalvageable in its present form. Never the thought of just one person, t...
The way we communicate with each other is vital to preserving the cultural ecology, or wellbeing, of a place and time. Do we listen to each other? Do we ask the right questions? Do we speak about each other with respect or disdain? The stories that we convey on screens, or what author Carl Plantinga calls 'screen stories, ' are one powerful and pervasive means by which we communicate with each other. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement argues that film and media studies needs to move toward an an approach to ethics that is more appropriate for mass consumer culture and the lives of its citizens. Primarily concerned with the relationship between media and viewers, this book c...