You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Books tell stories about our lifeworld. In this book Jan Coetzee invites us to critically inquire into the aims, the content, and the context of the stories contained in a collection of old books from an old world. Without opening these old texts and without converting the original print on the pages to meaning and message, Coetzee brings the books into a dialogue with each other. Together with accompanying sculpted and/or found objects these books take on a new, broader function. By gathering them in one volume they attain a different character and tell us more than what the individual books ever could.
The chapters in this book reflect on the practice of using narratives to understand individual and social reality. They all reveal dimensions of the same concrete reality: contemporary society of Central South Africa. Except for two, all the chapters originated from research in the program The Narrative Study of Lives, situated in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Each chapter opens a window on an aspect of everyday life in Central South Africa. Each window displays the capacity of the narrative as a methodological tool in qualitative research to open up better understandings of everyday experience. The chapters also reflect on the epistemological journey towards unwrapping and breaking open of meaning. Narratives are one of many tools available to sociologists in their quest to understand and interpret meaning. But, when it comes to deep understanding, narratives are particularly effective in opening up more intricate levels of meaning associated with emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences.
Increasingly, development requires a new approach. For a long time it has focused on broad societal structures, neglecting the capacity, creativity and insight of individuals on the ground. This volume aims to change that by taking into account particular histories and individual actors, without forgetting the broad structures in which they live and work.
The luminous new novel from 'one of the best writers of our time', double Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. 'Full of truth, tearfully moving to read... Brilliant' Evening Standard Simón and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Inés. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive. But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simón and Inés are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness. The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions. * A New York Times Notable Book * ___________________ 'Extraordinary... Coetzee stands as the pre-eminent novelist in the English-writing world' New Statesman 'You will read its cool, dry final sentences - as I did - with tears in your eyes' The Times
Table of contents
Wide-ranging and engaging, Selves in Question considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa.The twenty-seven interviews presented here consider both the ontological status and the representation of the self. They remind us that the self is constantly under construction in webs of interlocution and that its status and representation are always in question. The contributors, therefore, look at ways in which auto/biographical practices contribute to placing, understanding, and troubling the self and selves in postcolonies in the current global constellation. They examine topics such as the contexts conducive to produ...
Readers' Liberation addresses question of what we should be reading to obtain information, examining how past readers encountered the same problems that today's readers face, and how they dealt with them.
In this volume leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness, the way in which survivors remember and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.