J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture : / Andrew Gibson

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibson, Andrew, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism in literature.

Neoliberalism in popular culture.

Coetzee, J. M., 1940---Criticism and interpretation.

Coetzee, J. M.

Genre:

Literary criticism

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 pages)

Place of Publication:

Oxford Oxford University Press 2022

Summary:

J.M. Coetzee is the leading English-language novelist today. He is also, in a characteristically low-key, understated way, a cultural heretic. This book presents his 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's counterblast comes from a 'global-Southern' perspective. A growing number of often brilliant critiques of neoliberalism have been appearing, and this book coincides with them. But there has so far been comparatively little sustained and incisive critique of neoliberal culture. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book helps to remedy that lack. On that basis, it 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', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and unconvincing progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere if bleak inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an insufficient age.

Contents:

Preface

Introduction

1 Self-Reductions

2 Impoverishment of Resources

3 Sobriety and the New Eudaemonism

4 The Creation of Difficulty

5 The Refusal of Theodicy

6 Countenancing Grace

Coda Aesthetics of Failure

ISBN:

0-19-259979-8

0-19-189048-0

0-19-259978-X