J.M. Coetzee's politics of life and late modernism in the contemporary novel / Marc Farrant.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farrant, Marc, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh, Scotland : Edinburgh University Press Ltd, [2024]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Argues that J. M. Coetzee’s works constitute a form of late modernism that situates life at the heart of questions concerning the politics and ethics of literatureExplores Coetzee’s relation to late modernism and broader intellectual development using original archival materialCovers a broad focus, including most recently published works (that are excluded from earlier studies), and non-fiction writingsSheds news light on the legacies of modernist writing in contemporary literature, and the intersection of literary form and ethico-political debatesSurveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee’s career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee’s writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life that involves an entanglement of politics and ethics, which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout his engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Coetzee’s politics of life yield a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century; a powerful commentary on our interrelatedness that emphasises finitude and contingency as fundamental to the way we live together.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Politics of Life in J. M. Coetzee

Chapter 1 Unwording Life: On Inheriting Late Modernism

Chapter 2 The Mattering of Life: Coetzee’s Apartheid Fictions

Chapter 3 Literature and the Right to Life: Sacrificial Forms in Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace

Chapter 4 Biologico-literary Experiments: The Life of Writing and the Writing of Life

Chapter 5 Infinite Finitude: Crypto-allegory, Cosmopolitanism and the Postsecular in Coetzee’s Jesus Fictions

Conclusion: Literary Agonism in the Contemporary

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Mrz 2024)

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781399507806

139950780X

OCLC:

1428236035