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In her analysis of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee's
literary and intellectual career, Jane Poyner illuminates the
author's abiding preoccupation with what Poyner calls the "paradox
of postcolonial authorship". Writers of conscience or
conscience-stricken writers of the kind Coetzee portrays, whilst
striving symbolically to bring the stories of the marginal and the
oppressed to light, always risk reimposing the very authority they
seek to challenge. From Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year, Poyner
traces how Coetzee rehearses and revises his understanding of the
ethics of intellectualism in parallel with the emergence of the
"new South Africa". She contends that Coetzee's modernist
aesthetics facilitate a more exacting critique of the problems that
encumber postcolonial authorship, including the authority it
necessarily engenders. Poyner is attentive to the ways Coetzee's
writing addresses the writer's proper role with respect to the
changing ethical demands of contemporary political life.
Theoretically sophisticated and accessible, her book is a major
contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to
postcolonial studies.
The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of
a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from
apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa's socio-economic
reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary
South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary
experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or
contesting the idea of the "new South Africa". The mediatising of
truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet
covert past, the shaping for "unimagined communities" of an
inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing
capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as
environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling
restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key
nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates
on world-literature to register the "shock" of an uneven modernity
produced by a capitalist world economy.
A 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title In September 2003 the
South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most
influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the
Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to
contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his
work makes into South African political discourse and the field of
postcolonial studies. Taking the author's ethical writing as its
theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding
Coetzee's fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of
Coetzee's singular, modernist response to the apartheid and
postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the
first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives
of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of
the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee's roles as a South African
intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and
his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South
Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of
public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his
explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays
collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate,
provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee's writing.
The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of
a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from
apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa's socio-economic
reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary
South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary
experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or
contesting the idea of the "new South Africa". The mediatising of
truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet
covert past, the shaping for "unimagined communities" of an
inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing
capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as
environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling
restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key
nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates
on world-literature to register the "shock" of an uneven modernity
produced by a capitalist world economy.
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