Strong opinions : J.M. Coetzee and the authority of contemporary fiction

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Bibliographic Information

Strong opinions : J.M. Coetzee and the authority of contemporary fiction

edited by Chris Danta, Sue Kossew and Julian Murphet

Continuum, c2011

  • : hardcover

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-163) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzees work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzees most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzees decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzees direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzees explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Contributors
  • Introduction
  • J.M. Coetzee: the Janus Face of Authority
  • Chris Danta
  • Part One: Place
  • 1. J.M. Coetzee's Australian Realism
  • Elleke Boehmer
  • 2. "[I]n Australia you start zero": the Escape from Place in J.M.
  • Coetzee's Late Novels
  • Melinda Harvey
  • 3. J.M. Coetzee and Patrick White: Explorers, Settlers, Guests
  • Maria Lopez
  • Part Two: Form. 4. Coetzee's Opinons
  • Paul Patton
  • 5. Diary of a Bad Year: Parrhesia, Opinion, and Novelistic Form
  • Julian Murphet
  • 6. Realism and Intertextuality in Coetzee's Foe
  • Anthony Uhlmann
  • Part Three: Limits
  • 7. The Trope of Following in J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man
  • Mike Marais
  • 8. Literary Migration: Shifting Borders in Coetzee's Australian Novels
  • Sue Kossew
  • 9. The Melancholy Ape: Coetzee's Fables of Animal Finitude
  • Chris Danta
  • 10. Silence as Heterotopia in Coetzee's Fiction
  • Bill Ashcroft
  • Bibliography
  • Index.

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