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Full Description
Just as J. M. Coetzee's post-2003 books present essays and narrative alongside one another, this book engages with its ideas through both critical and creative writing. Reading Coetzee interleaves critical essays on Coetzee's works with an autobiographical narrative detailing MacFarlane's more personal response to her reading and writing. The presentation of elements of the creative with the critical, and the critical within the creative, aims to challenge the traditional boundary between the two. This kind of methodology derives from the idea (and practice) of embodiment: that an idea or philosophy does not 'float free', but is tied to the idiosyncrasies, divergences, and subjective 'travel' of its speaker or writer.
Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year explicitly address themes which abide more surreptitiously throughout his oeuvre: the divisions and paradoxes which occur the moment pen gains page, the value of literature, and the ethics of embodiment. In revealing the dialogue between writer-self and reader-self, and between author and character, these recent novels invite a rereading of Coetzee's previous literature. Reading Coetzee explores Coetzee's preoccupation with the act of writing using his recent books as a lens through which to view his eight previous novels as well as his memoirs and essays.
Contents
Introduction
This Book is Irregular: On the critical-creative nexus
The middle voice
'I have beliefs but I do not believe in them'
The voice of the literary critic
The critical landscape
Coetzee's recurring blank page
The written is always a compromise
Metaphor as Contagion: On the Postscript of Elizabeth Costello
Elizabeth Costello as Postscript to Coetzee's oeuvre
Lord Chandos's total renunciation of literary activity
Lady Chandos and the problem of metaphor
The Author Divided in Coetzee's Novels
A moment of rupture: The white-haired woman
Time, tense, and aspect
Singing birds
Divided and divined
'A going against': Coetzee, postmodernism, and late style
Where is Coetzee? Authors and characters
Her man and she
The Ethics of Embodiment
The ethics of embodiment: Philosophy and literature
Costello's progress, human to ape
The dark chamber: Ethics and ambiguity
Two suspended elements: sentence, narrative, text
The metaphor of the real
Short fiction
The Nature of It
Museum
The Scar
Triptych
Conclusions
Foreground and background
Late style
The wrong question
Postscript: A Bad Year
References
Index
