Cirrus@Austlit

'J. M. Coetzee’s previous novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year have more or less dealt with ‘gating’ foreigner or refugee issues, but The Childhood of Jesus(2013) appears to exacerbate these issues. This essay will examine how Coetzee’s novel engages with the question of hospitality for the refugee by reading it alongside Jacque Derrida’s two seminars in Of Hospitality, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality." This essay will f ix this comparative reading in the text by relating it to Coetzee’s treatment of language and pedagogy in the novel. This essay suggests that Coetzee is subverting the Derridean distinction between unconditional hospitality and conditional hospitality by showing how the case examples always take the material conditions as given. Ultimately, this essay suggests that Coetzee’s novel reminds us of the need to hold on and return to the Platonic ideal of unconditional, unconditioned hospitality by presenting a bleak, dismal foreign country where what Derrida calls "the law of hospitality" is violated.'

Source: CAOD.