'This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of post humanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'Recent years have witnessed a steep rise in studies and monographs on the work of J. M. Coetzee. Many of them have been prompted by the publication of what has come to be known as the Jesus Trilogy, made up of the novels The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019), which in their highly original form and distinctive concerns have opened up the field to new readings and critical approaches to Coetzee’s fiction. Coetzee’s manuscripts at the Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin have also contributed to this increase in critical responses, with lots of critics turning to the exploration of the archive as a new way of analysing different aspects of Coetzee’s life and literary production.' (Introduction)
'Recent years have witnessed a steep rise in studies and monographs on the work of J. M. Coetzee. Many of them have been prompted by the publication of what has come to be known as the Jesus Trilogy, made up of the novels The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019), which in their highly original form and distinctive concerns have opened up the field to new readings and critical approaches to Coetzee’s fiction. Coetzee’s manuscripts at the Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin have also contributed to this increase in critical responses, with lots of critics turning to the exploration of the archive as a new way of analysing different aspects of Coetzee’s life and literary production.' (Introduction)
