Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 ‘Who Does He Think He Is : Jesus?’ J. M. Coetzee's Last Confession in Summertime
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'With the publication of The Death of Jesus (2019), following The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), J. M. Coetzee's Jesus novels are a completed trilogy. Baffling to reviewers and critics, attempts have been made to situate the Jesus novels in Coetzee's previous oeuvre, and to establish continuity in the author's literary thinking and style. This essay highlights Coetzee's identification with Jesus in Summertime (2009), the last instalment in the author's autobiographical trilogy, where an author named John Coetzee is already dead. The essay reads Summertime as an elaborate ‘posthumous’ confessional design meant by Coetzee to evade the obstacles of secular confession and to enable (fictional) redemption and absolution. Coetzee's invocation of Jesus as ‘a guide’ in turn serves to code authorial death and resurrection as a final act of sacrifice and taking responsibility. Thus providing a sense of finality to Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy, the confessional design of Summertime prepares for a new phase in the author's writing, in the name of Jesus.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Life Writing vol. 20 no. 2 2023 25968734 2023 periodical issue 2023 pg. 287-309
Last amended 28 Mar 2023 10:23:08
287-309 ‘Who Does He Think He Is : Jesus?’ J. M. Coetzee's Last Confession in Summertimesmall AustLit logo Life Writing
Subjects:
  • c
    South Africa,
    c
    Southern Africa, Africa,
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