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y separately published work icon Doubling the Point : Essays and Interviews selected work   interview   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 1992... 1992 Doubling the Point : Essays and Interviews
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his “vision goes to the nerve center of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance.” Doubling the Point takes us to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee’s longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography of striking intellectual, moral, and political force.

Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, Doubling the Point provides rigorous insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility—not only for Coetzee’s own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell, remarkably well attuned to his subject, prompts from Coetzee answers of extraordinary depth and interest (Harvard University Press).

Notes

  • Table of Contents:

    Author’s Note

    Editor’s Introduction

    Beckett

    Interview

    The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett’s Murphy (1970)

    The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt (1972)

    Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style (1973)

    Remembering Texas (1984)

    The Poetics of Reciprocity

    Interview

    Achterberg’s “Ballade van de gasfitter”: The Mystery of I and You (1977)

    The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike (1976)

    A Note on Writing (1984)

    Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech (1987)


    Popular Culture

    Interview

    Captain America in American Mythology (1976)

    The Burden of Consciousness in Africa (1977)

    Four Notes on Rugby (1978)

    Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising (1980)

    Syntax

    Interview

    The Rhetoric of the Passive in English (1980)

    The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device (1980)

    Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language (1982)

    Kafka

    Interview

    Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s “The Burrow” (1981)

    Robert Musil’s Stories of Women (1986)


    Autobiography and Confession

    Interview

    Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky (1985)

    Obscenity and Censorship

    Interview

    The Taint of the Pornographic: Defending (against) Lady Chatterley (1988)

    Censorship in South Africa (1990)


    South African Writers

    Interview

    Man’s Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma (1974)

    Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State (1986)

    Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960—1977 (1984)

    Breyten Breytenbach, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir (1985)

    Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture (1989)

    Retrospect

    Interview

    Notes

    Sources and Credits

    Index

Contents

* Contents derived from the Cambridge, Massachusetts,
c
United States of America (USA),
c
Americas,
:
Harvard University Press , 1992 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Editor's Introduction, David Attwell , single work essay (p. 1-13)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Alternative title: Doubler le cap : essais et entretiens
Language: French
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Editions du Seuil ,
      2007 .
      image of person or book cover 4064393897392767160.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 343p.
      Edition info: 1st ed.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: 3 May 2007.
      ISBN: 2020817276, 9782020817271
      Series: y separately published work icon Le don des langues Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1946 8135177 1946 series - publisher essay

Works about this Work

The Creature-Feeling as Secular Grace : On the Religious in J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction Kai Wiegandt , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Literature and Theology , March vol. 32 no. 1 2018; (p. 69–86)

'In this article, I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Lévinas when addressing theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.' (Publication abstract)

Strange Kinships : Embodiment and Belief in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello Fiona Jenkins , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 28 no. 3 2013; (p. 15-27)
Strange Kinships : Embodiment and Belief in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello Fiona Jenkins , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 28 no. 3 2013; (p. 15-27)
The Creature-Feeling as Secular Grace : On the Religious in J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction Kai Wiegandt , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Literature and Theology , March vol. 32 no. 1 2018; (p. 69–86)

'In this article, I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Lévinas when addressing theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.' (Publication abstract)

Last amended 8 Dec 2014 11:31:40
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