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).
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
'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)
'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)
