Cirrus@Austlit

'The article confronts postcolonial criticism with postcritique, a proposal by Rita Felski for a hermeneutic strategy aiming to overcome the limits of critique. Because of its self-reflexivity, its liaison with poststructuralism, and the societal categories it mobilizes, postcritics often see postcolonial criticism as a quintessential example of critique. However, postcolonial authors share similar concerns as postcritics, particularly when warning against any hasty conflation between intellectual work and political commitment. This article argues that the postcritical understanding of critique eschews the connection between critique and the realm of culture, thereby running the risk of doing away with context altogether. In order to account for the frameworks or contexts in which cultural objects are produced, without falling into some of the pitfalls of critique that postcritique aims to counter, the article proposes to look at the figure of the author as a bridge between the individual and the collective, as Edward Said suggests. The article closes with an analysis of several (critical and postcritical) readings of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus to provide an example of how authorship can enter the interpretive scene through the figure of ‘late style’.' (Publication abstract)

'This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This article explores the political resonance of the child figure in J. M. Coetzee’s writing by linking the two child characters in his fictional memoir Boyhood (1997) and his recent fiction The Childhood of Jesus (2013). Mirroring some recurring themes and motifs in Coetzee’s early novels, the trope of childhood and the issue of education, as I observe, have become increasingly important, since the late and post-apartheid era, in the author’s ongoing critique of colonialist and neocolonialist forms of power. This article will discuss the ideological dimension and the subversive potentiality embedded in this particular literary trope through the concept of political ‘nonposition’. Developed by Coetzee himself in his critical essays and often associated with the trope of the child, the notion of ‘nonposition’ is significant to understand Coetzee’s novelistic discourse as a form of non-sectarian political participation. Tracing Coetzee’s Australian-phase writing back to post-apartheid South Africa, this article also illuminates part of a continuous trajectory in Coetzee’s oeuvre that will shed light on the politics of his highly self-reflexive metafictional literary practice in general, which has been substantially informed by South African history and politics preceding his emigration to Australia and the development of his late style.'(Publication abstract)