Recommended Readings - EL4800 - Major Authors - Library at SUNY College at Old Westbury

Ebooks: A - C

Acts of Visitation:The Narrative of J. M. Coetzee by María J. López; María J. López
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9789042034075
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
This study traces, in J.M. Coetzee's fictional and non-fictional production, an imaginative and intellectual masterplot deriving from Coetzee's perception of European presence in (South) Africa as having its origin in an act of illegitimate penetration and fraudulent visitation. In Coetzee's novels, the historical and political problem of a hostile occupation and unfair distribution of the land finds a correspondence in the domestic space of house and farm, and the uneasy cohabitation of its occupants, along with the relation between hosts and guests. The seminal dimension of the categories of penetration and visitation is highlighted, as these are shown to operate not only on a spatial level but also on an epistemological, physical, psychological, hermeneutic, metafictional and ethical one: we encounter literary and psychological secrets that resist decipherment, bodies that cannot be penetrated, writers depicted as intruders, parents that ask to be welcomed by their children. This study also identifies, in Coetzee's narrative, an ethical proposal grounded on a logic of excess and unconditionality - a logic of 'not enough' - lying behind certain acts of hospitality, friendship, kindness, care, and guidance to the gate of death, acts that may transform prevailing unequal socio-historical conditions and hostile personal relationships, characterized by a logic of parasitism and intrusion. As the figure of the writer progressively gains explicit prominence in Coetzee's literary production, special attention will be paid to it, as it alternately appears as secretary and master, migrant and intruder, pervert and foe, citizen and neighbour. Overall, Acts of Visitation analyzes how Coetzee's works depict the (South) African land, the Karoo farm, the familial household or the writer's and literary character's house as simultaneously contending and redemptive sites in which urgent historical, ethical, and metafictional issues are spatially explored and dramatized.
In the Middle of Nowhere: J. M. Coetzee in South Africa by Jonathan Crewe
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9780761866930
Publication Date: 2015-12-01
Relying on the author's personal recollections as well as on J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical and fictional works, this book deals with Coetzee's formation as a writer of international prominence, whose life and writing career began in South Africa. Drawing on Coetzee's "South African" writings from Dusklands through Disgrace, the book considers Coetzee's initial positioning in provincial South African political and literary culture as well as his drastic reframing of South African "letters" and his breakout into a global career culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize in 2003. The book considers Coetzee almost exclusively in relation to the South Africa from which he emigrated in 1999, but also emphasizes his momentous revision and undoing of the marginalized genre of "South African Literature" in the service of global authorship. Written in the conviction that Coetzee's "South African" works remain his most impassioned and momentous ones, this book seeks to come to terms with their conditions of possibility and distinctive achievement.
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power: Unsettling Complicity, Complacency, and Confession by Emanuela Tegla
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9789004308435
Publication Date: 2016-01-21
"For I was not, as I liked to believe, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow." Thus the Magistrate confesses in Coetzee's 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. The present study looks closely into the unsettling effects Coetzee's novels have on the reader and explores the interconnectedness between stylistic choices and moral insights. Its overall aim is to disclose the effectiveness of Coetzee's narrative strategies to prompt the reader to engage in self-questioning and radical revisions of personal and social moral assumptions. "This is an original and ground-breaking study of Coetzee's work. Dr Tegla's insightful close-readings highlight the ways in which Coetzee fictionalizes a variety of moral dilemmas. In particular, she shows how he turns narrative into an instrument for moral discernment. Her narratological approach advances our understanding of his achievements, and I can state without reservation that this book will be referred to as a landmark in Coetzee criticism." -- Richard Bradford, Research Professor and Senior Distinguished Research Fellow, University of Ulster

Ebooks: C - W

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory by Elleke Boehmer (Editor); Robert Eaglestone (Editor); Katy Iddiols (Editor)
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9781441101112
Publication Date: 2011-12-29
Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist André Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.
Reading Coetzee by Elizabeth MacFarlane
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9789042037014
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Just as J. M. Coetzee's post-2003 books present essays and narrative alongside one another, this book engages with its ideas through both critical and creative writing. Reading Coetzee interleaves critical essays on Coetzee's works with an autobiographical narrative detailing MacFarlane's more personal response to her reading and writing. The presentation of elements of the creative with the critical, and the critical within the creative, aims to challenge the traditional boundary between the two. This kind of methodology derives from the idea (and practice) of embodiment: that an idea or philosophy does not 'float free', but is tied to the idiosyncrasies, divergences, and subjective 'travel' of its speaker or writer.Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year explicitly address themes which abide more surreptitiously throughout his oeuvre: the divisions and paradoxes which occur the moment pen gains page, the value of literature, and the ethics of embodiment. In revealing the dialogue between writer-self and reader-self, and between author and character, these recent novels invite a rereading of Coetzee's previous literature. Reading Coetzee explores Coetzee's preoccupation with the act of writing using his recent books as a lens through which to view his eight previous novels as well as his memoirs and essays.
The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy by Stephen Mulhall
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9780691137377
Publication Date: 2008-12-28
In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

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