J.M. Coetzee's revisions of the human posthumanism and narrative form

This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee's oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a 'poetic of testing' which pits intertextual...

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1. Verfasser: Wiegandt, Kai (VerfasserIn)
Format: UnknownFormat
Sprache:eng
Veröffentlicht: Cham, Switzerland Palgrave Macmillan 2019
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Zusammenfassung:This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee's oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a 'poetic of testing' which pits intertextually referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee's reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of post humanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.
Beschreibung:ix, 280 Seiten
ISBN:9783030293055
978-3-030-29305-5