In 2003, South African writer J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature. Coetzee was credited with being "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization." The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience.
Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee's extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee's depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society. With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.
- Contents
- Introduction: Coetzee and Philosophy
- Part I. People, Human Relationships, and Politics
- 1 The Paradoxes of Power in the Early Novels of J. M. Coetzee
- 2 Disgrace, Desire, and the Dark Side of the New South Africa
- 3 Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication: A Strategy for Reading Diary of a Bad Year
- 4 Torture and Collective Shame
- Part II. Humans, Animals, and Morality
- 5 Converging Convictions: Coetzee and His Characters on Animals
- 6 Coetzee and Alternative Animal Ethics
- 7 Writing the Lives of Animals
- 8 Sympathy and Scapegoating in J. M. Coetzee
- Part III. Rationality and Human Lives
- 9 Against Society, Against History, Against Reason: Coetzee’s Archaic Postmodernism
- 10 Coetzee’s Critique of Reason
- 11 J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker
- 12 Being True to Fact: Coetzee’s Prose of the World
- Part IV. Literature, Literary Style, and Philosophy
- 13 Truth and Love Together at Last: Style, Form, and Moral Vision in Age of Iron
- 14 The Lives of Animals and the Form-Content Connection
- 15 Irony and Belief in Elizabeth Costello
- 16 Coetzee’s Hidden Polemic with Nietzsche
- List of Contributors
- Index
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