Authors:
- Demonstrates how Coetzee’s work is fundamentally concerned with questioning what constitutes the human
- Reads Coetzee for the first time in relation to literary anthropology
- Situates Coetzee’s oeuvre in the context of current debates about posthumanism, materiality, and social practice theory
Buy it now
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.
Table of contents (6 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
About this book
“Kai Wiegandt’s study offers a nuanced, thoroughgoing and deeply engaging account of novelist J.M. Coetzee’s revision of our core ideas of the human—not least the human sense of uniqueness that we have invested in our belief in reason and conviction of God-likeness. He persuasively analyses the careful ways through which Coetzee deploys narrative as a mode of thinking through such human and post-human questions, so developing a fresh and original approach Wiegandt calls ‘anthropological realism’. Drawing on thinkers from across the French, German and Anglophone traditions, Wiegandt has produced a fiercely insightful and committedly interdisciplinary study.”
— Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford
“J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human offers a bold and compelling argument that is sure to make a serious intervention in Coetzee criticism. Wiegandt introduces several new fields of enquiry in relation to Coetzee’s fiction; the discussions thus reframe well-worn debates in an innovative way, making for unexpected insights in seemingly familiar critical terrain. The book opens up a valuable and thought-provoking perspective on Coetzee’s work, and will be of particular interest to the philosophically-minded Coetzee specialist.”— Carrol Clarkson, Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature, University of Amsterdam
"Tracking skilfully across the shifting terrain of J. M. Coetzee’s fictions, Kai Wiegandt draws out their philosophical and literary intertexts in this lucid, erudite and compelling book, and thereby illuminates a fundamental concern that has persisted throughout Coetzee’s career: to probe and push our ideas of what it is to be human."
— Jarad Zimbler, author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style 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.Reviews
“This is a study that is sure to become an essential reference in Coetzee criticism. Wiegandt sheds new light on worn-out discussions and opens up fresh insights and thought-provoking questions that are bound to inspire future responses to Coetzee’s work. … this book, furthermore, does not only work as a highly valuable and illuminating companion to Coetzee’s fiction but also constitutes apowerful reflection on the value of literature and literary criticism.”
(María J. López, Anglia, Vol. 140 (3-4), 2022)“J.M. Coetzee is renowned for his postmodern metafictional plots and for the philosophical richness and complexity of his texts that have found readerships around the world, often appealing to scholars and intellectuals in particular. In his study J.M. Coetzee's Revisions of the Human (2019), Kai Wiegandt engages with Coetzee's literary negotiations of the human, illuminating the transhistorical reservoir of Western philosophy … . Wiegandt's study is marked by a sense of affordance … .” (Caroline Koegler, Anglistik, Vol. 33 (3), 2022)
Authors and Affiliations
-
Englisches Seminar, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Kai Wiegandt
About the author
Kai Wiegandt is Heisenberg Fellow in the English Department of Universität Tübingen, Germany.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human
Book Subtitle: Posthumanism and Narrative Form
Authors: Kai Wiegandt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29306-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-29305-5Published: 23 January 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-29308-6Published: 26 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-29306-2Published: 22 January 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 280
Topics: Postcolonial/World Literature, Contemporary Literature, African Literature, Poststructuralism, African Politics