Donald Powers

Bio: Donald Powers is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 3 citations.

Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee's Afterlives

Abstract: This paper begins by exploring via Roland Barthes's eponymous book about himself the implications of the premise of J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime that the author John Coetzee is dead. I show how Summertime’s fragmented structure and echoes from Coetzee's earlier novels undermine the idea of a coherent authorial subject, and how emigration and acts of translation in the novel are central to how Coetzee's personality, life, and work are interpreted. The paper goes on to examine the influence of Nabokov's work on Coetzee's later fictions, with an emphasis on the interplay between Nabokov's actual and fictionalised struggles with his biographers. The paper concludes by arguing that J. C. Kannemeyer's biography of Coetzee, notwithstanding its claims to objective detachment, cannot but be read as a text scripted in the spirit of Coetzee's novel.

Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form

Abstract: Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. This dissertation explores three writers who developed a similar literary strategy at such times: they pushed fictionality toward and beyond its limits, but ultimately preserved that fictionality, revealing new value in fiction after challenging it. Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee shaped their writings at these moments to provide readers with an experience that I argue is congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy as espoused by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and others. Such a reading experience avoids an authoritarian mode of communication (a writer dictating a message to a passive audience) by requiring any successful reader of the work to be an active interpreter of the texts' forms, contents, and contexts. The pedagogies Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee infuse into such works as The Years, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, The Mad Man, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime free those works from being either narrowly aestheticist or quotidian social realism; instead, each asks for an active interpretation, one that supports certain habits of reading that may develop into habits of thinking, and those habits of thinking may then affect habits of being. By pushing against fiction's fictionality, these writers of very different backgrounds, geographies, privileges, situations, tastes, and styles created texts that do the pedagogic work of liberating the reader toward a critical, ethical thinking that less Modernist, less polyphonic, and more traditionally fictional texts do not even if those texts are more explicitly committed to particular sociopolitical visions. Monologic, preaching, propagandistic texts may present ethical thought, but they are less likely to stimulate it than the polyphonic pedagogies practiced by Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee in their fiction.

Truth-Telling: Hybridity, Authorship and Ethics

Abstract: This chapter examines the theme of truth and specifically the possibilities and limits of truth-telling. Focusing on the Commission’s translating and interpreting service, the chapter starts with a brief discussion on the TRC’s multi-narrative machine and its production of many, often contradictory, versions of truth. It then moves to explore Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat and Patrick Flanery’s Absolution. If analysis of The House Gun highlights the inadequacy of the TRC’s conceptual categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” as tools to determine the truth, Agaat and Absolution extend their explorations of the notion of truth more formally, deploying a highly experimental combination of narratives which intersect with each other and provide different versions of the same event(s).

‘Who does he think he is: Jesus?’ J. M. Coetzee's Last Confession in Summertime

Abstract: With the publication of The Death of Jesus (2019), following The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), J. M. Coetzee's Jesus novels are a completed trilogy. Baffling to revi...