Yoshiki Tajiri

Bio: Yoshiki Tajiri is an academic researcher from University of Tokyo. The author has contributed to research in topics: Universality (philosophy) & Modernism (music). The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 4 publications receiving 6 citations.

Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee's Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus , makes use of postmodern pastiche: various literary themes are recycled as if on display in a “ literary theme park.” Coetzee also reuses themes he has explored in his previous works. Here a link can be made to Edward Said’s idea of late style, which includes an element of self-quotation. However, two issues are so important that Coetzee probes them further rather than recycles them. One is a conception of family based not on blood relations, but love. This is part of the other, more fundamental issue: the contingency of the world. By engaging with these subjects, The Childhood of Jesus embodies late style in Coetzee’s own sense of the term.

In quest of ‘other modes of being’: J.M. Coetzee's ontological inquiries

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee's work is characterised by profound meditations on the question of being, though this aspect tends to be obscured by his ethical and political concerns. The characters of his novels are often faced with the fundamental question of why they (have to) exist in the way they do. Typically, Elizabeth Costello wonders, ‘Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?’ This sense of the contingency of being human – the feeling that one could have been non-human – underlies Elizabeth Costello's (and Coetzee's) deep commitment to the lives of animals. This essay aims to illuminate such an ontological theme in Coetzee's work by offering a revaluation of In the Heart of the Country, in which it first substantially emerges, and then by outlining its developments in the recent works such as Elizabeth Costello, the 2006 lecture ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Here and Now and The Childho...

The Fixation on the Womb and the Ambiguity of the Mother in Life & Times of Michael K

Abstract: In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri offers a new reading of the relation between K and his mother in J. M. Coetzee’s fourth novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983), by focusing on the desire to return to the womb. Closely analysing the novel in this light, Tajiri argues that a particular kind of ambiguity concerning K’s relationship with his mother is created by the coexistence of his conscious identification with mother earth and his unconscious desire to be back to the conditions of the foetus that is completely protected by the mother from the world. In the process, he also highlights the relevance of Samuel Beckett’s fixation on the womb and Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth.

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.

A Bridging Fiction: The Migrant Subject in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract: SummaryThe article examines, with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), how the migrant is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life, which is being transformed into memory, and a future life, which has to be imagined before being realised. Drawing on Coetzee’s own metaphor in Elizabeth Costello of writing fiction as constructing a bridge over a chasm between the real world and an imaginary one, as well as Calvino’s similar metaphor in If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) of story being a bridge over a void, the article shows how the narrative in The Childhood of Jesus is located in, and constitutes a passage from, an unspecified past to an indeterminate future. The reader is reminded throughout the narrative of the void beneath the minimalist fictional bridge, and of the problem that the young protagonist, David, has with the logic of conventional numeracy – the hypotext for David’s difficulty with numbers being Musil’s novel, The Confusions...

Belonging to the Human and Non-human Animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Novels

Abstract: This essay places Coetzee’s writing within the context of the recent posthumanist debate concerning the distinction between human and non-human animals, whose contributors include Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe I propose a reading of the figures of animals in Coetzee’s recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), which contributes to the questioning of the divide, particularly with reference to such markers of the limits between humanity and animality as taste Coetzee’s characters from his recent novels are an exercise in the adoption of non-anthropocentric positions: they transgress and contest the borders between the human and the non-human configured as angelic, divine, animalistic, or non-material Coetzee’s recent novels question the divide and suggest new ways of understanding the human–non-human continuum By rejecting binary divisions between human and non-human animals, Coetzee’s prose illustrates the idea of entanglement, in which light his characters cannot be perceived as traditional agents endowed with unified identities, but rather, must be seen as radically entangled, with matter and meaning inextricably connected

Growing Up Against Allegory: The Late Works of J. M. Coetzee

Abstract: The first two books of J. M. Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), are extremely strange. Just when “the Australian fiction,” following the works set in South Africa and various international locations, was thought to be the last phase of Coetzee's career, the Nobel laureate changed tack. The Jesus books challenge readers and critics with their sparse tone, lengthy philosophical dialogues, and allegorical obscurity. Their difficulty seems to shed little light on some of the most intriguing questions about Coetzee's writing: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from Coetzee's earlier fiction are analyzed, with focus on In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Boyhood (1997). Parental roles are found to be vital in the connections between the novel form and allegory. The third section applies these analyses to Childhood and Schooldays. Focus on the books’ references to Plato and Don Quixote helps scrutinize their philosophy and reach the thesis of this essay: that with these books, Coetzee experiments with a form that goes beyond the novel.

Bothering to Believe: Acts of Faith in J. M. Coetzee's Late Novels

Abstract: J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.