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Journal ArticleDOI

Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: Rereading J.M. Coetzee's Foe

15 Oct 2008-Journal of Literary Studies (Taylor & Francis Group)-Vol. 24, Iss: 4, pp 44-62
TL;DR: The authors reread Foe as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, "La Pharmacie de Platon", and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon, and appropriates Grabe's (1989: 176) observation that the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience informs the work.
Abstract: Summary The novels of J.M. Coetzee both invite and reward multiple readings, and Foe (1986) remains one of Coetzee's most deliberately innovative and literary of novels. In a prescient act, a conference on Foe was hosted by the Theory of Literature Department at Unisa as early as 1988, only some two years after its publication, which resulted in the perspicacious and incisive scrutiny of this aesthetically strategic work. More recently, Attridge (2005) has revisited his 1992 examination of Foe, and argued that the novel is both a plea for canonical status and an attempt to widen the canon. Following Attridge's (2005) insightful essay, this article also returns to Foe, and appropriates Grabe's (1989: 176) observation that “the Derridean notion of the textualisation of all experience” informs the work, and therefore rereads it as a commentary on, and critique of, one of Jacques Derrida's most influential essays, “La Pharmacie de Platon”.
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Book
01 Jan 1988
TL;DR: The closing of the American mind as mentioned in this paper is one of the best-sellers in history, and Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today, and it has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change.
Abstract: "The Closing of the American Mind, " a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change.

662 citations


"Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...And the defenders of, what appeared to many as, an abstruse project at a politically explosive kairos could point to Coetzee’s emerging worth as a novelist, since “the anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1994: 8) that was pressing upon him is “usually taken to be the earliest novel in English” (Mullan 2006: 40), namely, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Moreover, subsequent information denotes the formidable impact of Robinson Crusoe upon Coetzee’s development as a writer, and, indeed, his early perplexity at the relationship between a first-person narrator and an...

    [...]

  • ...with difficulty (see, inter alia, Bloom (1987); MacIntyre (1990); Bloom (1994))....

    [...]

  • ...But the debate about canonicity in the field of literary studies – its definition, establishment, boundaries, and, indeed, openness – is fraught with difficulty (see, inter alia, Bloom (1987); MacIntyre (1990); Bloom (1994))....

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Journal ArticleDOI

222 citations


"Foes: Plato, Derrida, and Coetzee: ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…many as, an abstruse project at a politically explosive kairos could point to Coetzee’s emerging worth as a novelist, since “the anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1994: 8) that was pressing upon him is “usually taken to be the earliest novel in English” (Mullan 2006: 40), namely, The Life and Strange…...

    [...]

  • ...But the debate about canonicity in the field of literary studies – its definition, establishment, boundaries, and, indeed, openness – is fraught with difficulty (see, inter alia, Bloom (1987); MacIntyre (1990); Bloom (1994))....

    [...]

Book
15 May 2007
TL;DR: Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual as mentioned in this paper explores Coetzee's roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights.
Abstract: A 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the author's ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzee's fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee's singular, modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee's roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee's writing.

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2002
TL;DR: In the paper to which I am responding, Professor Ayers has set himself the task of formulating a tenable version of realism as discussed by the authors, and has done a number of things: he provides his reading of the origins and developments of the debate about realism and its alternatives in modern philosophy; he criticises some recent prominent ideas, as either inconsistent with realism, and hence as being, as he sees it, idealist, or as being in other ways inadequate; and he spells out, sometimes without fully developing them, different aspects of the views he favours.
Abstract: In the paper to which I am responding, Professor Ayers has set himself the task of formulating a tenable version of realism. Professor Ayers does a number of things: he provides his reading of the origins and developments of the debate about realism and its alternatives in modern philosophy; he criticises some recent prominent ideas, as either inconsistent with realism, and hence as being, as he sees it, idealist, or as being in other ways inadequate; and, he spells out, sometimes without fully developing them, different aspects of the views he favours. Ayers's discussion is both interesting and rich, and my response cannot engage with much of it. I shall certainly not attempt to give an answer to the question in Ayers's title.Article

63 citations