In 1919 T.S. Eliot famously stated that ‘not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigor...

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13825577.2016.1183422

J.M. Coetzee and the Novel

Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, intertextuality and the non-English literary traditions

Modernism, Idiocy, and the Work of Culture: J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K

SummaryThis article points to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics. This relation is brought to the foreground in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), but it also underlies his previous ones, Age of Iron (1998), Disgrace (2000), and Slow Man (2005), as well as his critical pieces, “The Novel Today” (1988) and the “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1992b), all of which contain echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote ([1605, 1615]2005). My argument is that the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, central in Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production, needs to be re-examined as a fundamentally Cervantine one. The adventures and fate of Don Quixote lie behind Coetzee’s exploration of whether literature may be an effective and ethical guide in our dealings with reality, whethe...

Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity

Scenes and settings: Foe, boyhood, youth, slow man

One of the most habitual metafictional devices employed by J.M. Coetzee is the figure or persona of the author, together with the autobiographical use of the third person and the present tense, the critical reflection on the concepts of ‘autrebiography’ and ‘confession’, or references to alter egos such as ‘John’, ‘John Coetzee’ or ‘Senor C.’ The aim of this article is to discuss Coetzee’s process of fictionalisation of the writer in the light of Borges’s use of the persona of ‘Borges’ or ‘the blind poet’, and of Cervantes’s use of Benengeli in Don Quixote. My basic contention is that Coetzee is echoing and recreating Cervantes’s, and especially Borges’s, self-projections, wondering, as he put it in Stranger Shores, ‘which Borges [Coetzee] is real, which is the other in the mirror’.

J.M. Coetzee and the Novel

Citations

Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, intertextuality and the non-English literary traditions

Modernism, Idiocy, and the Work of Culture: J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K

Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity

Scenes and settings: Foe, boyhood, youth, slow man

Borges, Cervantes and Coetzee, or the fictionalisation of the author

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