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The Novel Today
01 Jan 1977-
About: The article was published on 1977-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 155 citations till now.
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TL;DR: For instance, this paper argued that the essential gesture of the white South African writer can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully [...] that the reader can no longer evade it' (248-50).
Abstract: It seems logical to assume that substantive changes in history should lead to shifts in emphasis in the preoccupations of politically engaged literature. After all, such literature usually erects history as an a priori structure. For this reason forms of social realism have usually been favored by politically engaged fiction writers in the South African context. During the apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer treated with suspicion the \"disestablishment from the temporal\" that results from the modernist attempt to \"transform the world by style\"; she concluded that the \"essential gesture\" of the white South African writer \"can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully [. . .] that the reader can no longer evade it'\" (248–50). A body of writing whose understanding of the relation between text and history is informed by a correspondence theory of truth must of necessity alter
85 citations
TL;DR: The role of the imagination in Disgrace is explored in this paper, where the authors argue that the notions of sensibility, sympathy, and compassion were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the instrumentalist logic of autonomous individuality and, in this regard, they cite Adam Smith's observation in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments that "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea
Abstract: In an early review of Disgrace, Jane Taylor first relates this novels treatment of violence in post-apartheid South Africa to the European Enlightenment's legacy ofthe autonomy ofthe human subject (25), in terms of which each individual is conceived of as a living consciousness separated totally from every other consciousness, and then discusses J.M. Coetzee's postulation of the sympathetic imagination as a potential corrective to the violence attendant on monadic individuality Taylor makes the telling point that, in the eighteenth century, the notions of sensibility, sympathy, and compassion, which the novel repeatedly invokes, were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the instrumentalist logic of autonomous individuality and, in this regard, she cites Adam Smith's observation in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments that "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensation" (qtd. in Taylor 25). Relatively few ofthe many subsequent readings of Disgrace have elaborated on Taylor's necessarily cursory examination of the role of the imagination in Disgrace. For the most part, this aspect of the novel seems to be regarded as a self-evident given and therefore not in need of elaboration. When critical discussions ofthe text do touch on the imagination, they tend automatically to assume that Coetzee deems this faculty capable of countering the individual's solipsistic concern with itself. By extension, they assume that the Bildung which Coetzee's protagonist, David Lurie, undergoes in the course of Disgrace involves the successful development of a sympathetic imagination and hence the capacity to empathize with the other.1
50 citations
TL;DR: Tutu's prayer succinctly summons the impossible injunction under which the new South Africa now labors as discussed by the authors, which is best expressed by the nation's spiritual leader, Bishop Desmond Tutu.
Abstract: ‘‘Nuut se gat . . . dis nie nuut nie, dis dieselfde gemors, gerecycle onder ’n ander naam.’’ —Marlene van Niekerk, Triomf Over the past ten years, the ‘‘new’’ South Africa has been sustained by a prayer and the jussive mode that governs it. This prayer is best expressed by the nation’s spiritual leader, Bishop Desmond Tutu. At the close of his foreword to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he wrote, ‘‘Ours is a remarkable country. Let us celebrate our diversity, our differences. God wants us as we are. South Africa wants and needs the Afrikaner, the English, the coloured, the Indian, the black. We are sisters and brothers in one family—God’s family, the human family.’’ 1 Tutu’s prayer succinctly summons the impossible injunction under which the new South Africa now labors. He congregates all South Africans under the aspiration to a national unity grounded in natural law: ‘‘We are sisters and brothers in one family—God’s family, the human family’’; yet at the same moment, he urges, ‘‘Let us celebrate our diversity, our
47 citations
TL;DR: In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes and that fiction has become redundant in this country.
Abstract: In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually inten...
30 citations
TL;DR: In the case of The Lives of Animals as discussed by the authors, the Tanner lectures at Princeton University in the form of a narrative in which Elizabeth Costello, an elderly Australian novelist delivers two lectures at a prestigious American university on the subject of the responsibilities of human beings toward animals.
Abstract: In 1997-98, J. M. Coetzee elected to deliver the Tanner lectures at Princeton University in the form of a narrative in which Elizabeth Costello, an elderly Australian novelist delivers two lectures at a prestigious American university on the subject of the responsibilities of human beings toward animals. That narrative makes up the bulk of The Lives of Animals. In the absence of an explanation from Coetzee, we do not know why he chose that strategy of mediation, but it appears to function as a distancing device, a way of “insulat[ing] the warring 'ideas'” presented in the piece “against claims of authorship and authority” (Lives of Animals 79). The strategy perhaps originated in 1987, with Coetzee's expression of unease at being obliged when making a public address to speak a “language” other than his own–that is, to communicate in expository or discursive rather than narrative prose (“The Novel Today” 3). Storytelling, Coetzee declared then, is “another, an other mode of thinking” (4).
28 citations