J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus typify the concerns of his later writings. These concerns are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a post-secular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifice inherent to any attempt to both count, or account, for life. This dynamic is not simply thematized. Rather, through what I am terming Coetzee's literary thinking, the ethico-political import of ‘life’ in Coetzee's late works is bound up with the question of their meaning as literary works. Accordingly, Coetzee's literary thinking helps to address the interaction of life and form that is at the center of debates about affect and the body, animal and posthuman life, and the formal distinctiveness of the literary work.

In this esssay I highlighted the new postcolonial views and issues aroused from the cinematic readaptation of "The planet of the apes". The problem of identity, the constant pursuit of a home, the alienation of the Creole. All these issues, embodied by the character of Caesar,  have been considered through some examples of contemporary postcolonial authors: J.M. Coetzee (Foe), Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea) and Derek Walcott (Collected Poems).

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.

Resumo: O presente artigo disserta sobre a capacidade da literatura, a partir de uma leitura de 2666, de Roberto Bolaño, e de Elizabeth Costello, de J. M. Coetzee. Compreendo que as duas obras versam, ainda que de modos distintos, sobre a relação entre literatura e mal, e fazem conjecturar sobre os ganhos e as perdas quando o mal "cabe na literatura". Tendo em conta a afirmação de Derrida de que a literatura é uma instituição em que se pode dizer tudo, o artigo busca indicar a ambiguidade presente nos atos de imaginar, escrever e ler sobre o mal. Abstract: This article discusses the limits of literature from reading 2666, by Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. Although it is in different fashions, both literary texts work on the relationship between literature and evil in a way that makes us think about this relation's advantages and disadvantages. Having in mind Derrida's assumption that literature is an institution where everything can be said, this text attempts to point out the ambiguity in the acts of imagining, reading and writing about evil. Resumen: Este artículo discute los límites de la literatura a partir de una lectura de 2666, de Roberto Bolaño, y Elizabeth Costello, de J. M. Coetzee. Si bien están hechos de distintos modos, se puede afirmar que ambos textos literarios tratan de la relación entre la literatura y el mal, permitiendo conjeturar acerca de las ventajas y desventajas presentes en dicha relación. Teniendo en cuenta la suposición de Derrida de que la literatura es una institución en la que se puede decir todo, este texto intenta señalar la ambigüedad de los actos de imaginar, leer y escribir sobre el mal.

This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually-referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. The study goes on to purport that without acknowledging Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot be fully understood. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of posthumanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.

8/2018 issue of Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw including:
“Scratching Claw Marks on the Lid”: The (Dis)abled Female Character in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan
Justyna Dąbrowska
Artistic Forms of Consciousness Representation in the Dramatic Works by Oleksandr Oles Zemlya Obitovana and Nich na Polonyni
Viktoriya Atamanchuk
The Ethics of Female Silence in the Works of Witold Gombrowicz and J.M. Coetzee
Paweł Wojtas
The Viability of Experimental Narratives: A Contextualization of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” in the Era of Media Streaming
Lech Zdunkiewicz
Unieważnienie małżeństwa / nullite de mariage : analiza porownawcza terminow i ich funkcjonowanie w dyskursie normatywnym polskim i francuskim
Paulina Mazurkiewicz
Przezwisko oraz jego miejsce w systemie polskiego i wschodniosłowiańskiego onomastykonu – proba redefinicji
Magdalena Kawęcka
Animals as a Source Domain for Metaphorical Expressions in English Economic Discourse
Maria Lojko
(Nie)oficjalna toponimia Sankt Petersburga
Roża Kochanowska
Frazeologiczny obraz świata w aspekcie lingwistyki antropologicznej (na przykładzie funkcjonowania związkow frazeologicznych we wspołczesnym języku rosyjskim)
Elwira Stefańska
Primus inter pares – jak rozwijać i wykorzystywać potencjał ucznia zdolnego na zajęciach językowych
Eliza Chabros

This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative and provocative Elizabeth Costello as a dialogic instigator who emerged during the interstitial space between his South African fictions and his citizenship in Australia, where he moved after publishing 1999s Disgrace. Over the last four decades, Coetzee’s engagement with white female subjectivity has taken three different yet sequential forms: first, via his female narrators Magda (1977), Susan Barton (1986), and Mrs Curren (1990) he has explored the ways in which white women’s voices enter into and are negated from male-dominated institutions like literary and social production. Second, in Disgrace (1999), he creates a narrative about the impossibility of the arrogant male belief that one can ‘be the woman’ (160), embody her narrative, and write her as anything other than his idea of her. Finally, in his creation of Elizabeth Costello (2003, 2005), Coetzee undertakes an act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself.