Andrew Gibson

J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. August 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780192599780
• Artikelnr.: 65434166

Autorenporträt

Andrew Gibson was educated at Lord Williams's Grammar School, Thame and St. John's College, Oxford. He has held positions at the University of Hong Kong, the University of London, and Northwestern University. He is Professor Emeritus in Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo and the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.

Inhaltsangabe

* Preface: Literature and Neoliberalism
2022 * Introduction: J.M. Coetzee
Neoliberalism
and Democratic Culture * 1: Self Reductions: Boyhood
Youth
Summertime * 2: Impoverishment of Resources: In the Heart of the Country
Life and Times of Michael K * 3: Sobriety and the New Eudaemonism: Waiting for the Barbarians
Slow Man * 4: The Creation of Difficulty: Foe
Disgrace
The Master of Petersburg * 5: The Refusal of Theodicy: The Lives of Animals
Elizabeth Costello * 6: Countenancing Grace: 'The Vietnam Project'
Age of Iron
The Childhood of Jesus * Coda: Aesthetics of Failure:The Schooldays of Jesus
The Death of Jesus