J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture

Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-885791-4
Verlag: Hurst & Co.

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 617 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gibson, Andrew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Postkoloniale Literatur

Über Autor(innen)

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.