Coetzee & co: failure, lies and autobiography. Issue 3 (15th April 2016)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Coetzee & co: failure, lies and autobiography. Issue 3 (15th April 2016)
- Main Title:
- Coetzee & co: failure, lies and autobiography
- Authors:
- Sheehan, Paul
- Abstract:
- Abstract : The most recent critical studies of J. M. Coetzee's oeuvre have paid little attention to the writer's autobiographical fictions, either downplaying their importance or ignoring them altogether. In this essay I make a case for the their formal and thematic significance. Focusing principally, though not exclusively, on the Scenes from Provincial Life (2011), I demonstrate how this trilogy of works is written against the generic impositions of life-writing. Those impositions turn on the notion of triumphalism: every memoir, auto/biography, confessional narrative, and so on, implicitly or explicitly affirms a teleology of achievement, in showing how the self-reflecting subject becomes a self-writing subject capable of narrating its own development. Coetzee's auto-fictions, by contrast, stage a kind of agon with this generic demand by focusing on failure, on solipsistic distraction, and on the nature of belonging. In addition, and following clues from Coetzee's unpublished notebooks, I suggest that the spurs for these textual reworkings can be found in French literature – in particular, the auto-fictive writings of Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The Scenes are finally shown to be not only central to Coetzee's wider novelistic concerns, but also to his ethics of the outsider and the ordinary or everyday.
- Is Part Of:
- Textual practice. Volume 30:Issue 3(2016)
- Journal:
- Textual practice
- Issue:
- Volume 30:Issue 3(2016)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 30, Issue 3 (2016)
- Year:
- 2016
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 3
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2016-0030-0003-0000
- Page Start:
- 451
- Page End:
- 468
- Publication Date:
- 2016-04-15
- Subjects:
- J. M. Coetzee -- life writing -- auto-fiction -- triumphalism -- Samuel Beckett -- belonging -- Alain Robbe-Grillet -- Roland Barthes -- outsider -- Vladimir Nabokov
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals
Semiotics -- Periodicals
801.95 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1158934 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0950-236X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8813.780460
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 302.xml