J. M. Coetzee's Poetics of the Child
Subtitle: Arendt, Agamben, and the responsibilities of Literary Creation
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9781350138421
Description: "Tracing how central tensions in J.M. Coetzee's fiction converge in and are made visible by the child figure, this book establishes the centrality of the child to Coetzee's poetics. Through readings of novels from Dusklands to The Schooldays of Jesus, Charlotta Elmgren shows how Coetzee's writing stages the constant interplay between irresponsibility and responsibility-to the self, the other, and the world. In articulating this poetics of (ir)responsibility, Elmgren offers the first sustained engagement with the intersections between the writing of J.M. Coetzee and the philosophical thought of Giorgio Agamben. Key to the argument is Agamben's idea of infancy, the experience of holding thought in suspense, which is shown to productively complement earlier critical perspectives that, drawing on Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, find in Coetzee's writing an ethics of hospitality to an alterity that is always yet to emerge. With reference also to Hannah Arendt's thinking on natality and education, Elmgren demonstrates the inextricable links in Coetzee's writing between freedom, play, and serious attention to the world. The book is structured around five central dynamics of a "poetics of the child" in Coetzee's works: the child as a figure of truth-telling and authenticity; the ethics of the not-so-other child; the child, new beginnings and care for the world; infancy and the poetics of perpetual study; and the redemptive potential of the nonposition of infancy. Offering a fresh contribution to the field of literary childhood studies, this study shows the critical possibilities in thinking about-and with-childlike openness and childish experimentation when approaching the writing and reading of the work of J.M. Coetzee and beyond"--