J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style

This is the first book-length study of the distinctive style of J. M. Coetzee's early and middle fictions.

Jarad Zimbler (Author)

9781107624597, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 April 2016

242 pages, 2 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.4 kg

'Zimbler's monograph lends a new dimension to Coetzee studies and invites us to take his approach to others of Coetzee's novels and to the study of other authors, and to incorporate relational analyses in narratological inquiries. This valuable contribution to Coetzee criticism thus holds interest also for scholars in postcolonial literatures and narrative theory.' Alexandra Effe, English Studies

J. M. Coetzee's early novels confronted readers with a brute reality stripped of human relation and a prose repeatedly described as spare, stark, intense and lyrical. In this book, Jarad Zimbler explores the emergence of a style forged in Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of South African culture and politics. Tracking the development of this style across Coetzee's first eight novels, from Dusklands to Disgrace, Zimbler compares Coetzee's writing with that of South African authors such as Gordimer, Brink and La Guma, whilst re-examining the nature of Coetzee's indebtedness to modernism and postmodernism. In each case, he follows the threads of Coetzee's own writings on stylistics and rhetoric in order to fix on those techniques of language and narrative used to activate a 'politics of style'. In so doing, Zimbler challenges long-held beliefs about Coetzee's oeuvre, and about the ways in which contemporary literatures of the world are to be read and understood.

Introduction
1. Neither progress, nor regress
2. New dimensions
3. Lyrical situation and rhythmic intensity
4. Native traditions and strange practices
5. From bare life to soul language
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: general [DSB]