J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style

Abstract

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.

Ludic effects in fiction: A case study of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and its Russian and Ukrainian translations

“…One of the biggest challenges of modern translation studies is the reproduction of idiostyle which is thought of as the complex sequence of the author's linguistic choices that produces certain literary-aesthetic effect [9] or as a peculiar combination of factors by which an author comes to be known or identifiable [15].…”

J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and the poetics of resistance

“…4 And yet the infusion of realistic historical elements in the novel — the vivid depictions of struggle, the brutal violence of the apartheid machine — is not the only departure from Coetzee’s previous work that it enacts. Age of Iron also signals the arrival of what Jarad Zimbler identifies as a “spiritual register” (2014: 197) in Coetzee’s writing: an appeal to transcendent realities that feels more sincere, or less cloaked in a mood of ironic detachment, than evocations of the otherworldly in his previous novels (2014: 176). Zimbler takes a stylistic approach to tracing the emergence of a transcendental appeal in Age of Iron , 5 relating it explicitly to the aesthetic dimension of the novel.…”

“…Zimbler takes a stylistic approach to tracing the emergence of a transcendental appeal in Age of Iron , 5 relating it explicitly to the aesthetic dimension of the novel. Thus, Mrs Curren’s appeal to the soul is not used “to name a particular metaphysical entity”, but rather “to evoke an otherwise occluded zone of existence” (2014: 177), one which has to do with “the power of fiction as fiction, art as art”, or more specifically with “the capacity of fiction — indeed the work of art — to produce the truth content of a particular moment” (2014: 197). As the details of life in South Africa during the “state of emergency” period come more brutally into focus, it seems, so too the insistence of a reality beyond the vagaries of historical circumstance — a transcendent ideal that manifests in the writing as a capacity for aesthetic experience — speaks ever more forcefully.…”

“…Of these, one of the more frequent and familiar is the transition from life to death, where soul identifies that part of the self that survives. It is with this soul that Mrs Curren is increasingly concerned” (Zimbler, 2014: 173).…”

Narrative Mask in Ludic Stylistics of J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction

“…М. Кутзее оповідна маска є одним із прийомів втілення психонаративної та метафікціональної ігор. Перша віддзеркалює психоемоційні трансформації особистості оповідача / персонажа в опозиції «внутрішній vs. зовнішній світ» і спирається на лінгвальні засоби створення психологічно акцентованих художніх форм [5,19]. Друга націлена на акцентоване розмивання референційного статусу художньої оповіді, що породжує принципово неоднозначне сприйняття художньої дійсності, змодельованої в термінах гри [там само].…”