J. M. Coetzee's Politics of Life and Late Modernism in the Contemporary Novel

Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam.

The twofold hypothesis of the book, according to Farrant, is that Coetzee’s “works foster an anti-essentialist approach to life ... and that this approach to life is inseparable from an anti-foundational approach to politics” (p. 7). In the five chapters that follow, Farrant analyzes a wide range of Coetzee’s postcolonial fiction, fictionalized memoirs, animal studies, recent Jesus trilogy, and his essays. The great strength of Farrant’s approach is that it brings astute analysis to these highly varied works and demonstrates their connectedness as a body of work.Summing Up: Recommended.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Politics of Life in J. M. Coetzee 1. Unwording Life: On Inheriting Late Modernism 2. The Mattering of Life: Coetzee’s Apartheid Fictions 3. Literature and the Right to Life: Sacrificial Forms in Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace 4. Biologico-literary Experiments: The Life of Writing and the Writing of Life5. Infinite Finitude: Crypto-allegory, Cosmopolitanism and the Postsecular in Coetzee’s Jesus FictionsConclusion: Literary Agonism in the Contemporary Works Cited Index