- Title
- The incurious seeker: waiting, and the search for the stranger in the fiction of Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee
- Creator
- Marais, Mike
- Date
- 2014
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143971
- Identifier
- vital:38299
- Identifier
- https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/22380/18161
- Description
- In J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett, Patrick Hayes argues that Coetzee, while influenced by Beckett’s prose style, assimilates it in such a way that his writing not only departs from the latter’s solipsism but also provides “an anti-foundational imagining of moral community” (71). While there is much merit to this argument, Hayes’s distinction between Beckett’s solipsism and Coetzee’s concern with community downplays the extent to which the human subject’s conception of herself depends on the differential process through which community establishes itself. In the first section of this paper I show that, already in Murphy, we find evidence in support of Ileana Marculescu’s argument that Beckett inscribes solipsism in his writing only to subvert it. Murphy’s attempts at solipsistic knowledge fail precisely because he has been estranged from himself by language and community. What appears to be solipsism is, in fact, a search for the self from which he has been divided by community. In Beckett’s writing, the self’s concern with its ability to know itself is always a concern with community.
- Format
- 25 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- MediaTropes, Marais, M., 2014. The Incurious Seeker: Waiting, and the Search for the Stranger in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee. MediaTropes, 4(2), pp.6-30., MediaTropes volume 4 number 2 6 30 2014 1913-6005
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.( https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/about)
- Hits: 672
- Visitors: 829
- Downloads: 168
Collections
Marais, Mike (Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | The Incurious Seeker.pdf | 280 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |