Literary cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144148 , vital:38315 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2018.1427849
- Description: Samuel Beckett’s last few plays were all written by invitation and performed before specialist audiences who were familiar with his work and knew what they could expect from him. Arthur Rose quite rightly points out that such expectation is constitutive in nature, that these audiences approached the plays with the baggage of a “preconceived Beckett” (112–13). He is also right when he argues that Beckett, in the plays in question, evinces an awareness of his reification as an author and of the authority of reputation.
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- Date Issued: 2018
“A Step Towards Silence”: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and the Problem of Following the Stranger
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144205 , vital:38320 , DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2016.1249617
- Description: In this article, I argue that Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable evinces the kind of aesthetic ambivalence that Theodor Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, ascribes to the artwork’s location both in and outside of society. By tracing the metaphors used in the narrator’s depiction of the act of narration, I demonstrate that this novel self-reflexively articulates and meditates on its ambivalent position in society. Thereafter, I relate the work’s suspicion of its medium, and therefore its estrangement from itself, to its critique of community’s norms of recognition, which are embedded in language. Finally, I reflect on the potential effect of the text’s aesthetic ambivalence on the reader.
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- Date Issued: 2016
The time of hospitality in Samuel Beckett's Murphy, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144106 , vital:38312 , DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2015.1083193
- Description: In this article, I focus on the temporal dimension of the differential process through which community constitutes itself. If community is premised on the sameness that is enabled by that which it excludes, and sees as a threat, then it must seek always to conserve itself and to render the future – which is hazardous in its uncertainty – calculable, predictable and determinable. In its search for stability and permanence, community must dominate time in such a way that it is overcome, that it withdraws from itself. Arguably, though, we would view time less teleologically and programmatically, if we could relate differently to the difference on which community depends. A form of hospitality that is predicated on an acceptance of otherness – not only that of a community's outsiders, but also the ‘common strangeness’ of its insiders – would alter the ways in which being-in-common is conceived, and would also change our experience of belonging.
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- Date Issued: 2015
An Interview with Ken Barris:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144050 , vital:38306 , DOI: 10.4314/eia.v41i1.9
- Description: Ken Barris was born in Port Elizabeth and lives in Cape Town, where he works at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. His writing includes two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and five novels, the most recent being What Kind of Child (2006) and Life Underwater (2012). His work has been translated into Turkish, Danish, German and Slovenian, and poetry and short fiction have appeared in various anthologies. More recently, he has turned to writing for academic journals. His research interests are postapartheid fiction and language education.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Necrophiliac Narration and the Business of Friends: Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144159 , vital:38316 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2014.918406
- Description: Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of the “new” South Africa, the novel’s treatment of friendship, which cuts across the distinction between the private and the public, reflects obliquely on the nature of the emerging democratic dispensation. In this paper, I explore the link that Galgut constructs between friendship and community, and argue that his portrayal of the former points to the possibility of a form of community that is premised on a “common strangeness.”
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- Date Issued: 2014
Shame, divine cannibalism, and the spectacle of subaltern suffering in Ken Barris's What Kind of Child:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144028 , vital:38304 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC171544
- Description: This essay examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Ken Barns's portrayal of the life of a street child in What Kind of Child. Responses to literary representations of subaltem suffering are sharply divided. On the one hand, there is the commonsense view that such representations require one to imagine what the situation of other people may be like, and that, in doing so, one opens oneself to their experience of life. To the extent that representations of suffering inspire one to reflect on one's relations to others, they are salutary. On the other hand, though, such depictions, like poverty tourism, may be accused of providing a spectacle of distant suffering that one vicariously experiences from a position of privilege and then dircards.
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- Date Issued: 2014
The incurious seeker: waiting, and the search for the stranger in the fiction of Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143971 , vital:38299 , 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.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Versions of hospitality in recent writing on the fiction of JM Coetzee:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144039 , vital:38305 , DOI: 10.4314/eia.v40i1.8
- Description: In one of the interviews in Summertime, Martin, a former colleague, claims that he and the deceased John Coetzee felt their "presence" in South Africa "was legal but illegitimate," that it "was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest," which rendered them "sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland" (209-10). With this statement in mind, Maria J. Lopez argues that a sense of unbelonging underlies J. M. Coetzee's entire oeuvre, including the Australian fiction, and forms a kind of "imaginative and intellectual masterplot" (xii). ). It is this "narrative" that she traces in her monograph, starting with the early fiction and concluding with chapters on the fictionalised autobiographies and Australian fiction.
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- Date Issued: 2013
“A road that may lead nowhere”: JM Coetzee, Tayeb Salih, and the Hospitality of Vagrant Writing
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144072 , vital:38308 , https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=4568814
- Description: In this article, I argue that Coetzee's writing, being alienated from history but unable to transcend it, is forced to treat its own representations with a measure of suspicion. By extension, the Coetzee text is always divided against itself. It is, in the idiom of hospitality, never quite at home with itself because it is aware that home is premised on exclusion, on the existence of an outsider, one for whom home is not a home.
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- Date Issued: 2013
Patrick Hayes. JM Coetzee and the Novel: writing and politics after Beckett
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144220 , vital:38322 , DOI: 10.1093/res/hgs014
- Description: According to Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee's fiction, on a thematic level, ‘repeatedly suggests that the condition of modernity is made up of competing, equally important, and yet incommensurate ways of imagining the good community’ (p. 4). The first of these imaginings is grounded in the Kantian notion that the human individual is a rational and autonomous agent, and that it is precisely his or her rational autonomy, and capacity to direct life through neutral principles that commands the respect and recognition of other individuals. As is evident in its emphasis on rationality, this politic of equal dignity and recognition is universalistic in its claims. In contrast, the second imagining of community is based on the recognition of cultural specificity, and the argument that freedom and equal recognition are only possible through a revision of deleterious cultural stereotypes. In its terms, the good community ‘must be founded on the recognition, and active fostering of cultural particularity’ (p. 12). This politic of difference is highly suspicious of the universalizing claims of the politic of dignity, arguing that its appeal to equal dignity is itself a form of particularism masquerading as universalism.
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- Date Issued: 2012
JM Coetzee's Disgrace: a reader's guide, and: JM Coetzee's austerities
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144231 , vital:38323 , DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.42.4.135
- Description: Like all of the other publications in the series of which it forms a part, Andrew van der Vlies's Disgrace: A Reader's Guide conforms to a set format: a preface, followed by biographical information on the novelist and the context in which he or she wrote the text concerned, and then a longer section comprising a paraphrase and discussion of the work and its reception, together with suggestions for further reading. Despite these structural constraints, van der Vlies provides a very fine introduction to Disgrace in this volume. Readers will find especially insightful his treatment of Coetzee's preoccupation with alterity, and the responsibility, both ethical and aesthetic, that such otherness exacts. One very slight criticism I have of the monograph is that it could have contained more references to discussions of Coetzee's use of narrative point of view in its list of recommended reading. (James Meffan and Kim Worthington's examination of the ambivalent relationship between David Lurie and the narrator's voice comes to mind here, for instance.) Having said this, however, I have little doubt that van der Vlies's guide will prove a useful and comprehensive introduction to Disgrace in university programs.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Violence, postcolonial fiction, and the limits of sympathy:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143993 , vital:38301 , DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2011.0034
- Description: In this article, I consider the implications for fiction of Slavo Zizek’s argument that the violence of individual subjects is informed by ‘symbolic violence’ (1-2), that is, the distortions concomitant on languages’s constitutive, rather than merely referential, relation to the world.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Bodies that belong: race and space in Elleke Boehmer's Nile Baby
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144094 , vital:38310 , DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2010.488337
- Description: South African literature has never been particularly perceptive in addressing the question of race. While this is especially true of writing of the apartheid period, not much has changed in the postapartheid years. Only rarely does one encounter a literary treatment of race that is aware of its performative, rather than essential, nature. Rarer still are works that are conscious of the ways in which we gain a sense of belonging by shaping our environments to affirm our raced subjectives.
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- Date Issued: 2010
JM Coetzee and the ethics of reading:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144253 , vital:38325 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26286886.pdf
- Description: One of Derek Attridge's principal concerns in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading is the relationship that is established with alterity in the writing and reading of literary works. As is evident from the fact that some of the chapters in the book date back more than a decade, this is an abiding concern. Indeed, The Singularity of Literature, which also appeared in 2004, theorizes this relationship at great length. In it, Attridge describes the literary text as the emanation of an act of creation, that is, that mysterious experience in which the writer, who is located in culture's familiar modes of understanding, encounters something strange (in that it does not yet exist within the horizon that culture provides for thinking and feeling) and is required to resist the mind's tendency to reduce novelty by understanding it in terms of the familiar.
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- Date Issued: 2007
JM Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144126 , vital:38313 , DOI: 10.2979/JML.2006.29.2.75
- Description: In an early review of Disgrace, Jane Taylor first relates this novel's treatment of violence in post-apartheid South Africa to the European Enlightenment's legacy of the autonomy of the human subject (25), in terms of which each individual is conceived of as a living consciousness separated totally from every other consciousness, and then discusses J.M. Coetzee's postulation of the sympathetic imagination as a potential corrective to the violence attendant on monadic individuality. Taylor makes the telling point that, in the eighteenth century, the notions of sensibility, sympathy, and compassion, which the novel repeatedly invokes, were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the instrumentalist logic of autonomous individuality and, in this regard, she cites Adam Smith's observation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensation" (qtd. in Taylor 25).
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- Date Issued: 2006
Bastards and bodies in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story:
- Authors: Marais, Mike
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144264 , vital:38326 , https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021989405056969
- Description: The Population Registration Act of 1950, in the apartheid period of South African history, defined a coloured person as “a person who is not a White person or a Black”. In differentiating coloured from white, coloured from black, and black from white, somatic appearance obviously played a crucial role. So, for instance, a white person was defined as “a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a White person, and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a White person and is not in appearance obviously not a White person”.1 It follows that the body of the individual was read as a signifier of racial identity, a hermeneutic practice still prevalent in present-day South Africa. My argument in this essay is that Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story2 shows how the trope of “pure blood” in the discourse of race not only reduces the body of the individual coloured person to a material sign of racial difference, but also inscribes a history of shame on that body.
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- Date Issued: 2005