- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (Aug 12 1992)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674215176
- ISBN-13: 978-0674215177
- Product Dimensions: 24.2 x 16.2 x 3.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 771 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,349,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Library Journal
Coetzee is known here for his fiction, set in his native South Africa, but less so for his criticism. This collection of essays should enhance his reputation. Coetzee examines such literary giants as Samuel Beckett (stylistically analyzing Watt via a computer-generated diagram in one essay), Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, D.H. Lawrence, and fellow South African writers Athol Fugard, Breyten Breytenbach, and Nadine Gordimer. Also included are sections on poetics, popular culture, syntax, and censorship. Atwell interviews Coetzee at the beginning of each section to complete a retrospective analysis of the essays; the result is a literary autobiography of stature. Recommended for academic as well as large public libraries.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Coetzee is known here for his fiction, set in his native South Africa, but less so for his criticism. This collection of essays should enhance his reputation. Coetzee examines such literary giants as Samuel Beckett (stylistically analyzing Watt via a computer-generated diagram in one essay), Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, D.H. Lawrence, and fellow South African writers Athol Fugard, Breyten Breytenbach, and Nadine Gordimer. Also included are sections on poetics, popular culture, syntax, and censorship. Atwell interviews Coetzee at the beginning of each section to complete a retrospective analysis of the essays; the result is a literary autobiography of stature.
--Ann Irvine (Library Journal )
--Ann Irvine (Library Journal )
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The great world and its concerns, May 17 2008
By Luc REYNAERT - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Paperback)
This book covers as diverse subjects as sports (rugby's political importance in South-Africa), pop culture (`Captain America as a great flag-wrapped phallus'), advertising (creating identifications and associations in the consumer), linguistics and postmodern theories (`The Rhetoric of the Passive in English'), comments on censorship (`The Taint of the Pornographic'), personal remembrances (Coetzee's US years as a student) and reviews of other writer's work (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, Musil, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, A. Fugard, N. Gordimer, S. Beckett, B. Breytenbach, A. La Guma and others).It shows were J.M. Coetzee stood as a writer and as an individual at the end of the 1980s, just before the publication of one of his masterpieces `Age of Iron'.
Contrary to another writer who dissects during 43 pages his dominant feeling of nothingness (in a period of war!!!), the morass of linguistics (as an important philosopher remarked: linguistics equals the cleaning of one's spectacles) didn't turn J.M. Coetzee from `the great world and its concerns'. He took to heart G. Lukácz's position on realism: `one's first duty as a writer is to express social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of representation into question is time-wasting.'
An author should express `the truth as he sees it'. He `must take freedom from the public conformity of political interpretations, morals and tastes.' Therefore, he must be against censorship and its alleged function of protecting the State, a community, a society.
While others continued to be stuck in the morass, J. M. Coetzee tackled essential human problems as individual, political and social violence, sexuality, racism, dictatorship, justice, political monopolies, colonialism, human destiny (child, youth, aging and death) and the function of writing itself, head-on.
I have only a few comments on this thought-provoking book.
The world doesn't behave as mathematics predict it. As J. von Neumann said: `mathematical formulation necessarily represents only a theory of some phase (aspects) of reality, and not reality itself.'
Philosophically speaking, truth is correspondence with the facts (A. Tarski), with what happened, happens and will happen. Dreams, thoughts, wishes ... are also facts. There is no endless series of supplements that defers the truth.
This book is a must read for all Coetzee fans and lovers of world literature.
N.B. Some texts on censorship have been reprinted in Coetzee's `Giving Offense'.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
