{"title":"Coetzee and the Filipino Woman","authors":"Mina Roces","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885850","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The character Anya in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year whether knowingly or unknowingly, reinforces white Australian stereotypes of the Filipino woman that Filipina feminists in Australia have tried valiantly to dismantle since the late 1980s. Placing Anya in the context of the history of Filipinas in Australia underscores the unique politics of race and gender that this group experienced. The stereotype of the sexualized Filipina that Anya represents contrasts greatly with the lived experiences of Filipina migrants in Australia, and Filipino cultural constructions of the feminine. Hence, while Filipinos will be offended by Anya, the danger is that Coetzee's Anya normalizes and affirms the white male construction of the sexual Filipina to a non-Filipino readership, further entrenching this image of the Filipina in the popular imagination of white Australians.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Derrida and Modernism: A Review of Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885854","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism constitutes a series of essays that explore Jacques Derrida's relationship to modernism and modernity. Jean-Michel Rabaté's edited collection finds in Derrida and deconstruction an expansion of the figures and terms through which modernism can be approached and narrated. Establishing a new interface between modernist literature and philosophy, Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism provides different coordinates and parameters for defining and rethinking the relationship between, literary modernism and its historical moments. Simultaneously, this collection demonstrates how modernism and modernity serve as apposite lenses for understanding a host of Derrida's critical and philosophical pursuits.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Caring to Survive","authors":"Lynda Ng, Paul Sheehan","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885842","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Stories We Tell: Individual and Society in The Childhood of Jesus","authors":"Paul Patton","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885847","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Commentators have drawn attention to the close relationship between The Childhood of Jesus and Coetzee's exchanges with Arabella Kurtz in The Good Story . Read in the light of The Good Story's concern with the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we lead, our relationship to those stories and to their truth or falsity, the stories of Simón and David, their tensions and conflicts with one another and with the sometimes-incompatible stories told by the inhabitants of Novilla, exemplify the contemporary postmodern human condition. In particular, Childhood explores the consequences of what Coetzee calls a common postmodern situation in which someone is aware that a story is not true but nevertheless commits to it wholeheartedly. It shows how lives are changed by the commitment to a particular story and how they unfold as a result of the tensions that develop between individual and collective stories.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Civilization Perilous: Resituating Coetzee's Barbarians and the West","authors":"Lynda Ng","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885849","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: J.M. Coetzee's novel, Waiting for the Barbarians , has long been regarded as a political fable that takes place in an abstract, delocalized world. Source material in the Coetzee archive has revealed, however, that far from featuring a completely invented place, Barbarians is in fact set in the very real and recognizable terrain of Xinjiang, the Westernmost province of China. Relocating the novel into Xinjiang's multi-ethnic context has considerable implications for the way we are to understand Coetzee's positioning of civilized and barbarian peoples. It enables us to see how racialization is used to stabilize the abstract concepts of civilization and barbarism, moving beyond the black-white binary of South African apartheid. Perhaps most importantly, it draws attention to the racialized assumptions that readers themselves bring to the text and highlights the tenuous basis on which civilization constructs itself.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"To Come into the Story as Late as Possible, and To Tell It as Fast as You Can\": Pace in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy","authors":"Allan Hepburn","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885853","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Why do some novels have a fast pace and others slow? Pace in narrative gauges the movement of a story in a specific direction with respect to time. Dialogue, descriptive summaries, chapter breaks, and other formal elements speed up or slow down the perceived tempo of a narrative. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré creates pace by exploiting the discrepancies between fabula and syuzhet. By his own admission, he prefers to begin a story as late as possible to induce pressure between the content of a story and the manner of its telling, a pressure that sets and regulates narrative pace.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Anathema to the spirit the Beats are remembered for\": A Review of Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885855","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture is a major new reappraisal of the Beat authors: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Mailer. Stevenson critiques the myth that would have us regard these writers as utopic dreamers or as well-meaning disciples of liberation who drew inspiration primarily from the Romantics and American Trascendentalists. While acknowledging these influences, Stevenson demonstrates the Beats were also inheritors of a deeply skeptical, often fatalist and misanthropic \"anti-humanist\" lineage in modern writing with major European exemplars. Stevenson's account provides a complex and thoroughgoing critique of the Beats' often paradoxical relationship to the counterculture, then and now.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Precarious Author, Diary of a Bad Year, Slow Man","authors":"Anthony Uhlmann","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885846","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The idea of the author and the \"authority\" on which works of fiction might be based has long been precarious, as evinced by the first modern novel, Don Quixote , when it challenged such authority. This precarity in turn is transferred to the very idea of meaning itself, and the possibility of somehow approaching the \"truth.\" Two of Coetzee's later novels, Diary of a Bad Year and Slow Man shed light on the complex nature of authorial intention. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation and his engagement with New Critical, structuralist, and post-structuralist theory serve to frame the question. Like much of Coetzee's fiction, these works directly engage with the figure of the writer and provoke us to think about the ethical and epistemological implications of literary authority.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Lives: Near-Death and Survival in Coetzee's Fiction","authors":"Kai Wiegandt","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885843","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with precarity—the economic, social and political uncertainties suffered by disenfranchised and marginalized characters—and with the precariousness of life, i.e. the vulnerability and fragility of the body. The significance of the moments of close survival consists in the tension between the religious sense of the precarious as that which is undeservedly given and can be revoked at any time, and the purely man-made, political nature of precarity. Barely surviving, the privileged survivors of Coetzee's fictions are reminded that they owe not only their life to luck but also their privilege of being shielded from most threats to life.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Migration and the South in J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Novels","authors":"Elleke Boehmer","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885851","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The first two novels in South African and Australian writer J.M. Coetzee's Jesus novel trilogy invite being read as studies in migration that explore the ambiguities of crossing over and arriving in a seeming \"new life,\" as it is repeatedly called. The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) dramatize this arrival as a one-way experience, with no possibility of return. Moreover, key features of the migrant crossing—contingency, isolation, an inarticulable mystery and strangeness, and repetition—are evoked through what we might term a southern poetics, following Coetzee's own definition of the \"one south.\" This southern framing in turn throws light on the provinciality of the trilogy's settings, on the provisional and derivative nature of the lives lived there, and on the precarity of migrant crossings, not least in the south, including the Global South, today.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"270 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}