Pedagogy In The Novels Of J M Coetzee

Critically analyzing the representation of pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, this insightful text illustrates the author’s profound conception of learning and personal development as something which takes place well beyond formal education. Bringing together critical and educational theory, Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee examines depictions of pedagogy in novels including Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Childhood of Jesus. Engaging with Coetzee’s varied literary use of pedagogical themes such as motherhood, maternal love, and the importance of childhood interactions, reading, and experiences, chapters demonstrate how Coetzee foregrounds pedagogy as intrinsic to the formation of human actors, society, and civilization. The text thereby aptly explores and broadens our understanding of education - what it is, what it achieves, and how it can affect and shape human existence. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers and professionals in the fields of pedagogy, postcolonial studies, educational theory and philosophy, and English literature.

Critically analyzing the representation of pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, this insightful text illustrates the author's profound conception of learning and personal development as something which takes place well beyond formal education. Bringing together critical and educational theory, Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee examines depictions of pedagogy in novels including Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Childhood of Jesus. Engaging with Coetzee's varied literary use of pedagogical themes such as motherhood, maternal love, and the importance of childhood interactions, reading, and experiences, chapters demonstrate how Coetzee foregrounds pedagogy as intrinsic to the formation of human actors, society, and civilization. The text thereby aptly explores and broadens our understanding of education - what it is, what it achieves, and how it can affect and shape human existence. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers and professionals in the fields of pedagogy, postcolonial studies, educational theory and philosophy, and English literature.

J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work. The volume covers a wealth of topics, including: · The full span of Coetzee's work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels · Biographical details and archival approaches · Coetzee's sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures · Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation. The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.

Tracing how central tensions in J.M. Coetzee's fiction converge in and are made visible by the child figure, this book establishes the centrality of the child to Coetzee's poetics. Through readings of novels from Dusklands to The Schooldays of Jesus, Charlotta Elmgren shows how Coetzee's writing stages the constant interplay between irresponsibility and responsibility-to the self, the other, and the world. In articulating this poetics of (ir)responsibility, Elmgren offers the first sustained engagement with the intersections between Coetzee's work and the philosophical thought of Giorgio Agamben. With reference also to Hannah Arendt's thinking on natality, education, and amor mundi, Elmgren demonstrates the inextricable links in Coetzee's writing between freedom, play, and serious attention to the world. The book identifies five central dynamics of Coetzee's poetics: the child as a figure of truth-telling and authenticity; the ethics of the not-so-other child; the child, new beginnings and care for the world; childish behaviour as perpetual study; and the redemptive potential of infancy. Offering a fresh contribution to the field of literary childhood studies, Elmgren shows the critical possibilities in thinking about-and with-childlike openness and childish experimentation when approaching the writing and reading of the work of J.M. Coetzee and beyond.

Open Secrets reflects on contemporary humanistic pedagogy by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret refers not to a revealed mystery but to an utterance that is not understood, the likely fate of any instruction based purely on authority. Revisiting the European Bildungsroman, it studies the pedagogical relationship from the point of view of the tutor or mentor figure rather than with the usual focus on the young hero. The argument is not confined to works of fiction, however, but examines texts in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's Emile, as a semi-novelised treatise, whose fictiveness is at once overt and yet unmarked, is relatively unaware of the imaginary nature of its envisaged authority. Passing through Laurence Sterne, C. M. Wieland, Goethe and Nietzsche, the situation is gradually reversed, culminating with the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All these writers have achieved their pedagogical impact despite, indeed by means of, their internal scepticism. By contrast, in the three subsequent writers, D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis and J. M. Coetzee, the impasse of pedagogical authority becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. The awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be conducted in an aesthetic spirit, remains a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of the education as form of instructional 'production'.

What is the role of the author in times of crisis? Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form examines how Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee developed literary strategies in common to cope with crisis periods they were anticipating, living through, or looking back on. Matthew Cheney outlines how the three writers shaped their art to create an author/audience relationship congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy espoused by such thinkers as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Seeking to stimulate ethical thought, Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee required their readers to be active interpreters of their texts' forms, contents, and contexts. By pushing against fiction's fictionality, these writers of very different backgrounds, geographies, privileges, situations, tastes, and styles discovered complex ways to address the world wars in England, the AIDS crisis in New York, and apartheid in South Africa, going so far as to question the value of fiction itself.

Ever since it was first published in 1999, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has provoked controversy. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it follows Prof. David Lurie as he encounters disgrace through his sexual exploitation of a student and then through the shocking gang-rape of his only daughter. The novel's uncompromising portrayal of the "new" South Africa outraged many, who found the book regressive, even racist. It also challenged readers worldwide to confront its hard questions. This first book of essays devoted to the novel ambitiously brings together criticism and pedagogy. The ten critical essays and eight essays on teaching Disgrace grapple with the ethical issues the novel so provocatively raises: rape, gender, race, animal rights. Disgrace is widely taught in colleges and universities and read in book clubs; the debates it has given rise to will take on fresh life with the release of the upcoming film starring John Malkovich. Unusually, the eighteen contributors to the collection are all faculty members or graduates of the same institution, the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, and have worked together closely in crafting their essays over the past two years. The volume will be exceptionally useful to teachers of literature, philosophy, and South African culture, to book club leaders, and to all readers of Coetzee. Contributors: Nancy Best, James Boobar, Bradley Butterfield, Jane Creighton, Matthew Gray, Pat Harrigan, Gary Hawkins, Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Daniel Kiefer, Bill McDonald, Michael G. McDunnah, Kim Middleton, Kevin O'Neill, Raymond Obstfeld, Kathy Ogren, Kenneth Reinhard, Sandra D. Shattuck, Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, Julie Townsend. Bill McDonald is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Redlands, Redlands, California.

What is the role of the author in times of crisis? Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form examines how Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee developed literary strategies in common to cope with crisis periods they were anticipating, living through, or looking back on. Matthew Cheney outlines how the three writers shaped their art to create an author/audience relationship congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy espoused by such thinkers as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Seeking to stimulate ethical thought, Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee required their readers to be active interpreters of their texts' forms, contents, and contexts. By pushing against fiction's fictionality, these writers of very different backgrounds, geographies, privileges, situations, tastes, and styles discovered complex ways to address the world wars in England, the AIDS crisis in New York, and apartheid in South Africa, going so far as to question the value of fiction itself.