Metaphysical Exile: On J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions [Hardcover]

Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee's Jesus fictions constitute a trilogy of novels that have appeared over the last decade. They stand out from his earlier work in their difficulty, and in the central role they accord philosophy--in part through their interest in specific themes in which philosophy is interested, in part through their critical engagement with philosophy as a mode of intellectual activity, with a very particular role to play in the broader cultural concerns of modern Western Europe.Robert Pippin presents the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy as a whole. In order to understand them, he treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato'sRepublic, More'sUtopia, Rousseau'sEmile, or Nietzsche'sThus Spoke Zarathustra. In the trilogy's mythical setting, everyone is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, with most of their memories of their homeland erased. Pippin treats these fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he sees the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection al³_