J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style [Paperback]

This is the first book-length study of the distinctive style of J. M. Coetzee's early and middle fictions.This book argues for the centrality of linguistic understanding in the study of literary works by exploring the subterranean operations of syntax, lexis, prosody and semantics in J. M. Coetzee's early fiction.This book argues for the centrality of linguistic understanding in the study of literary works by exploring the subterranean operations of syntax, lexis, prosody and semantics in J. M. Coetzee's early fiction.J. M. Coetzees early novels confronted readers with a brute reality stripped of human relation and a prose repeatedly described as spare, stark, intense and lyrical. In this book, Jarad Zimbler explores the emergence of a style forged in Coetzees engagement with the complexities of South African culture and politics. Tracking the development of this style across Coetzees first eight novels, from Dusklands to Disgrace, Zimbler compares Coetzees writing with that of South African authors such as Gordimer, Brink and La Guma, whilst re-examining the nature of Coetzees indebtedness to modernism and postmodernism. In each case, he follows the threads of Coetzees own writings on stylistics and rhetoric in order to fix on those techniques of language and narrative used to activate a politics of style. In so doing, Zimbler challenges long-held beliefs about Coetzees oeuvre, and about the ways in which contemporary literatures of the world are to be read and understood.Introduction; 1. Neither progress, nor regress; 2. New dimensions; 3. Lyrical situation and rhythmic intensity; 4. Native traditions and strange practices; 5. From bare life to soul language; Conclusion. Zimbler has taken a relatively traditional genre - the single-author monograph aimed at specialists - and armed it with something invigorating: a desire, first, to foreground the compositional concerns of a writer whose critics don't always attend to his handling of form; and, second, to lóP