Reading Coetzee's Women

253 Pages·2019·2.912 MB·English

by  Sue Kossew, Melinda Harvey

Reading
Coetzee’s Women
Edited by
Sue Kossew · Melinda Harvey
Reading Coetzee’s Women
Sue Kossew • Melinda Harvey
Editors
Reading Coetzee’s
Women
Editors
Sue Kossew Melinda Harvey
Monash University Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-19776-6 ISBN 978-3-030-19777-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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A P
cknowledgements And ermissions
The editors are grateful to the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and
Professor Rae Frances, for their generous financial support for the confer-
ence held in Prato, Italy, in September 2016 from which the majority of
these chapters have emerged. Grateful thanks, too, to the School of
Language, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics for internal funding for
index preparation, and Sandra Pyke for her sterling work on this. Our
gratitude to Dr Lynda Chapple and Matilda Grogan for their help in pre-
paring the chapters for publication.
For permission to quote from the J. M. Coetzee archive manuscript
materials, we are very grateful to John Coetzee and the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Sue
Kossew was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (2015–2016)
to research the J. M. Coetzee papers at the Harry Ransom Center.
v
c
ontents
J. M. Coetzee and the Woman Question 1
Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey
Part I Becoming Woman, Becoming Other 17
He and His Woman: Passing Performances and Coetzee’s
Dialogic Drag 19
Laura Wright
Molly Bloom and Elizabeth Costello: Coetzee’s Female
Characters and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination 39
Derek Attridge
‘A New Footing’: Re-reading the Barbarian Girl in Coetzee’s
Waiting for the Barbarians 55
David Attwell
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Aestheticising Women 69
Art and the Female in Youth: Between Joyce and Beckett 71
Paul Stewart
‘Beauty Does Not Own Itself’: Coetzee’s Feminist Critique of
Platonic and Kantian Aesthetics 87
Jana M. Giles
Part III Coetzee Reading Women 111
J. M. Coetzee and the Women of the Canon 113
Gillian Dooley
Robinsonaden in the Feminine? Coetzee’s Foe and Muriel
Spark’s Robinson 129
Teresa Pinto Coelho
Part IV Other Men’s Women 149
The Fixation on the Womb and the Ambiguity of the Mother
in Life & Times of Michael K 151
Yoshiki Tajiri
‘God Knows Whether There Is a Dulcinea in This World or
Not’: Idealised Passion and Undecidable Desire in J. M.
Coetzee 165
María J. López
CONTENTS ix
Seeing Where Others See Nothing: Coetzee’s Magda,
Cassandra in the Karoo 183
Susanna Zinato
Part V Women’s Knowledge 203
Reading Coetzee Expectantly: From Magda to Lucy 205
Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn
Women’s Knowledge: Self-Knowledge and Women’s Frank
Speech in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime 221
Benjamin Kunkler
On Beyond the Representational Binary: Coetzee (and the
Women) Take Wing 239
Elleke Boehmer
Index 245
n c
otes on ontributors
Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and
Related Literature, University of York, UK, and a fellow of the British
Academy. His books include Joyce Effects (2000), J. M. Coetzee and the
Ethics of Reading (2004), The Singularity of Literature (2004), and The
Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He edited The Cambridge Companion
to James Joyce (1990, 2004) and co-edited Writing South Africa:
Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995 (1998), The Cambridge
History of South African Literature (2012), and Zoë Wicomb & the
Translocal (2017). His works on poetic form and the history of poetry
have been published widely.
David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York, where he
has served as Head of the Department of English and Related Literature.
Born in South Africa, he is extraordinary professor at the University of the
Western Cape in Cape Town. Before moving to the UK he was pro-
fessor and head of the English Department at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He co-edited and conducted the
interviews for J. M. Coetzee’s Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews
(1992). His monographs include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the
Politics of Writing (1993), Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South
African Literary History (2005), and most recently, J.M. Coetzee and the
Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015). With Derek Attridge, he
co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012).
Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English, in the
English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her books include Colonial
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xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), the biography Nelson Mandela
(2008), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals (2015), and
Postcolonial Poetics (2018). She is the author of five novels, including
The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Screens again the Sky (short-listed
for David Hyam Prize, 1990). Her second short-story collection To
the Volcano and Other Stories will appear in 2019, as will the Australian
edition of The Shouting in the Dark and Other Southern Writing (UWA
Press). She edited the British best-seller Robert Baden-Powell’s
Scouting for Boys (2004) and the anthology Empire Writing (1998),
and has co-edited several books, including J.M. Coetzee in Writing and
Theory (2009). She is director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing
at Wolfson College and the general editor of the Oxford Studies in
Postcolonial Literatures Series.
Teresa Pinto Coelho is full Professor and Chair at the Universidade
Nova de Lisboa, where she teaches Victorian literature, Anglo-Portuguese
imperial relations and postcolonial literature. She obtained her DPhil from
the University of Oxford in 1994 and was director of the Oxford Centre
for Portuguese Studies and supernumerary fellow of St. John’s
College from 2004 to 2007. She has published several books on his-
torical, diplomatic and cultural relations between Portugal and the
United Kingdom mainly during the late nineteenth century. Her lat-
est book, Eça de Queirós and the Victorian Press, was published by Boydell
& Brewer in 2014.
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at
Flinders University in South Australia. Her publications included mono-
graphs, edited books, and articles on a range of writers, including V. S.
Naipaul, Iris Murdoch and Jane Austen, as well as the British maritime
explorer Matthew Flinders. Her monograph J.M. Coetzee and the Power of
Narrative was published in 2010. She was the founding general edi-
tor of the e-journal Transnational Literature and is the co-editor of
Writers in Conversation.
Martina  Ghosh-Schellhorn is the Inaugural Chair of Transcultural
Anglophone Studies (TAS) at Saarland University, Germany. Focus of her
teaching and research: transcultural processes and cultural production in
the context of memorialization studies, museology, material culture stud-
ies, revisionist historiography, life narratives, and tourism studies. Ghosh-
Schellhorn’s main publications include Virtual Modelling in a Transcultural