J. M. Coetzee and Ethics

J. M. Coetzee and Ethics

Philosophical Perspectives on Literature

  • Author: Leist, Anton; Singer, Peter
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 9780231148405
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231520249
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2010
  • Month: June
  • Language: English
A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

  • Contents
  • Introduction: Coetzee and Philosophy
  • Part I. People, Human Relationships, and Politics
    • 1 The Paradoxes of Power in the Early Novels of J. M. Coetzee
    • 2 Disgrace, Desire, and the Dark Side of the New South Africa
    • 3 Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication: A Strategy for Reading Diary of a Bad Year
    • 4 Torture and Collective Shame
  • Part II. Humans, Animals, and Morality
    • 5 Converging Convictions: Coetzee and His Characters on Animals
    • 6 Coetzee and Alternative Animal Ethics
    • 7 Writing the Lives of Animals
    • 8 Sympathy and Scapegoating in J. M. Coetzee
  • Part III. Rationality and Human Lives
    • 9 Against Society, Against History, Against Reason: Coetzee’s Archaic Postmodernism
    • 10 Coetzee’s Critique of Reason
    • 11 J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker
    • 12 Being True to Fact: Coetzee’s Prose of the World
  • Part IV. Literature, Literary Style, and Philosophy
    • 13 Truth and Love Together at Last: Style, Form, and Moral Vision in Age of Iron
    • 14 The Lives of Animals and the Form-Content Connection
    • 15 Irony and Belief in Elizabeth Costello
    • 16 Coetzee’s Hidden Polemic with Nietzsche
  • List of Contributors
  • Index

Subjects

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