Journal article
Timely, Untimely, Timeless: Temporal Limits in JM Coetzee's Late Global Fiction
Critique - Bolingbroke Society, Vol.62(4), pp.459-470
08/08/2021
DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1791792
Abstract
J.M. Coetzee's late global fictions regularly offer formal experiments with fleetingness - works designed to become dated, superannuated - yet repeatedly return to the theme of enduring, almost transcendental, literary value. These are works that illustrate a crisis point in literary history, when the global and the digital inflict on authors an imperative to be timely while older institutional literary values demand that they be timeless. In these works, joined together in one present we find threads of timeliness (actions and ideas that area proposof the moment), untimeliness (actions and ideas that are retrograde or avant-garde, out of joint with the times or, from the perspective of the untimely one, that reveal time to be out of joint with itself), and timelessness (intimations of ever-lasting, extra-temporal, permanence). This article examines these temporal figures inElizabeth Costello,Summertime, and some of J.M. Coetzee's shorter fictions, tracing the limits of the present they produce, oppose, or, in trying to surpass, reenforce.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Timely, Untimely, Timeless: Temporal Limits in JM Coetzee's Late Global Fiction
- Creators
- Jan Steyn - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Critique - Bolingbroke Society, Vol.62(4), pp.459-470
- DOI
- 10.1080/00111619.2020.1791792
- ISSN
- 0011-1619
- eISSN
- 1939-9138
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Number of pages
- 12
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 08/08/2021
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian; World Languages, Literatures and Cultures
- Record Identifier
- 9984397921302771
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