Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews [Hardcover]

J. M. Coetzee (Author), David Attwell (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 1992

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his "vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance". "Doubling the Point" takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography. Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, "Doubling the Point" provides insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility - not only for Coetzee's own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell prompts from Coetzee answers of depth and interest. The result is the story of a fiction writer's intellectual development, and of an intellectual's literary development. It is the story of how one writer has moved through the scholarly and political trends of the last 30 years, carefully assessing their applications and limitations, and through this experience forged for himself a unique and powerful literary voice informed in equal parts by life and learning.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Coetzee is known here for his fiction, set in his native South Africa, but less so for his criticism. This collection of essays should enhance his reputation. Coetzee examines such literary giants as Samuel Beckett (stylistically analyzing Watt via a computer-generated diagram in one essay), Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, D.H. Lawrence, and fellow South African writers Athol Fugard, Breyten Breytenbach, and Nadine Gordimer. Also included are sections on poetics, popular culture, syntax, and censorship. Atwell interviews Coetzee at the beginning of each section to complete a retrospective analysis of the essays; the result is a literary autobiography of stature. Recommended for academic as well as large public libraries.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Coetzee is known here for his fiction, set in his native South Africa, but less so for his criticism. This collection of essays should enhance his reputation. Coetzee examines such literary giants as Samuel Beckett (stylistically analyzing Watt via a computer-generated diagram in one essay), Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, D.H. Lawrence, and fellow South African writers Athol Fugard, Breyten Breytenbach, and Nadine Gordimer. Also included are sections on poetics, popular culture, syntax, and censorship. Atwell interviews Coetzee at the beginning of each section to complete a retrospective analysis of the essays; the result is a literary autobiography of stature. (Ann Irvine Library Journal )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (August 12, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674215176
• ISBN-13: 978-0674215177
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,790,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The great world and its concerns, May 17, 2008

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Paperback)

This book covers as diverse subjects as sports (rugby's political importance in South-Africa), pop culture (`Captain America as a great flag-wrapped phallus'), advertising (creating identifications and associations in the consumer), linguistics and postmodern theories (`The Rhetoric of the Passive in English'), comments on censorship (`The Taint of the Pornographic'), personal remembrances (Coetzee's US years as a student) and reviews of other writer's work (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, Musil, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, A. Fugard, N. Gordimer, S. Beckett, B. Breytenbach, A. La Guma and others).

It shows were J.M. Coetzee stood as a writer and as an individual at the end of the 1980s, just before the publication of one of his masterpieces `Age of Iron'.

Contrary to another writer who dissects during 43 pages his dominant feeling of nothingness (in a period of war!!!), the morass of linguistics (as an important philosopher remarked: linguistics equals the cleaning of one's spectacles) didn't turn J.M. Coetzee from `the great world and its concerns'. He took to heart G. Lukácz's position on realism: `one's first duty as a writer is to express social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of representation into question is time-wasting.'
An author should express `the truth as he sees it'. He `must take freedom from the public conformity of political interpretations, morals and tastes.' Therefore, he must be against censorship and its alleged function of protecting the State, a community, a society.
While others continued to be stuck in the morass, J. M. Coetzee tackled essential human problems as individual, political and social violence, sexuality, racism, dictatorship, justice, political monopolies, colonialism, human destiny (child, youth, aging and death) and the function of writing itself, head-on.

I have only a few comments on this thought-provoking book.
The world doesn't behave as mathematics predict it. As J. von Neumann said: `mathematical formulation necessarily represents only a theory of some phase (aspects) of reality, and not reality itself.'
Philosophically speaking, truth is correspondence with the facts (A. Tarski), with what happened, happens and will happen. Dreams, thoughts, wishes ... are also facts. There is no endless series of supplements that defers the truth.

This book is a must read for all Coetzee fans and lovers of world literature.

N.B. Some texts on censorship have been reprinted in Coetzee's `Giving Offense'.