Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Studies in Major Literary Authors) [Hardcover]

Laura Wright (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 041597707X | ISBN-13: 978-0415977074 | Publication Date: February 2, 2006 | Edition: 1

Combining postcolonial, performance, gender-based and environmental theory, this interdisciplinary study examines the ways in which Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Due to its interdisciplinary and accessible range, the book has broad academic appeal in the fields of not only literary studies, but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. It also contributes towards bridging a gap created by the increased interest in Coetzee's work as a result of his Nobel Prize award and the relative dearth of single author studies on Coetzee. Concerned with the ethical responsibility of the individual to the 'other', the book situates Coetzee's writing within various and seemingly disparate contexts - particularly the environmental and performative - which other studies are less overtly concerned with. Its attention to the performative nature of his work is something unique in Coetzee studies and through the analysis of imagined and performative animal interiority, the work also bridges two distinct realms that have hitherto lacked cross disciplinary anaylsis - the postcolonial and the ecocritical.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Laura Wright is Assistant Professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her primary areas of interest and scholarship include contemporary postcolonial and world literature, environmental theory, and performance studies. She has published work in Mosaic, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, African Studies Review, and Minnesota Review.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 164 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (February 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041597707X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415977074
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,671,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable resource, July 3, 2006

By 

Beth Keller "Beth" (Amherst, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Studies in Major Literary Authors) (Hardcover)

Laura Wright's study is an interdisciplinary examination - combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory - of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). She argues that via such displacement Coetzee writes dialogically, in the Bahktinian sense, as an author whose work performs various positions rather than maintains an internal, controlling, and monologic subjectivity. Therefore, Coetzee's texts, like his character of Michael K, position themselves "out of all the camps at the same time." Such destabilization opens up a space for my examination of the metafictional and postmodern nature of Coetzee's writing as performative narratives that allow for interplay between character, audience, and author. If there is any unifying aspect of Coetzee's writing, she argues, it is his relentless examination - and his characters' continuous pursuit - of imagined identification with the other, in the form of not only the black characters who are often silent in his texts and the white women who often narrate, but also in the form of animals, an issue he pursues most overtly in is 1997-98 Princeton Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals.

5.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Wright knows it, July 3, 2006

By 

Yeeson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Studies in Major Literary Authors) (Hardcover)

I'm currently writing my disseration on J. M. Coetzee, and I found Dr. Wright's book to be an invaluable resource. This text is particularly useful in terms of its discussions of animals in Coetzee's works and with regard to Coetzee's female narrators -- I would classify this research as environmental, animal-rights, feminist, and postcolonial. All in all, a thorough study and a pleasure to read: her writing is scholarly, but it's also lyrical and accessible.