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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In this collection of eight essays, South African novelist J. M. Coetzee examines the complexities of censorship beyond the model of villainous censor and victimized artist. Having lived in a police state, Coetzee's experience is that "the same censors patrol the boundaries of both politics and esthetics." By contrast, in the United States, the way for artists to get away with representations that some find offensive or forbidden is to argue that their work has some political worth. Though Coetzee admits he doesn't know what to think of artists who "break taboos and yet claim protection of the law," he remains committed to free speech, conscious of how easily oppressive righteousness can rear its viscous head. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In South African novelist Coetzee's intriguing theory, censorship arises out of a paranoid mentality when a dominant class, church or state, lashing out in fear from a sense of latent powerlessness, suppresses a writer or artist whose truth-telling gives offense. He buttresses his argument by discussing Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, arrested in 1934 and commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, and South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, imprisoned in 1974 and forced to repudiate his poem that condemned political execution and torture. The battle with the censor invades the writer's psychic life, as Coetzee demonstrates in his analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's skirmishes with the Soviet state, leading to his exile in 1974; Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's fight against Stalinist repression; and humanist satirist Erasmus's battle with Luther and the papacy. Coetzee implicitly rejects feminist Catharine Mac-Kinnon's antipornography stance ("her heart lies with the censors"). These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing critique of censorship in its many guises.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
In this collection of eight essays, South African novelist J. M. Coetzee examines the complexities of censorship beyond the model of villainous censor and victimized artist. Having lived in a police state, Coetzee's experience is that "the same censors patrol the boundaries of both politics and esthetics." By contrast, in the United States, the way for artists to get away with representations that some find offensive or forbidden is to argue that their work has some political worth. Though Coetzee admits he doesn't know what to think of artists who "break taboos and yet claim protection of the law," he remains committed to free speech, conscious of how easily oppressive righteousness can rear its viscous head. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In South African novelist Coetzee's intriguing theory, censorship arises out of a paranoid mentality when a dominant class, church or state, lashing out in fear from a sense of latent powerlessness, suppresses a writer or artist whose truth-telling gives offense. He buttresses his argument by discussing Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, arrested in 1934 and commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, and South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, imprisoned in 1974 and forced to repudiate his poem that condemned political execution and torture. The battle with the censor invades the writer's psychic life, as Coetzee demonstrates in his analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's skirmishes with the Soviet state, leading to his exile in 1974; Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's fight against Stalinist repression; and humanist satirist Erasmus's battle with Luther and the papacy. Coetzee implicitly rejects feminist Catharine Mac-Kinnon's antipornography stance ("her heart lies with the censors"). These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing critique of censorship in its many guises.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
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