Description
Book SynopsisSerious Fiction explores the novels of J.M. Coetzee, in dialogue with key works of the European literary tradition and several contemporary masterworks of world literature, in order to flesh out an ethico-aesthetic ideal for the contemporary novel. Serious refers back to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy to revive a certain communal, political-ethical task of the artwork; fiction, also referring back to Aristotle and the subsequent poetic tradition, stresses the element of play in the artwork in contrast to the seriousness of the world of daily survival, business, and life. Following post-Enlightenment thinkers from Schiller and Arnold to Leavis and Auerbach, as well as more contemporary literary theorists, the argument maintains a delicate balance between seriousness as a sort moral criterion of literary assessment and playfulness as a necessary stage in the creation of any artwork, adding the formal and epistemological obligations of the realist novel as the d
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Introduction – Models: Coetzee and the (Late) Modernist Legacy of Kafka and Beckett – Form: Generic Hybridity and the Claims of Fiction – Foucault, Coetzee, and the Power of Fiction – Humans Among the Other Animals: Planetarity, Responsibility, and Fiction in Disgrace and Wolf Totem – On the Road: The Childhood of Jesus and The Road – Notes – Works Cited – Index.
