J. M. Coetzee’s Poetics of the Child: Arendt, Agamben, and the (Ir)responsibilities of Literary Creation

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Tracing how central tensions in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction converge in and are made visible by the child figure, this book establishes the centrality of the child to Coetzee’s poetics. Through readings of novels from Dusklands to The Schooldays of Jesus, Charlotta Elmgren shows how Coetzee’s writing stages the constant interplay between irresponsibility and responsibility-to the self, the other, and the world. In articulating this poetics of (ir)responsibility, Elmgren offers the first sustained engagement with the intersections between the writing of J.M. Coetzee and the philosophical thought of Giorgio Agamben. Key to the argument is Agamben’s idea of infancy, the experience of holding thought in suspense, which is shown to productively complement earlier critical perspectives that, drawing on Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, find in Coetzee’s writing an ethics of hospitality to an alterity that is always yet to emerge. With reference also to Hannah Arendt’s thinking on natality and education, Elmgren demonstrates the inextricable links in Coetzee’s writing between freedom, play, and serious attention to the world. The book is structured around five central dynamics of a “poetics of the child” in Coetzee’s works: the child as a figure of truth-telling and authenticity; the ethics of the not-so-other child; the child, new beginnings and care for the world; infancy and the poetics of perpetual study; and the redemptive potential of the nonposition of infancy. Offering a fresh contribution to the field of literary childhood studies, this study shows the critical possibilities in thinking about-and with-childlike openness and childish experimentation when approaching the writing and reading of the work of J.M. Coetzee and beyond. Cover Half Title Title Copyrights Content Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction The child in Coetzee: A story waiting to be told Towards a poetics of the child From Levinas and Derrida to Agamben and Arendt Writing and the child The child as the object of writerly desire The writer as child Conceptions of the child ‘The child’ – a fluid concept The child and the fully human A figure of openness and possibility Outline 1 The story of the (un)romantic child: Innocence, truth, and first fictions of the self Fragments of childhoods (Un)romantic children Navigating fictions Moments of openness Authentic encounters: From self to other 2 Ethics of the not-so-other child The savage-as-child-as-self Children of iron Ethics of indeterminacy 3 The child between past and future Natality and the event Worrying about the child Getting beyond death Amor mundi and transmissibility The interregnum, freedom, and writing Pedagogy and play From natality to infancy 4 Childish behaviour: The poetics of study From waiting to ‘pressing on The incessant shuttling of study Grasping the potentialities of the present Impotentiality and the curious state of infancy Embracing uncertainty From childish to childlike 5 The redemptive nonposition of infancy The burdensome search for truth Infancy and language as such Being like a child: ‘The revocation of every vocation Infancy and ethics Writing and redemption Coda References Index