Browsing by Author "Coetzee, JM"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Aloe and honey : tales from town and country
    (1998) Mxakwe, Mzamadoda Theophilus; Coetzee, JM; Galgut D
    The Black South African literary oeuvre has as its dominant background township life. There has been a considerable neglect of village or rural setting. Even the proliferation of writing that has been regarded as depicting genuine African experience has fallen short of remedying this malady. There is a paucity of writings that endeavour to depict rural communities, and even where South African writers attempted to depict rural community, theirs has been an indolent attempt, as evinced by a lack of insight in such writings. One example is Matshoba's Call Me Not A Man. which is merely a glimpse into the rural setting. This shortcoming, coupled with a travesty of the rural setting, suggests a non-existence of the rural community. Whether South African writers, especially, Black writers, eschew rural setting deliberately or not is open to debate. Hence my project has as its paramount aim an endeavour to expose authentic rural realities. This collection, therefore, portrays rural life against the backdrop of city life. This paradoxical juxtapositioning is a deliberate attempt to enable the reader to extricate real-life happenings from both scenarios, and have a sound judgement about his/her observation.
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    Crystal Night : a short novel
    (2002) Rosen, David; Coetzee, JM; Watson, Stephen
    Crystal Night is a teenage love story that takes place in South Africa in the 1980s between Rachel, a Jewess, and Danny, a Catholic. Initially the Jewish fear of intermarriage and anti-Semitism that Rachel inherits from her parents challenges this relationship, and when Danny is conscripted into the army by the Apartheid state, his mysterious death ends it.
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    Elim : a novel
    (1998) Buckham, David; Coetzee, JM
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    The Hobbyist and other stories
    (2000) Kapilevich, Amichai Nikita; Coetzee, JM
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    In those words
    (2000) Stoutland, Andrea; Coetzee, JM
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    Indigenous tradition and the colonial legacy : a study in the social context of anglophone African literary criticism.
    (1985) Attwell, David; Coetzee, JM
    This dissertation attempts to examine the social meanings of anglophone African literary criticism as an ideological discourse. It begins by engaging with Marxist critical traditions, with particular reference to two areas of debate: the question of the epistemological relationship between literature and criticism, and the question of criticism's being a discourse which, in its articulation with a given social context, relies on the resources of a particular critical heritage. The basis of the second and central chapter is the interrelationship between the context and heritage of anglophone African criticism. The dominant themes of this discourse are seen as being shaped by ideological affiliations with the modern nation-state, and by the legacy of the empirical and organic traditions of metropolitan criticism. It is argued that in the situation of neo-colonial social stratification, anglophone African criticism faces a crisis of legitimacy. In the third to fifth chapters I attempt to illustrate and refine the central argument in relation to a selection of critical texts. The chapter on two works by Eldred Jones examines his reliance on orthodox British critical assumptions and its consequences in his treatment of the writing of Wole Soyinka. The chapter on West African traditions examines a range of critical operations which are used in the construction of organic traditions based on oral or traditional cultures. These operations rely on mythopoesis, formalism and the sociology of literature. The final chapter on East African political readings investigates the internal, discursive tensions in the work of two critics who, in attempting to politicize their reading of literature, have not been able to achieve a conceptual break from the legacies of idealism.
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    Language on music : Beethoven, Mann and the absolute
    (1997) Verster, François; Coetzee, JM
    This dissertation investigates the general use of language on instrumental music. Three types of linguistic usage are identified: the metamusical, the systemic, and the metasystemic. In the first section, various forms of the metamusical - description, attempts at "recreation" and formal analyses of music - are considered, and are all shown to fail in different ways. The limitations of existing systems for negotiation between language and music are also brought to the fore. Failure is redefined, and shown to be intrinsically related to the tradition of musical ineffability, which finds its most extreme development in the notion of "absolute music". The second section attempts to provide a systemic discourse which takes the failure of language into account. Drawing on Lacan's imaginary/symbolic distinction and on Derrida's notion of the frame, it sets forth a construct called "the word of music", which is itself an impossible point of aspiration, but which manages to account for some of the dialectical complexities involved in systemic negotiation with a non-denotative form such as music. The third section entails metasystemic analysis proper; in other words, metamusical and systemic sources are analyzed and assessed. This part consists of a passage-by-passage translation of eight pages from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which the fictional character Wendell Kretschmar delivers a lecture on and performance of Beethoven's Opus 111. Various metamusical and systemic issues are discussed: it is shown that Mann draws on a large number of established musicoliterary traditions, with his sources ranging from early Beethoven biographies to the writings of Theodor Adorno. Particular attention is given to the Romantic "Beethoven myth" and to Adorno's analysis of the composer's late music. Mann's negotiation between two partly opposing trends in the presentation of Opus 111 as an "ultimate" or "absolute" composition - the one based in a Romantic discourse of musical transcendence and the other originating in Adorno's identification of a tendency towards alienation in Beethoven's late style - is extensively discussed.
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    A Time of Angels : a novel
    (2002) Pinnock, Patricia Schonstein; Coetzee, JM
    These are the experience as a prisoner of war at Zonderwater of Romeo's father, Umberto; Ruth's memory of her father checking the list of Holocaust survivors' names, posted outside Salisbury Synagogue, as it was updated; Geraldine's description of her elderly neighbour's drawers full of embroidered linen - his mother's trousseau - unused and perished by time; and Anthony's experience as an Allied gunner officer in Sansepolcro, Italy, during World War 2 when he did not fire on the building that housed Piero della Francesca's mural, the Resurrection, though German soldiers were thought to be in the town.