J.M. Coetzee And Neoliberal Culture

This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth ofliterature, philosophy, and theory, this book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions.It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being', euphoria; its fetishization ofmanagerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry,rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

• | Author: Andrew Gibson
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Nov 25, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 288 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0198857918
• | ISBN-13: 9780198857914