Metaphysical Exile: On J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions

J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy is a philosophical exploration of spiritual homelessness and the theme of forgetting in late modern life. Robert Pippin interprets the trilogy as a philosophical fable, treating it as a version of Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Rousseau's Emile, or Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Pippin suggests that literature has the potential to be a profound form of philosophical reflection.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 152 pages
\n Publication date: 05 October 2021
\n Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
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Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee's Jesus fictions form a trilogy of novels that have emerged over the past decade. They stand out from his earlier work due to their complexity and the central role they accord philosophy, particularly through their interest in specific themes that philosophy is interested in, as well as their critical engagement with philosophy as a mode of intellectual activity, with a very particular role to play in the broader cultural concerns of modern Western Europe. Robert Pippin offers the first comprehensive interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy as a whole. To understand these works, he treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Rousseau's Emile, or Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the trilogy's mythical setting, everyone is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, with most of their memories of their homeland erased. Pippin treats these fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness—a version that characterizes late modern life itself—and he sees the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. This state of exile is interpreted as metaphysical as well as geographical. Pippin's insightful and careful reading of Coetzee suggests the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. And he extracts from the trilogy its intertextuality, as well as numerous references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, and Wittgenstein, among others. Throughout, Pippin expresses the potential of literature to address these themes and more.

\n Weight: 312g\n
Dimension: 299 x 580 x 18 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780197565940\n \n