Book Section
Benjamin Lewis Robinson
The World after Fiction
J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the ‘work of literature’. J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life ‘washed clean’ of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether ‘other’. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the ‘likeness’ in this world? Are we to read Coetzee’s novel like Simón or like David — and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?
| Title |
The World after Fiction
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| Subtitle |
J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus
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| Author(s) |
Benjamin Lewis Robinson
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| Identifier | |
| DOI Target | |
| HTML Page | |
| Description |
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the ‘work of literature’. J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life ‘washed clean’ of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether ‘other’. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the ‘likeness’ in this world? Are we to read Coetzee’s novel like Simón or like David — and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
2021
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| Subject |
world literature
otherness
singularity
Don Quixote
Jacques Derrida
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Harvested |
yes
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| Language |
en-GB
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| short title |
World after Fiction
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| page start |
105
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| page end |
126
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| Source |
The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 105–26
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| Bibliographic Citation |
Benjamin Lewis Robinson, ‘The World after Fiction: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 105–26 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_05>
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| Format |
application/pdf
application/pdf
application/pdf
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