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 of literature, philosophy, and theory, the 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 of managerial 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.
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| Title | J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 0192599798 |
| ISBN 10 | 0192599798 |
| ISBN 13 | 9780192599797 |
| Date published | 2022 |
| Edition | 1 |
| MRSP | 100 |
| Pages | 336 |
| Author | Andrew Gibson |
| Binding | Kindle Edition |
| Language | en |
| Publisher | OUP Oxford |
| Tags | General History Indigenous Modern |
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