‘left right left’: Plasticity, Affect, and Self-shaping Orientations in J M Coetzee’s Slow Man

Abstract

This article examines Coetzee’s (2005) novel Slow Man through the neuro-philosophical lenses of plasticity and affect theory. The aim is to arrive at an understanding of the role reflexivity and emotions play in decision-making and how such decisions emerge through affective orientations to shape the self. Coetzee’s novel, accordingly, eschews the metaphysical understanding of the self as totalising or transcendental, and instead focuses on how our selves are episodically shaped by our (re)orientations in the world.

Keywords:

• Coetzee
• Slow Man
• affect theory
• geriatric anxieties
• plasticity
• self

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soham Chakraborty

Soham Chakraborty is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is currently working on his thesis on food, affect, and animality in the late-apartheid fiction of J M Coetzee.

Avishek Parui

Avishek Parui is an Associate Professor in English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures (2018) and Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory (2022). He is the faculty coordinator of the Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras and founding chairperson of the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS).