![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Both J.M. Coetzee’s latest narrative work, The Childhood of Jesus, and his collection of fictionalised lectures Elizabeth Costello have been described as philosophical debates staged in fiction. Along with references to various novelistic traditions, these works do in fact display more or less explicit Platonic intertexts that criticism does not often take into account. Platonic dialogism intertwines blatantly with Christian references from the Gospels in The Childhood of Jesus; a closer look at Elizabeth Costello reveals similar features. The author’s analysis aims at exploring this intertextual intersection between novelistic traditions, Christian references and echoes of Plato from different theoretical points of view – most notably, recent ‘Bakhtinian’ developments in Plato studies.
Notes
1. Coetzee’s fictions have often been described as allegorised theory. Jane Poyner lists contrasting critical stances about this in the introduction to her book J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Poyner, Citation2006: 5–7).
2. See, for example, what Patrick Flanery writes about Elizabeth Costello: ‘Is it performance art, or performance didacticism? Is it moral philosophy? Does its generic slipperiness constitute academic evasiveness? Is it fiction or non-fiction? … Is it a work of indeterminate genre?’ (Flanery, Citation2004: 61).
3. Like all of Coetzee’s most recent works, The Childhood of Jesus has not been published as a ‘novel’, but as ‘fiction’. Rumour has it that the choice was deliberate, and that it was made out of Coetzee’s growing unease with the so-called ‘traditional novel’. For more details about this, see once again Roger Bellin’s review of The Childhood of Jesus.
4. See, most notably, Joyce Carol Oates’s (Citation2013) and Leo Robson’s (Citation2013) reviews of The Childhood of Jesus, published for The New York Times and New Statesman respectively.
5. Of course, the arguments I am presenting here do by no means apply only to the two books I have chosen as my main focus. Their intertextual features, however, make them kindred books in many ways – which, I hope, I will be able to illustrate here.
6. See Attwell (Citation2008) and Dooley (Citation2010, chapter 3).
7. See, for example, the already-quoted reviews by Joyce Carol Oates and Roger Bellin as well as the one by Laila Lalami (Citation2013) in The Nation.
8. See Tolmie (Citation1999: 105–15) on the vagueness of spatial settings in the Gospels.
9. ‘An identifiable mode of interpretation of Plato has prevailed, with rare exception, since antiquity. It is determined by two mutually reinforcing assumptions that have been little discussed before our century. The first is that Plato’s philosophy is a matter of doctrines or dogmas. … The second is that the dramatic dialogue is merely the form in which these doctrines are presented. … Since Schleiermacher, however, a new mode of interpretation has been slowly developing’ (Press, Citation1993: 107–8).
10. The quotations are from Heinrich von Stein’s 1862 study Sieben Bucher zur Geschichte der Platonismus (1965 edition, pages 409 and 375).
11. See Griswold (Citation1988: 52–8) on the history of Plato studies in English.
12. See, for example, Lodge (Citation2003).
13. All the quotes are taken from Stockhammer (Citation1963: 242–3).