‘Dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’ in J.M. Coetzee's <i>Age of Iron</i>

Attwell, David

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511586286.014

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Susan VanZanten Gallagher, for example, describes Coetzee as approaching the conventions of realism in the novel, pointing out that “[u]nlike any of his previous novels, Age of Iron is directly linked to a particular historical moment in South Africa” (1991: 194). David Attwell links that sense of historical engagement directly to the novel’s evocation of the racialized struggle for liberation, mentioning that “ Age of Iron breaks ground which had been somewhat intractable in Coetzee’s previous novel, Foe […] here, ethnographic and class differences are revealed in their specific detail” (1998: 168). Attwell names especially “the novel’s social density, the graphic depictions of township violence” as signs of its historical realism (1998: 174).…”

Section: The Voice Of Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…David Attwell links that sense of historical engagement directly to the novel’s evocation of the racialized struggle for liberation, mentioning that “ Age of Iron breaks ground which had been somewhat intractable in Coetzee’s previous novel, Foe […] here, ethnographic and class differences are revealed in their specific detail” (1998: 168). Attwell names especially “the novel’s social density, the graphic depictions of township violence” as signs of its historical realism (1998: 174). 4 And yet the infusion of realistic historical elements in the novel — the vivid depictions of struggle, the brutal violence of the apartheid machine — is not the only departure from Coetzee’s previous work that it enacts.…”

Section: The Voice Of Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 4. Attwell’s observations form part of a larger argument concerning Coetzee’s engagement, from within the codes of narrative fiction, with the realities of his socio-historical environment, and the extent to which that engagement “can be said to have a reciprocal effect on our perceptions of what is socially possible” (1998: 175). It is written in response to an essay by Benita Parry (1998) that charges Coetzee’s work with replicating the colonial authority that it tries so assiduously to undermine.…”

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J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and the poetics of resistance

Smuts

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Since the beginning of his career, J. M. Coetzee’s writing has occupied an uneasy threshold between the literary ideals of European modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the demands of socio-historical accountability that derives from his background as a South African novelist. This article revisits one of Coetzee’s novels in which these tensions come to the fore most explicitly, namely Age of Iron, to argue that it is precisely from the generative friction that arises between these two opposing fields that his writing draws its singularly affective force. I begin by considering the agonistic relationship between transcendent ideals and socio-material demands that marks Coetzee’s account of the classic (“What is a Classic?: A Lecture”), describing it as a defining feature of his literary sensibility. The article then moves on to a reading of Age of Iron that focuses on the protagonist Mrs Curren’s efforts, in the midst of the violent political struggle in apartheid South Africa, to speak in her own voice. My thoughts conclude with the suggestion that Coetzee’s perennial staging of the conflict between a desire for autonomous expression and a socio-historical milieu that is indifferent to that desire can be read as an imaginative form of resistance, in the field of literary expression, to both the pressures of historical determinism and the dangers of postmodern insularity.

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Section: The Voice Of Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Voice Of Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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