“Let us keep going and see what comes up”: The Poetics of Study in J.M. Coetzee’s "The Childhood of Jesus"

• Charlotta Elmgren ^[1]
  1. [1] Stockholm University

     Stockholm University

     Suecia

     
• Localización: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ISSN 0004-1327, ISSN-e 1920-1222, Vol. 50, Nº. 2-3, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: articles on postcolonial archives, caribbean colonialism and its legacies, postmigration in malkani's londonstani, and more), págs. 163-190
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • This article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus embodies a poetics of study. Noting Coetzee’s sustained interest in educational thought, the article places Coetzee’s enigmatic novel in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s idea of study, which brings together the latter’s foundational thinking on infancy, potentiality and the messianic. It shows how The Childhood of Jesus prompts its readers towards the pursuit of infinite interpretive possibilities in the present moment, inviting a different mode of reading than the future-directed Derridean/Levinasian ethics of hospitality through which Coetzee’s earlier works have often been read.