Author: yalpertem

On Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy | books

Mulhall, S. (2022). In other words: Transpositions of philosophy in J.M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy. Oxford University Press.

“J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy extends and intensifies his long-term interest in engaging with a wide range of texts, themes and assumptions that help constitute the history of Western European philosophy. In this commentary, Stephen Mulhall extends his own earlier work on Coetzee’s previous stagings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature by identifying and following out various ways in which the ‘Jesus’ Trilogy activates and interrogates themes drawn from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. These themes include rival conceptions of counting and reading, the relation between concepts and wider forms of life, and the intertwined fate of philosophy, literature and religion in a resolutely secular world. In these ways, Wittgenstein’s, and so Coetzee’s, visions of the world disclose their uncanny intimacy with issues and values central to the critique of modernity elaborated in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.” — from Oxford University Press

Pippin, R. B. (2021). Metaphysical exile: On J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus fictions. Oxford University Press.

“This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.” — from Oxford University Press

Uhlmann, A., & Rutherford, J. (Eds.). (2017). J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things. Bloomsbury Academic.

“Since the controversy and acclaim that surrounded the publication of Disgrace (1999), the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the publication of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (both in 2003), J. M. Coetzee’s status has begun to steadily rise to the point where he has now outgrown the specialized domain of South African literature. Today he is recognized more simply as one of the most important writers in the English language from the late 20th and early 21st century. Coetzee’s productivity and invention has not slowed with old age. The Childhood of Jesus, published in 2013, like Elizabeth Costello, was met with a puzzled reception, as critics struggled to come to terms with its odd setting and structure, its seemingly flat tone, and the strange affectless interactions of its characters. Most puzzling was the central character, David, linked by the title to an idea of Jesus. J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things is at the forefront of an exciting process of critical engagement with this novel, which has begun to uncover its rich dialogue with philosophy, theology, mathematics, politics, and questions of meaning.

Section I. Philological and Philosophical Concerns
1. What does J. M. Coetzee’s Novel, The Childhood of Jesus have to do with the Childhood of Jesus? – Robert B. Pippin
2. Pathos of the Future: Writing and Hospitality in The Childhood of Jesus – Jean-Michel Rabaté

Section II. Sociopolitical Concerns
3. Thinking Through Shit in The Childhood of Jesus – Jennifer Rutherford
4. Coetzee’s Republic: Plato, Borges and Migrant Memory in The Childhood of Jesus – Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan

Section III. Intertextual Concerns
5. Creative Intuition: Coetzee, Plato, Bergson and Murnane – Anthony Uhlmann
6. The Name of the Number: Transfinite Mathematics in The Childhood of Jesus – Baylee Brits

Section IV. Ethical and Stylistic Concerns
7. J. M. Coetzee and the Parental Punctum – Sue Kossew
8. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and the Moral Image of the World – Tim Mehigan
9. Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus – Yoshiki Tajiri

” — from Bloomsbury Collections

Rebecca Solnit, on Woolf and Uncertainty

Rebecca Solnit is my favorite author for the audiobooks I listen to. Maybe she’s the one who got me into listening to audiobooks with her Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Her essay collection Men Explain Things to Me has seven essays, one focusing on Virginia Woolf in dialogue with Susan Sontag. She returns back to this topic in Hope in the Dark, too. Maybe I can add that here as well. For now, I’d like to quote a passage from this essay, Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable, to get back to it in the future.

Solnit, R. (2014). Men explain things to me. Haymarket Books.

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Principles of Uncertainty

Woolf is calling for a more introspective version of the poet Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” a more diaphanous version of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “I is another.” She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression. It’s often noted that she does this for her characters in her novels, less often that, in her essays, she exemplifies it in the investigative, critical voice that celebrates and expands, and demands it in her insistence on multiplicity, on irreducibility, and maybe on mystery, if mystery is the capacity of something to keep becoming, to go beyond, to be uncircumscribable, to contain more.

Woolf’s essays are often both manifestoes about and examples or investigations of this unconfined consciousness, this uncertainty principle. They are also models of a counter-criticism, for we often think the purpose of criticism is to nail things down. During my years as an art critic, I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something of that desire to secure, to stabilize, to render certain and definite the open-ended, nebulous, and adventurous work of artists is present in many who work in that confinement sometimes called the art world.

A similar kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent and meaning often exists in literary criticism and academic scholarship, a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate, to classify and contain. What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.

There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art.

This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.

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Ovid in the Third Reich, Geoffrey Hill (Quote) w/ Moddi

I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.

The full version of the poem can be found in Poetry Foundation.

Source:
Geoffrey Hill, “Ovid in the Third Reich” from New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Used with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994)

It reminded me of Moddi’s A Matter of Habit:

Oh, being human is a matter of habit
A few baby steps, then you get better at it
To be for one minute, just now, just recall
The opposite side of the towering walls
But our hearts have hardened along with our skin
We built a bubble and let no one else in

Hong Sang-soo | Tactile Not I

Yöntemi Tan Tolga Demirci’den çalıyorum, onun da Švankmajer’den esinlendiğini düşünüyorum. Blogunda en sevdiğim kısımdı Tactile Deneyler. Ben de kendime göre yaparım. Deneye deneye belki öğrenirim. Hong Sang-soo için tactile not.

gör: sonradan eklenmiş dijital gren efekti
kokla: içki dökülmüş masa örtüsü
dokun: tiftik yün atkı
duy: asfalt ve çiseleyen yağmur
tat: küflü zarf