|
This book addresses the representation of masculinities in the work of J. M. Coetzee, with a particular focus on the writer’s trilogy: Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009). Provocatively dealing with questions of autobiography, Coetzee’s trilogy provides a panoramic view of a man’s development through various stages of life and, equally, different geographical locations, such as apartheid South Africa, sixties London and South Africa in the throes of democratic revolution.Attentive to the masculine formations that the trilogy represents, this work draws on conceptual frameworks and methodologies provided by the joint critique of gender and postcolonial studies, and is particularly animated by the discussions raised by men’s studies, a field that is nowadays patently interested in postcolonial / transnational masculinities. In this vein, the work discusses not only aspects related to violence and gendered formations as they occur and manifest themselves in the intersections of the local and global, but also the possibilities of refashioning identities increasingly attentive to an ethics of Otherness, one of the staples of Coetzee’s writing. “This is a rigorous, and magnificently argued, reading of J. M. Coetzee’s trilogy > Drawing on a complex set of theories from post-colonial studies and gender studies to psychoanalysis and philosophy, backed up by a sustained and well-informed historical contextualisation, Matias provides us with a renewed approach to a fascinating and complex author and some of his works, that combines rigorous scholarship with a pleasurable and entertaining reading.” —Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Centre for Comparative Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon... “Daniel Matias provides a study that is highly innovative in many ways, the main one being that historical reality is understood as an integral part of scientific thinking, as it considers both the permanent and transformative aspects of time and space. The analysis of masculinities in Coetzee’s trilogy, as presented here, goes beyond the limitations of a simple case study pertaining to the post-colonial situation of South Africa; instead, it is an excellent acknowledgement of how a cultural outlook may provide an important recognition of the temporal dimensions and tensions of reality.” —Zília Osório de Castro, Full Professor (Jubilated) in History of Ideas; Director of the research unit Faces de Eva; Estudos sobre a Mulher and the Master’s Degree on Women’s Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon... “The obvious strength of this book is in its authentic originality and the cutting-edge, complex, nuanced reading of Coetzee’s texts, which have never been explored in quite this way before, enabling Daniel Matias to situate yet complicate the performance of white masculinity across time and place. Matias is adept at combining knowledge of the fine-grain and detailed particulars of textual interpretation with a broader concern with social and political dynamics, both nowadays essential for addressing the charged and volatile nature of gender belongings and identities, as they shift across time and place.” —Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London...
|
