'A Language I Have Not Unlearned': Cultivating an Historical Awareness of J.M. Coetzee's Engagement with Christianity
J.M. Coetzee's most recent published fictions, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), have piqued critical curiosity in his engagement with Christianity. Yet little attention has been given to the historical depth and complexity of that engagement. This article seeks...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2018]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2018, Volume: 32, Issue: 4, Pages: 452-474 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture CG Christianity and Politics CH Christianity and Society FD Contextual theology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | J.M. Coetzee's most recent published fictions, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), have piqued critical curiosity in his engagement with Christianity. Yet little attention has been given to the historical depth and complexity of that engagement. This article seeks to begin filling that gap by, first, demonstrating Coetzee's express awareness of the social sanction Calvinist rhetoric provided for South African apartheid. Drawing on Derrida's idea that articulable 'concepts' tend to develop in response to more complex, more implicit 'impressions', the article then draws fresh connections between Coetzee's later direct discussion of 'fundamentalism' and his early approach to writing, through attending to impressions of Calvinism in his second published fiction, In the Heart of the Country (1977). Informed by recent discussions of secularism and post-secularism, and tracing theological allusions and references across In the Heart, this article illuminates submerged aspects of that well-studied story and of Coetzee's well-studied oeuvre. It reveals how a complex and doubled engagement with Christianity contributes to In the Heart's vehement demystification of sacralised political tropes, as well as to its foregrounding of the limitations of representational narrative from within-before the unwieldy power of the protagonist Magda's desires and the diverse countervoices inflecting the discourse she ultimately fails to get beyond. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fry019 |