J. M. Coetzee

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

These essays and panel discussions made up the Writer and Religion Conference held at Washington University in St. Louis. The six essays, all by writers of international stature, were followed by panel discussions, with audience participation. The featured essayists are Eavan Boland, J. M. Coetzee, William Gaddis, Amitav Ghosh, A. G. Mojtabai, and Hanan al-Shaykh.

This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers. Olsen's approach is eclectic, bringing to each text or textual complex those forces he feels most interestingly stir up its sediment--be they biographical, structural, psychoanalytic, philosophical, reader-response, or otherwise.

Debates rage over what kind of literature we should read, what is good and bad literature, and whether in the global, digital age, literature even has a future. But what exactly is literature? Why should we read literature? How do we read literature? These are some of the important questions J. Hillis Miller answers in this beautifully written and passionate book. He begins by asking what literature is, arguing that the answer lies in literature's ability to create an imaginary world simply with words. On Literature also asks the crucial question of why literature has such authority over us. Returning to Plato, Aristotle and the Bible, Miller argues we should continue to read literature because it is part of our basic human need to create imaginary worlds and to have stories. Above all, On Literature is a plea that we continue to read and care about literature.

A comprehensive historical and theoretical study of the "creolization" process and its relevance to both colonial and postcolonial literatures, this book focuses for the most part on novels from or about the French Caribbean.

It examines the ways in which colonial authors such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Victor Hugo, as well as such contemporary writers as Edouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin, have represented the process of cultural mixing and (con)fusion to which, under a variety of names (creolization, hybridity, metissage), postcolonial theorists have increasingly turned in order to understand the complexities of cultural identity in today's transnational world. Notwithstanding the obvious differences separating colonial and postcolonial literatures, Islands and Exiles emphasizes their entanglements, mapping out a middle ground in which they are ambivalently linked to one another.

An introductory section shows how colonial and postcolonial literatures are joined in a relation of epistemic complicity that the author designates with the word "post/colonial". That relation is exemplified by the intertextual links binding together Daniel Defoe's colonial classic Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee's postcolonial rewriting of it, Foe.

Subsequent chapters include an analysis of the central text of Enlightenment exoticism, Bernardin's Paul et Virginie; overviews of Glissant's novels as well as his theoretical discussions of creolization; an examination of fictional representations of the Haitian revolution (such as Hugo's Bug-Jargal and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!); and an extended consideration of nineteenth-century Martiniquan literature and politics.

The bookconcludes with a reading of New Zealander Keri Hulmes's the bone people, in which the author summarizes his core argument: namely, that in discussions of cultural identity, we need to maintain a fine balance between promoting the hy