Abstract
Kunkler argues that the experimental form of J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime, which formally precludes the autobiographical first-person narrative mode, can be read as a response to the crisis of self-knowledge in autobiography opened up by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Reading Summertime alongside Coetzee’s critical scepticism toward the truth value of Rousseauian ‘authenticity’, Kunkler assesses Summertime’s revalorisation of the Other’s truth in autobiography. Listening to the frank speech—or parrhesia—of the feminine Other is an inversion of Rousseauian form and continues Coetzee’s preoccupation with the gendering of textual authority, as seen in Foe. Kunkler argues that Summertime is a feminist text, in that it articulates a type of relationship of the self to truth where the feminine Other is foregrounded to speak truth to male power.
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Notes
- 1.
Williams describes how diverse mental contents can come to be sorted into beliefs and desires, from a baser level of contents with ‘no determinate attitude attached: wishes’ (Fricker 52–53). Wishes are not yet beliefs or desires, but, rather, fleeting contents, which only come to be sorted into ‘belief’, on the one hand, and desire on the other, if they can be maintained in the face of the other. For more on this, see Miranda Fricker’s discussion of Bernard Williams’ notion of ‘steadying the mind’, in Epistemic Injustice (2007: 52–56).
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Kunkler, B. (2019). Women’s Knowledge: Self-Knowledge and Women’s Frank Speech in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_13
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