Abstract
Philosophers writing on J. M. Coetzee’s literary project have described it as “realist-modernist”. This is due to a combination of the prose’s stylistic features and more substantial issues developed in his novels. Coetzee’s prose is extremely sober, compact, dry, and overtly self-conscious; it contains his reflections on features of the prose itself (a technique strongly associated with the great names of literary modernism) and on the historic-literary conflict between realism and modernism in the modern novel. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of Coetzee’s use of the split page in Diary of a Bad Year, focusing on its role in undermining “ersatz ethical thought”, and develop a model for explaining Coetzee’s realist modernism. This model is situated within a broader, self-critical project that traces the significance of my analysis for the form of philosophical discourse.
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Falcato, A. (2018). Embodied Ghosts: Coetzee’s Realist Modernism. In: Falcato, A., Cardiello, A. (eds) Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77078-9_4
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