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Author | J. M. Coetzee |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Fiction, Literature |
Publisher | Secker & Warburg |
Publication date | 30 September 2003 |
Publication place | Australia |
Media type | Print (Hardback), (Paperback) |
Pages | 224pp |
ISBN | 0-436-20616-1 |
OCLC | 52456771 |
Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil. Many of the lectures Costello gives are edited fragments that Coetzee had previously published. The lessons she delivers only tenuously speak to the work for which she is being honored. [1] Of note, Elizabeth Costello is the main character in Coetzee's academic novel, The Lives of Animals (1999). A character named Elizabeth Costello also appears in Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man and Coetzee's 2011 short story Lies is about a woman with the last name Costello.
A renowned writer, Elizabeth Costello has to put up with a large number of various inconveniences. First of all, she is a sixty-six-year-old woman who has committed all her life to writing, often neglecting not only her own needs but her children in order to give all her strengths to her work. Due to the fact that her first novel is about women's liberation, her interviewers – usually women who write books about her – expect that she will be an energetic fighter for equality, who eagerly discusses the importance of a woman's role in modern society. They are extremely disappointed to see an elderly woman, who is sick and tired of discussing her first book.
Accompanied by her son John, she comes to Pennsylvania to receive the Stowe Award. During her acceptance speech, she speaks about Kafka and the audience finds it difficult to follow her idea, for this kind of talk is not to their liking. It seems that there is a gap between her and her audience. Although public speaking becomes a challenge for her, she decides to take a cruise in which she is supposed to speak about realism. The applause she gets is unenthusiastic.
Not only does the public not understand what she wants them to realize, but neither does her own family. Elizabeth's vegetarianism often provokes quarrels between her and her daughter-in-law. Her son is torn between love for his mother and difficulties in accepting her point of view. More often than not, he asks himself why she can't be just like any other elderly woman. The truth is that she doesn't know the answer herself. She speaks about the things people don't want to know, because she feels the need to do it.
Elizabeth has a sister she hasn't seen for a long period of time. She lives in Africa and serves in the Marian Order. The sisters have very little in common. During a graduation ceremony that both sisters are invited to, Blanche criticizes the humanities. Their parting is bitter, for they know they will not see each other again. Blanche charges Elizabeth with choosing "the wrong Greeks", meaning that Blanche doesn't support the philosophical ideas her sister is so fond of.
At the end of the novel, Elizabeth finds herself in a kind of limbo, which she can only escape by satisfactorily explaining her beliefs before a court. It's implied this is a purgatory-like stage of the afterlife. Her first attempt is a failure, for she tells the truth and states that she doesn't believe in anything. She then has another try, where she tells a fictional story that reveals a deeper appreciation of life, but the novel ends before she finds out whether she will succeed at passing through the gate.
Elizabeth Costello frequently engages philosophers and their ideas. Among the philosophers mentioned by name are historical figures such as Aristotle, Porphyry, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes and Jeremy Bentham, as well as contemporary figures such as Mary Midgley, Tom Regan and Thomas Nagel. In addition two minor characters, Elaine Marx and an academic named Arendt (whose first name is not mentioned) share surnames with the famous philosophers Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. The frequent allusions to philosophers have caused critics to debate whether there are philosophical themes in Coetzee's work and, if so, what they might be. [2]
Part of the debate has focused on similarities between ideas expressed by Coetzee's protagonist and the philosophy of Mary Midgley. Coetzee's protagonist for example is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in her 1983 book Animals and Why They Matter. Midgley has also criticized Marx and other philosophers for singling out one human attribute (in Marx's case, that of freely given labour) and proclaiming it to be the unique quality that elevates human life above that of animals. Midgley argues that this approach confuses a factual claim and a moral claim, and it has been suggested that Elizabeth Costello draws attention to the same shortcoming in Arendt. As one analysis of Elizabeth Costello puts it, “The problem with Marx’s view is that there are human activities in which people find considerable value, such as giving birth, that are capacities we share with animals. Similarly, there are some actions, such as committing suicide, that may be unique to human beings yet that we do not celebrate. Like Marx, Hannah Arendt lauds one particular human attribute, in her case our capacity to take part in a shared world of political speech and action, on the grounds that it is what separates us from animals. There is a certain casual brilliance in the way Coetzee extends Midgley’s critique of Marx to Arendt, whose philosophy is often thought to invert Marxism.” [3]
The chamber opera Is this the gate? [4] by the composer Nicholas Lens with libretto by John M. Coetzee is based on the last chapter of the novel (first performance at the Adelaide Festival 2024, Australia). After Slow Man (opera), the chamber opera Is this the gate? is the second co-operation between the opera composer Nicholas Lens and John M. Coetzee.
Elizabeth Costello was generally well-received among British press. [5] Globally, Complete Review saying on the consensus "No consensus (and considerable confusion about what Coetzee is doing), though most fairly favourable". [6]
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America. As an influential writer and speaker, Maracle fought for those oppressed by sexism, racism, and capitalist exploitation.
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.
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Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
"A Report to an Academy" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he effected his transformation. The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly Der Jude, along with another of Kafka's stories, "Jackals and Arabs". The story appeared again in a 1919 collection titled Ein Landarzt.
Slow Man is a novel by the South-African writer J.M. Coetzee and concerns a man who must learn to adapt after losing a leg in a road accident. The novel has many varied themes, including the nature of care, the relationship between an author and his characters, and man's drive to leave a legacy. It was Coetzee's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The novel was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
The Human Condition, first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt's account of how "human activities" should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa as contrasted with the vita contemplativa and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. She distinguishes three sorts of activity and discusses how they have been affected by changes in Western history.
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A duende is a humanoid figure of folklore, with variations from Iberian, Ibero American, and Latin American cultures, comparable to dwarves, gnomes, or leprechauns. In Spanish duende originated as a contraction of the phrase dueñ(o) de casa, effectively "master of the house", or perhaps derived from some similar mythical being of the Visigoth or Swabian culture given its comparable looks with the “Tomte” of the Swedish language conceptualized as a mischievous spirit inhabiting a dwelling.
Foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The Lives of Animals (1999) is a metafictional novella about animal rights by the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. The work is introduced by Amy Gutmann and followed by a collection of responses by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts. It was published by Princeton University Press as part of its Human Values series.
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Henrietta Rodman was an American educator and feminist. She was active in advocating on behalf of married women teachers for their right to promotion and maternity leave.
Slow Man is an opera by Nicholas Lens to an English-language libretto by J. M. Coetzee, based on his 2005 novel of the same name. The opera was commissioned by the Malta Festival, Poznań and produced by the Opera Poznań.
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