A woman thinking in dark times

The absent presence of Hannah Arendt in J. M. Coetzee's “Elizabeth Costello and the problem of Evil”

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20156091
AutoresPam Ryan (0000-0002-3705-4665), Pam Muñoz Ryan (University of South Africa, autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Volumen21
Número3-4
Páginas277-295
Fecha de publicación2005-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
EditorialUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564710508530380
OpenAlexW2019598008
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas9

This paper approaches Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003), in particular the section entitled “Elizabeth Costello and the Problem of Evil” (originally published in Salmagundi 2003), as a complex narrative in which intellectual and philosophical ideas merge with storytelling to create an ¡ntertextual matrix. By means of a close reading of the aforementioned “lesson”, I aim to judge its contextualisation within a realm of intellectual and philosophical debates and thereby to reveal the influence of Hannah Arendt, who, I contend, emerges as one of the less obvious intertexts in a “novel” that is clearly celebrating intertextuality as a self‐reflexive, intellectual game. By examining the text as an intertext, I suggest, as one possibility, that Coetzee is presenting Elizabeth Costello as a latter‐day Hannah Arendt, a woman “thinking in dark times”. If that is perhaps too decisive a reading for a slippery writer like Coetzee, then at the very least, he seems to be in conversation with Arendt on such issues as evil, banality and thinking

Art · Conversation · Epistemology · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Realm · Storytelling · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Philosophy · Philosophy and Literary Analysis · Psychology · South African History and Culture