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"In this major reassessment of J. M. Coetzee, which looks at Coetzee's full writing career thus far, Anthony Uhlmann illuminates the intellectual and philosophical interests that drive Coetzee's writing. In doing so, Uhlmann makes the case for Coetzee as an important and original thinker in his right. Whilst looking at Coetzee's writing career, from his dissertation through to The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and interpreting running themes and scenarios, style, and evolving attitudes to form and genre, Uhlmann also offers revealing glimpses, informed by archival research, of Coetzee's writing process. Among the main themes that Uhlmann draws out from Coetzee's writing, and which remain highly relevant today, are the ideas that there is truth in fiction, or that fiction can provide valuable understandings of real world problems, and there are also fictions of the truth: that we are surrounded, in our everyday lives, with stories we tell ourselves which we wish to believe are true"-- Intuition, knowledge, truth -- Meaning : Coetzee's dissertation -- Method : Dusklands -- Process : Waiting for the barbarians -- Ethics and ethology -- Ethology : Life & times of Michael K, Age of iron -- Disposition and method : The master of Petersburg -- Truth in fiction : Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace -- Creative intuition : The childhood of Jesus -- Experience, insight : Boyhood, youth.
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