Browsing by Author "Kusek, Robert"
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Item Scholar – fictionist – memoirist: David Lodge’s documentary (self-)biography in "Quite a Good Time to Be Born: 1935–1975"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2016) Kusek, RobertOver the last decade or so, David Lodge has become not only a reader but also an avid practitioner of “fact-based writing” – be it the biographical novel (The Master of 2004 and A Man of Parts 2011), the autobiographical novel (Deaf Sentence of 2008), the biographical essay (Lives in Writing of 2014) and – finally – a proper autobiography (Quite a Good Time to Be Born of 2015). The aim of this paper is to analyse Lodge’s recent turn to life narratives and, in particular, his autobiographical story of 2015; and, consequently, to address the following questions: Does Lodge’s memoir offer “an experiment in autobiography” (to quote H.G. Wells, one of Lodge’s favourites), or remain a conventional life story immune to the tenets of contemporary life writing? Is it the work of a (self-)historian, or a novelist? Does it belong to the “regime of truth,” or is it the product of memory? Finally, is it, indeed, a memoir (as its subtitle claims), or a specimen of self-biography? The paper will show special interest in the work’s generic characteristics and will offer an attempt to locate Quite a Good Time to Be Born on the map of contemporary life writing practices.Item Thirty Years After... The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2013) Kusek, RobertAlthough J.M. Coetzee’s body of works – unique and highly idiosyncratic – defies easy generalizations or summations, it is possible to identify several major tendencies present in his extraordinary oeuvre. Coetzee’s novels published in the 1970s and 1980s, such as In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K, were seriously concerned with the power relation between the oppressor and the disfranchised under the oppressive systems and, according to a number of critics, often took the form of an allegory. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Coetzee focused on experimental fiction in which he expertly combined history, biography and fantasy and entered into intertextual dialogue with the masterpieces of Western literary tradition as well as their creators (e.g. Foe and The Master of Petersburg). In the last decade or so, the nature of Coetzee’s work has significantly changed. Old forms have been abandoned and Coetzee, instead, has turned towards other genres such as the memoir, essay, lecture, polemic – all of them being, in fact, intimate conversations Coetzee is having with himself, or, to be more precise, his multiple alter egos that he invents for the purpose of his fiction. Most notable examples include his autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life and Diary of a Bad Year. This paper discusses Coetzee’s most recent novel titled The Childhood of Jesus. Will the novel – published thirty years after Life and Times of Michael K – open a new chapter in Coetzee’s oeuvre? Does it hail – as the title seems to suggest – a return to allegorical fiction? Or, perhaps, can it constitute another experiment in self-referentiality? My discussion of the novel will try to position the book in relation to Coetzee’s other works and investigate its formal and thematic aspects in a comparative manner. The paper will also attempt to trace various literary and intertextual references and will ultimately see The Childhood of Jesus as a tribute to Miguel Cervantes and a work of a supreme ironist – a feature that is hardly ever considered when talking about Coetzee and his oeuvre.Item Writing Oneself, Writing the Other: J.M. Coetzee’s Fictional Autobiography in Boyhood, Youth and Summertime(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2012) Kusek, RobertHow is a writer’s life to be embodied in writing? How to tell one’s own life story? How to challenge a reader and not to imprison oneself in the modes and forms of conventional life writing? The above-posed questions remain central to J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre who in one of the interviews with David Attwell confessed that “in a larger sense all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it” (Attwell 1999: 17). Coetzee’s difficult and highly confusing group of late twenty and early twenty-first-century works – Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life – focus on a variety of strategies in which a life can be represented in a literary work. These genre-bending contributions to life-writing discourse constantly challenge the readers to tell fact from invention, autobiography from fiction, never satisfying them with the answers given. Yet, they explore the intriguing figure, that is the author – in all his peculiarity, accidentalness and actuality – in a way that can hardly be matched by many other contemporary works. Mikhail Bakhtin once observed that “the process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature has a complicated and erratic history, as does the articulation of actual historical persons in such a time and space” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). The present paper focuses on three such articulations, Coetzee’s autobiographical volumes entitled Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth and Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life and investigates their self-referentiality, i.e. a relationship between the ‘real’/historical ‘I’ and the narrated ‘I.’