Beyond the ancient quarrel: literature,

philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee First

Edition Coetzee
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/beyond-the-ancient-quarrel-literature-philosophy-and-
j-m-coetzee-first-edition-coetzee/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and

J.M. Coetzee 1st Edition Patrick Hayes

https://ebookmass.com/product/beyond-the-ancient-quarrel-
literature-philosophy-and-j-m-coetzee-1st-edition-patrick-hayes/

Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel Lyra Ekström

Lindbäck

https://ebookmass.com/product/iris-murdoch-and-the-ancient-
quarrel-lyra-ekstrom-lindback/

The Longman Standard History of Ancient Philosophy

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-longman-standard-history-of-
ancient-philosophy/

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity First Edition

Laura Eastlake

https://ebookmass.com/product/ancient-rome-and-victorian-
masculinity-first-edition-laura-eastlake/
In Other Words: Transpositions of Philosophy in J.M.
Coetzee's 'Jesus' Trilogy Stephen Mulhall

https://ebookmass.com/product/in-other-words-transpositions-of-
philosophy-in-j-m-coetzees-jesus-trilogy-stephen-mulhall/

Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy

Pierre Destrée

https://ebookmass.com/product/laughter-humor-and-comedy-in-
ancient-philosophy-pierre-destree/

Vice in Ancient Philosophy Karen Margrethe Nielsen

https://ebookmass.com/product/vice-in-ancient-philosophy-karen-
margrethe-nielsen/

Virtue and law in Plato and beyond First Edition Julia

Annas

https://ebookmass.com/product/virtue-and-law-in-plato-and-beyond-
first-edition-julia-annas/

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume LVI Caston

https://ebookmass.com/product/oxford-studies-in-ancient-
philosophy-volume-lvi-caston/
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond the Ancient

Quarrel
Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee

Edited by
PATRICK HAYES
and
JAN WILM

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2017
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941745
ISBN 978–0–19–880528–1
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Acknowledgements

This book emerged from a symposium held at the Research Centre at St John’s
College, Oxford, in June 2015, where initial drafts of the various chapters were
discussed in a small-group workshop format. The discussions we had on that
occasion created an absorbing dialogue between different ways of thinking about
literature, which did much to shape both the structure and contents of this book.
We wish to extend our gratitude to all those who attended for making the
symposium the lively and productive event that it was.
The John Fell Fund, the St John’s College Research Centre, and the Vereinigung
der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, provided
essential financial support that enabled the symposium to take place.
We especially wish to thank J. M. Coetzee for granting permission to quote from
his papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Thanks also to Rick Watson for all his assistance. References to the location of
specific quotations from the Coetzee Papers are provided in footnotes throughout
the book.
We are grateful to Silja Glitscher for providing editorial assistance during the
work on this volume.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Contents

List of Contributors ix

1. Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts: An Introduction 1

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

I. UNSET T L ING BO UN D AR IE S: P HILOSOPHY ,

L I T E R AT UR E , A ND L I T E R AR Y C RI T I C I SM
2. Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation: Embedding and
Embodying Philosophy in Literature and Theology in
The Childhood of Jesus 17
Stephen Mulhall
3. Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism: A Response to In the
Heart of the Country 35
Maximilian de Gaynesford
4. Double Thoughts: Coetzee and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism 52
Andrew Dean
5. ‘Good paragraphing. Unusual content’: On the Making and
Unmaking of Novelistic Worlds 70
Julika Griem

I I . E T H I C S A N D MO R A L P H I L O S O P H Y
6. ‘A Yes without a No’: Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of
Conversion in Coetzee’s Fiction 91
Derek Attridge
7. Coetzee and Eros: A Critique of Moral Philosophy 107
Eileen John

I I I . R E A L I T Y , L A N G U A G E , A N D S U B J E C T IV I T Y
8. Coetzee’s Quest for Reality 125
Alice Crary
9. Beyond Realism: Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination 143
Martin Woessner
10. Coetzee’s Critique of Language 160
Peter D. McDonald
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

viii Contents

11. Coetzee and Psychoanalysis: From Paranoia to Aporia 180

Jean-Michel Rabaté

IV. C ONTEXTS A ND IN STITUTIO NS

12. ‘Wisselbare Woorde’: J. M. Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy 199
Carrol Clarkson
13. The J. M. Coetzee Archive and the Archive in J. M. Coetzee 215
Jan Wilm

Bibliography 233
Index 247
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

List of Contributors
Derek Attridge is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the
Event (The University of Chicago Press, 2004) and several essays on Coetzee. Among his
other books are The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004) and The Work of Literature
(Oxford, 2015), and the co-edited volumes Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and
Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Cambridge History of
South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Zoë Wicomb and the
Translocal: Writing Scotland and South Africa (Routledge, 2017). He is Emeritus Professor at
the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Carrol Clarkson has published widely on aesthetics, legal theory, and South African
literature and art. Her books include J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009;
2nd edition 2013) and Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice
(Fordham University Press, 2014). She is Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature
at the University of Amsterdam, and has a research affiliation with the Amsterdam School for
Cultural Analysis. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town.
Alice Crary is Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She writes and
publishes on issues related to moral philosophy, philosophy and literature, Wittgenstein,
J. L. Austin, feminism and philosophy, philosophy and animals, philosophy of mind/
language, and philosophy and cognitive disability. Her publications include Inside Ethics:
On the Demands of Moral Thought (Harvard University Press, 2016), Beyond Moral Judg-
ment (Harvard University Press, 2007), the edited collection Wittgenstein and the Moral Life:
Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (MIT Press, 2007), and two co-edited collections, Reading
Cavell (Routledge, 2006) and The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000).
Andrew Dean recently completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. His thesis examined
postwar metafiction and life-writing, focusing on authors Philip Roth, Janet Frame, and
J. M. Coetzee—several chapters related to the thesis are forthcoming. He is a New Zealand
Rhodes Scholar and the author of a short popular book on the effect of the economic reform
period in New Zealand: Ruth, Roger and Me: Debts and Legacies (BWB, 2015).
Maximilian de Gaynesford is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the
University of Reading. Formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he is the author of
several books, including The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford
University Press, 2017) and I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (Oxford University
Press, 2006), and of articles on aesthetics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mind, and
language and ethics.
Julika Griem is Professor of English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
She has published on narrative theory, intermediality, the two cultures, genre theory, and
literature and space; her publications include books on Joseph Conrad, apes and monkeys as
figures of aesthetic and anthropological reflection between 1800 and 2000, and the intrinsic
logic of cities. Her current research projects are concerned with the Scottish author John
Burnside, figurations of the whole, philological economies of scale, and methodologies of
contemporary literature research. A further interest is dedicated to forms and styles of
science policy and the humanities’ contributions to academic institution building.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

x List of Contributors
Patrick Hayes is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and a
Fellow of St John’s College. His research focuses on debates about the nature and value of
literature, from the Romantic period to the present day. He is the author of J. M. Coetzee
and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Philip
Roth: Fiction and Power (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a
history of life-writing in the period after 1945.
Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research
is in aesthetics, with particular interests in art’s ethical and cognitive roles and in the
relations between literature and philosophy. She co-edited Blackwell’s Philosophy of Litera-
ture anthology and is Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and
the Arts, University of Warwick.
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of
Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state, and
the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions, and pub-
lishing; multilingualism, translation, and interculturality; and on the limits of literary
criticism. His main publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice,
1888–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship
and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas
of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford University
Press, 2017).
Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at New College, University
of Oxford. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche; philoso-
phy and religion; and philosophy and the arts. His publications include The Wounded
Animal: J. M.Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton
University Press, 2009), The Self and Its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as
Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Great Riddle:
Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature, a co-founder and
senior curator of Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (slought.org), and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include The Pathos of Distance
(Bloomsbury, 2016), Think, Pig ! (Fordham University Press, 2016), and Les Guerres de
Jacques Derrrida (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016).
Jan Wilm is Lecturer in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He
is the author of The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and
co-editor (with Mark Nixon) of a volume on Samuel Beckett and German Literature, Samuel
Beckett und die deutsche Literatur (Transcript, 2013). He is currently writing a book on the
aesthetics of snow and preparing a volume of essays on the German writer Michael Lentz.
He also works as a literary translator, having translated work by Maggie Nelson and Andrew
O’Hagan into German, and as a book reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among others.
Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History and Society at The City College of New
York’s Center for Worker Education, where he teaches courses in intellectual and cultural
history at both graduate and undergraduate level. He is the author of Heidegger in America
(Cambridge University Press, 2011). His essays and reviews have appeared in La Maleta
de Portbou, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Raritan.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

1
Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts
An Introduction

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

From Dusklands (1974) onwards, J. M. Coetzee’s fiction has been richly allusive
to philosophical idioms and traditions, and his most recent work has staged
philosophical questions in increasingly explicit ways. The texts that feature the
character Elizabeth Costello (The Lives of Animals [1999], Elizabeth Costello [2002],
and Slow Man [2005]), the volumes of correspondence with Paul Auster (2013)
and Arabella Kurtz (2015), together with his latest novels The Childhood of Jesus
(2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), all engage in overt ways with philosoph-
ical arguments about, among other things, the nature of justice, reason, subjective
experience, the good life, and the good society. There has been some remarkable
scholarship that reflects upon Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, from Derek
Attridge’s work on Coetzee and ethics ( J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
[2004]), to Stephen Mulhall’s study of how Coetzee’s ‘modernist realism’ engages
with philosophical ideas (The Wounded Animal [2009]). But so far no study has
succeeded either in gathering together the range of questions about literature and
philosophy that Coetzee’s fiction provokes, or in examining what is really at stake in
the kinds of thinking that his oeuvre stimulates.
The closest thing to such a study is the collection of essays assembled by the
philosophers Anton Leist and Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical
Perspectives on Literature (2010). This collection brought together a range of
philosophers, mainly from the analytic tradition, to reflect on different aspects of
Coetzee’s work from the perspective of moral philosophy, with a particular focus on
animal rights. While this volume includes some extremely good work, it was
constrained by some key assumptions. Most strikingly, it tended to downplay the
extent to which Coetzee’s writing obliges us to reflect upon what Socrates was
already calling, in The Republic, the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and
philosophy.1 Many essays tended to speak about literature and philosophy as if

1 Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997),

p. 1211. It suits Socrates to refer to the quarrel that he is starting between literature and philosophy as
‘ancient’, and the evidence he produces of its history is actually very slight: ‘But in case we are charged
with a certain harshness and lack of sophistication, let’s also tell poetry that there is an ancient quarrel
between it and philosophy, which is evidenced by such expressions as “the dog yelping and shrieking at
its master,” “great is the empty eloquence of fools,” “the mob of wise men that has mastered Zeus,” and
“the subtle thinkers, beggars all.” ’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

2 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

they were self-evidently distinct forms of discourse, both in their nature and their
functions. Moreover, the editors of the collection approached Coetzee’s work with
the implicit sense of a disciplinary hierarchy. The very subtitle of the collection,
Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, positioned literature as the passive object of
knowledge which philosophy would illuminate, or which philosophy would use as
incidental material for the purposes of a philosophical argument. These assump-
tions tended to close down the possibility that literature might itself pose questions
about the value of philosophical reasoning, or that it might offer a disparate or even
rival form of thinking in its own terms.
Perhaps because of these assumptions, Leist and Singer limited the range of
implication that Coetzee’s work carries to very specific fields of philosophical
inquiry, and to a narrow concept of utility-to-philosophy. Coetzee’s writing is
most likely to be useful, they implied, to those who are engaged in the specific
field of ethics, and especially applied ethics. One aim of the present collection is
therefore to let Coetzee’s fiction speak to a broader range of philosophical ques-
tions, and thereby represent the nature and value of his writing more adequately.
It takes the discussion of Coetzee and philosophy into new terrain by allowing his
work to resonate beyond the realm of moral philosophy—without neglecting this
key preoccupation of Coetzee’s work—into other kinds of philosophical inquiry.
It includes chapters on Coetzee’s relationship with, and impact upon, a diverse
range of philosophical subjects, including the philosophy of action, the philosophy
of language, the concept of rationality, questions about the nature of reality, and
a distinct engagement with questions about aesthetics. It also opens out onto
broader themes that intersect with philosophical inquiry, including education,
theology, psychoanalysis, and post-secularism. Broadening out from subject-
specific areas, the present collection also explores the institutional environments
that have mattered most for Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, such as the
status of his archive, and the philosophical legacies at stake in the resistance politics
of his native South Africa.
But as well as enlarging the parameters through which Coetzee’s fiction might be
addressed, the deeper aim of this book is to examine the ways in which Coetzee
invites us to reopen longstanding questions about the boundaries between litera-
ture, literary criticism, and philosophy. It is to ask how these different forms of
discourse might be able to engage each other—though in a way that does not ignore
their considerable differences, and the often disparate kinds of thinking they
engage and demand. In short, our aim was to treat the assumptions that limited
J. M. Coetzee and Ethics very much as open questions that Coetzee’s fiction helps us
to explore. Are we sure we know what literature and philosophy actually are, how
they can be defined and delimited, both in their ‘essence’ and from a disciplinary
perspective? That is to say, are there forms of thinking that are truly specific to the
one and necessarily excluded from the other? As Karl Ameriks has pointed out,

[T]he very notion of a sharp distinction of the philosophical and the non-philosophical
is itself the result of a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to Kant, none of the truly great
modern philosophers had lived the life of a philosophy professor—not Descartes, not
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 3

Leibniz, not Hume. Conversely, the early romantics all studied philosophy closely, and
most of them showed serious interest in an academic career in philosophy.2
Likewise, in his lectures on the cross-currents between literature and philosophy,
Philosophien der Literatur (2013), Friedrich Kittler notes that while there ‘is no
doubt that many languages on this earth have brought forth literature and that
today there exists literature in nearly all languages’, he questions whether philoso-
phy has been equally ubiquitous. Kittler historicizes the ways in which ancient
Greece gave rise to philosophy, and emphasizes that a culture of writing, poetry,
and music has played a key part in the shaping of what is called philosophy,
suggesting that there existed and continues to exist a fruitful interaction and a
cross-fertilization between these different forms of discourse.3 What, then, are the
intellectual commitments that create disciplinary boundaries between literature and
philosophy, or between philosophy and literary criticism? And what is the value of a
body of writing such as Coetzee’s that invites us to question those boundaries?
* * *
There are many reasons why Coetzee’s fiction is particularly interesting to think
about in relation to these questions. One of the most significant is the fact that, just
as none of the great philosophers prior to Kant lived the life of a professional
philosopher, neither has Coetzee exactly lived the life of a professional writer, at
least as such a life is conventionally understood. He has been a writer-cum-
academic, a ‘fictioneer’, as he has described himself, who has also published very
considerable academic monographs on the history and theory of literature. He has
co-taught seminars alongside philosophers at the University of Chicago, and has
developed longstanding friendships with leading philosophers, such as Raimond
Gaita, Robert B. Pippin, and André du Toit.
In fact Coetzee’s interdisciplinary interests are considerably more diverse than
this brief summary suggests. He graduated from the University of Cape Town
(UCT) in 1961 with honours in both English and Mathematics, and initially it was
unclear what direction he would pursue. He moved to London in December 1961,
where he wrote his Master’s thesis on the fiction of Ford Madox Ford, while
at the same time embarking upon a career as a computer programmer at
IBM. There, he used his training in mathematics to run data tests for private
clients on their new ‘mainframe’ computers; in his spare hours he ‘[e]xperiment[ed]
with computer-generated poetry’.4 His interest in mathematics would resurface
throughout his life, increasingly with regard to the philosophy of numbers. In

2 Karl Ameriks, ‘Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism’, in The Cambridge Companion to German

Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17; 12.
3 Friedrich Kittler, Philosophien der Literatur (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2013), p. 10 (our translation).
4 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2015), p. 12. See also J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing,
trans. Michiel Heyns (Johannesburg/Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), pp. 121–5.
Also, see Coetzee’s treatment of this in his fictionalized autobiography Youth (London: Secker &
Warburg, 2002), pp. 160–1.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

4 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the character known as David (in
Childhood) and Davíd (in Schooldays) finds it first impossible to learn conventional
counting routines, and then learns to dance ‘the numbers down from where they
live among the aloof stars’; in Here and Now, his exchange of letters with Paul
Auster, Coetzee engages a critique of mathematical conventions in his own voice.5
As Alice Crary shows in her chapter in this collection, Coetzee’s early interest in
mathematics had developed by this stage into a complex reflection on arguments
about counting, learning, and the concept of a private language, that find their
classical expression in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that Coetzee didn’t last long at IBM. In Youth, a
text that is poised in an uncertain realm between fiction and autobiography (a mode
that Coetzee has elsewhere described as ‘autrebiography’), the character known as
‘John’ is appalled to discover that, far from using mathematics in the disinterested
pursuit of knowledge, he is being required by the men in grey suits to run data tests
for a nuclear weapons manufacturer.6 One symptom, perhaps, of his growing
alienation from corporate life was an increasing devotion to the fiction of Samuel
Beckett, and Coetzee’s next move was to the University of Texas at Austin, where
he would write his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction.
This doctorate was a most unusual piece of work. It was completed in 1969, at a
time when English studies in America was still dominated by an approach known
as the New Criticism. Concerned to establish literary criticism as a respectable
discipline in its own right, the New Critics (a group that encompassed a diverse
range of intellectuals, from John Crowe Ransom to Cleanth Brooks) had stressed
the autonomy of the literary text, and strived to make literary interpretation into a
teachable art. Only the properly initiated could generate the superfine attention to
stylistic qualities such as paradox, irony, and ambiguity, and appreciate how the text
was thereby woven into an untranslatable expressive whole, that was demanded by
the professional critics. Coetzee never had any patience with this kind of literary
hermeticism. Years later, when teaching at UCT, he typed up a memorandum on
the related topic of Practical Criticism:
Practical Criticism is not a critical theory but a package designed to simplify and streamline
the preparation of large numbers of culturally semi-literate students for careers in school-
teaching. As a teaching package, it is modelled on a drastically oversimplified version of
human psychology. Designed with the limitations of the 45-minute tutorial in mind, it
fosters a skill in doing rapid explications of half-page texts with a tight semantic structure.
Since such texts are largely unrepresentative of the vast body of literature, the relevance of
Practical Criticism to literary criticism is smaller than one might be led to think.7

5J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), p. 68.
6J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/
London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 394.
7 Practical Criticism descends from the writings of I. A. Richards; while it was not identical with the

New Criticism, it was in many ways a precursor to it. The quotation is from a two-page memorandum
entitled ‘Practical Criticism at U[niversity of] C[ape] T[own]’, dated July 1977, in the J. M. Coetzee
Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, Container 113, Folder 4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 5

By contrast, Coetzee’s thesis was determinedly interdisciplinary. It was an attempt

to place literary interpretation on a stronger intellectual footing by integrating
criticism with statistical analysis. The method Coetzee engaged with was known
as ‘stylostatistics’, an approach pioneered by George Udny Yule and Wilhelm Fucks
to study language patterning in complex texts: Coetzee’s hope was that stylostatis-
tics could be integrated with more traditional forms of literary interpretation that
try to account for the wider meaningfulness of a text. However, with remarkable
honesty for a young man at the beginning of his career, Coetzee concluded that
stylostatistics was simply not as useful as he had hoped it would be ‘as a creative tool
of explication in single texts’. This was, he explained, due to the inability of a
method grounded in statistical analysis to account for the way in which the event of
reading is not a linear process, but involves the ‘incessant recursion’ of creating and
revising hypotheses about a text. In contrast to the inventiveness of the subjective
reader, stylostatistics ‘can only substantiate discoveries’, he concluded, and ‘never
initiate them’.8
While this was an unpromising conclusion for a doctoral thesis to have reached,
Coetzee’s distrust of seemingly obvious institutional assumptions was already
taking him in interesting directions. As it ground to a halt, Coetzee’s thesis opened
up a series of questions:
To what extent…are points of stylistic density functions of the work itself and to what
extent functions of our reading of it?…Should style be studied in its effects on the
reader, and thus in its expressive aspect, or in its objectively verifiable formal proper-
ties? If the former, where are we to draw the line beyond which criticism degenerates
into the subjective vagueness of ‘moods’ and ‘tones’? If the latter, how can we give
equal weight to properties which are perceptible to an intelligent reader and properties
which reveal themselves only under a grammatical or statistical microscope?9
Each of these questions turns on a deeper question about the nature of literature as
a form of discourse, and about the nature (and limits) of literary criticism. For
Coetzee, the question of what makes literature into literature (Is it an inherent
quality? Is it the desire of the reader or a convention of reading that frames the text
as literary?) is an entirely open one. It is equally unclear to him what literary
criticism is, or what it should be: he makes no assumptions on this front. In
Summertime (2009), the third instalment in his fictionalized autobiography,
those people thrown into relationships with the young ‘John’ tended to find him
a rather obtuse young man. But this obtuseness, which is certainly on display here
in his doctoral thesis, is not dissimilar to the obtuseness that so frustrates the parents
of young David (or Davíd) in the Jesus novels. His very inability to go along with
institutionalized roles and routines brings with it not only a certain level of
frustration and annoyance, but also a certain creative possibility.

8 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis’, PhD thesis,

University of Texas at Austin, 1969, pp. 160–2.

9 Ibid., p. 153.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

6 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

It was very much against his will that Coetzee ended up back in South Africa
teaching English at UCT, a position he held until he retired from academic life in
2001. His first job was as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo in New
York state, then a thriving campus for literary studies, which featured such
luminaries as Robert Creeley and Leslie Fiedler on its staff. Buffalo had embraced
what Patrick Ffrench has called the ‘time of theory’, and it was here that Coetzee
was exposed to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and especially Roland Barthes—
an enduringly important influence—who moved freely between philosophical
reflection and literary analysis.10 He lost his American visa as a result of participat-
ing in a protest on campus, and arrived at UCT in 1971. At this time, along with
several other Commonwealth nations, the teaching of English literature in South
Africa was dominated by F. R. Leavis’s strongly moralistic approach to literary
criticism, which was actively hostile to more philosophical kinds of reflection on the
nature and value of literature. Leavis had insisted that the value of reading was to
increase our understanding of ‘felt life’, yet at the same time he strongly resisted any
attempt to define what that actually was, on the basis that to do so would be to fall
into the alienated form of philosophical reasoning that literature is (putatively)
there to save us from. Coetzee was uncomfortable with the inward-looking and,
he felt, intellectually lazy academic environment that this approach seemed to
permit.11 Even as UCT gradually reformed, opening itself to other ways of thinking
about literature, he tended to look elsewhere for intellectual companionship, which
he eventually found in the Committee for Social Thought (CST) at the University
of Chicago. The emphasis of this institution on thinking across disciplinary
borderlines was very congenial to Coetzee, and in the 1990s he began a long-
standing connection with the Committee, teaching courses on his own as well as
together with the philosopher Jonathan Lear. As David Attwell points out, with
Lear Coetzee ‘taught comparative literature on congenial terms—an entire semester
on autobiography, or Tolstoy, or Proust; in these examples, themes and authors
that were relevant to the writing he was pursuing at the time, especially the
autobiographies’.12 J. C. Kannemeyer notes in his biography that the seminars
organized by Coetzee and Lear tended to take the form of ‘relaxed Socratic
conversations on a common topic with students’.13
Coetzee’s visits to Chicago continued until 2003, and in the fall term of 1996 he
taught a course titled ‘Realism in the Novel’. The course encompassed readings of
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, alongside
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and James Joyce’s Ulysses. For the course,
Coetzee had prepared a lecture titled ‘Retrospect’, which he begins by referring
explicitly to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy as it relates
to realism:

10 Patrick Ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 1960–1983 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995).

11 See Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, pp. 227, 366.
12 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 212.
13 Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, p. 482.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 7

You will have noticed that both Plato and Aristotle take it as a basic assumption that
art is a matter of imitation (mimesis) of something that pre-exists. To Plato it is
inconceivable that art can bring into existence something that never existed before.
That is why Plato does not see any point to it. If you want to learn about honour and
truthfulness and bravery, study them philosophically, or at least learn about them via
people who exhibit them. Why bother to go to fictional representations of people
who exhibit them? The various critics of Don Quixote agree; if there are no real
heroes around, go to well-attested records of heroes, that is, to the historical record.
(The historical record? says Quixote?—And that’s not a representation?)14
As Coetzee continues, Don Quixote emerges even more powerfully as a counter-
weight to Plato and Aristotle:
I have been presenting Don Quixote to you not so much as an exemplary realist text…
as a book in which the philosophical question of realism is approached in a fictional
medium. In other words, fiction does not yield to philosophy by saying that philo-
sophical questions can be approached in the discourse of philosophy.15
While it is clear that Coetzee’s sympathies lie firmly with the man from La Mancha,
his academic teaching reflects the interest in thinking across disciplinary boundaries
that his fiction also pursues, albeit in different ways.
While Coetzee is of course not unique in the postwar period for combining his
activities as a writer with a career as an academic, most writers involved with the
academy have tended to offer courses in creative writing instruction rather than
courses that stray onto the terrain of literary theory and philosophy. As Andrew
Dean argues in Chapter 4, Coetzee is unusual for the extent to which he has
interweaved his interests as a writer and as a literary theorist, cross-fertilizing the
one from the other. Dean’s chapter explores Coetzee’s inaugural professorial lecture
at UCT, Truth in Autobiography (1985), which Coetzee would later pinpoint as
‘the beginning of a more broadly philosophical engagement with a situation in the
world’.16 This lecture followed the pattern of his doctoral thesis by obtusely ques-
tioning, rather than accepting and exploiting, longstanding institutionalized assump-
tions about the nature and value of literary criticism—which was, as he takes care to
observe in the lecture, precisely the form of writing he was being paid increasingly
large sums of money to do. Coetzee used the occasion of his inauguration to criticize
the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which
literary texts are themselves blind. What, he asks, are the blind-spots of literary
criticism? What are the forms of desire (for power? for moral superiority?) that it
must hide behind a mask of objectivity in order to survive, to keep its self-respect?
Like Coetzee’s doctoral thesis, this lecture was therefore curiously self-undermining.
But, as Dean points out, it also inaugurated Coetzee’s longstanding and increasingly
overt interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature, literary criticism, and philosophy.
This interest would be developed in Foe (1986), a text that moves between fiction and

14 Harry Ransom Center, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10. ‘ “Seminars taught

abroad”, materials for courses taught at University of Chicago, University at Buffalo, Harvard, and
University of Texas at Austin, 1984–2002’, ‘REAL-3. LEC’.
15 Ibid. 16 Doubling the Point, p. 394.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

8 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

literary criticism, the ‘lessons’ of Elizabeth Costello (2001), which move between
fiction and philosophy, and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), where essays on moral
philosophy (among other things) are joined with fiction and autobiography.
No small part of what makes Coetzee such an interesting figure to think about in
relation to the ‘ancient quarrel’ is therefore the ambivalent way in which he situated
himself in the academy, and the attunement to philosophical debates about the
nature and value of literature that this ambivalent situation afforded. But it is by no
means the only factor. As Carrol Clarkson (Chapter 12) shows, Coetzee was very
profoundly marked by the way he was positioned as a white male in apartheid
South Africa. Clarkson draws attention to the ways in which Coetzee responded to
the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, a movement
which (as she points out) took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon, and
especially Fanon’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre. Its critique of moral universals, and
its attack on the notion of a normative human identity, were, Clarkson shows,
absorbed into the very structure of Coetzee’s early texts, especially In the Heart of
the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
But the situation in South Africa was important in other ways too. During the
State of Emergency that was declared in the 1980s, there emerged a powerful
demand from within the white intelligentsia for writers to make themselves
morally and politically useful within the struggle against apartheid. The novelist
Nadine Gordimer took a particularly strong version of this position when she
reviewed Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which she criticized for
lacking this kind of usefulness. At the time of writing Gordimer was taking
her literary bearings from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács,
and the high valuation he placed on a form of storytelling that could illustrate
the development of historical progress in an allegorical way. Applying Lukács’s
Marxism to South Africa, Gordimer believed that what was needed were literary
texts that displayed the value of active and heroic black resistance to apartheid.
Judged by those standards, Coetzee’s enigmatic narrative about a man with a hare
lip who becomes a gardener, then nearly starves to death, seemed at best irrelevant.
‘No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining that course [of
history],’ Gordimer complained:
[N]o one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be. The sense is of the
ultimate malaise: of destruction. Not even the oppressor really believes in what he is
doing, anymore, let alone the revolutionary. This is a challengingly questionable
position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The
presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out
on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does;
yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists
with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South
Africa—Michael K’s people—is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day.
It is not present in the novel.17

17 Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’,

review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6; 6.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 9

It would have been possible for Coetzee to shrug off Gordimer’s review as merely a
misreading. Gordimer seems to assume that Michael K is being presented as an
exemplary hero of some kind, and she fails to register the text’s complex focaliza-
tion, which playfully disorients the genre of the exemplary life; she also misses out
on the many registers of irony and bathos that surround the protagonist. But in his
response, which came in a lecture entitled ‘The Novel Today’ (1986), Coetzee
chose to address the prevailing assumptions about literary value, which Gordimer’s
review represented most powerfully, in a way that invoked the whole history of the
‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy.
Fiercely rejecting the notion that literature should serve any cause other than the
cause of literature, in this lecture Coetzee made what he called an ‘argument about
supplementarity’. In times like the present, he claimed, the novel has only two
options: it can choose to be a useful supplement to ideas about the good, or it can
choose to occupy what he called ‘an autonomous place’, which he described as the
position of ‘rivalry’.18 Even though Coetzee was here dealing primarily with
questions about literature in its relationship with history and politics, the position
he marked as ‘supplementarity’ can be traced back to the more primary debates
about literature’s nature and value in Plato’s The Republic.
Here, as part of an attempt to distinguish literature from philosophy, Socrates
rejected what he called the ‘childish passion for poetry’, claiming that it is ‘not to be
taken seriously or treated as a serious undertaking with some kind of hold on the
truth’.19 Unlike philosophy, Socrates argued, literary representation is misleading:
it is at a third remove from the forms, a representation of a reality that is already
itself a representation, and it is therefore condemned to the realm of mere opinion,
rather than truth. He also claimed that, again unlike philosophy, poetry arouses
desire—eros—in a way that becomes tyrannical, because it is not properly regu-
lated. But as any reader of The Republic knows, Socrates’ claims are at the same time
ironically undercut by Plato. If rumours are to be believed, Plato himself started out
as a poet, and, of course, his Socratic dialogues are dramatic and narrative in
nature—indeed, Nietzsche thought of Plato as the first novelist.20 Socrates’ argu-
ments against literature are embodied in a dialogue, and The Republic is a text that
in certain ways reads like a novel. Equally, in other dialogues such as the Phaedrus
Socrates emerges as a very accomplished poet in his own right, and, as Eileen John
points out in her chapter in this collection (Chapter 7), he elsewhere makes a direct
connection between philosophical wisdom and the work of eros. It quickly becomes
apparent that even in The Republic, Socrates cannot in fact do away with the form
of discourse that has been marked out as ‘literature’. While his Philosopher Kings
must ascend from the cave, to which mere mortals are condemned, to witness the
light of truth, they must then descend back from the light into the cave, and

18 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): p. 2.

19 Plato, Complete Works, p. 1212.
20 For an elaboration of this point, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and

Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1980).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 + − Review 3:171 Ag 25 ’20 100w

“Mr Brett Young has a distinguished, ardent, and promising

muse.”

+ Spec 122:177 F 7 ’20 400w

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p718 D 4
’19 30w
+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p779 D 25
’19 900w

YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT. Young physician.

*$2.50 Dutton

20–8520

“This story proceeds by definite stages. First of all we have the boy
in the English public school. We find him suffering keenly from the
roughness and cruelty of public school life. His own escape from this
torment is in his dreams. He confides these dreams to his mother
and she responds with an understanding which tightened the bond
between them. After his mother has died, Edwin’s father has a period
of poignant self-revelation. He takes Edwin on a bicycle trip to the
country where his boyhood was spent. His father uses rather undue
influence in persuading him to give up his chosen career in order to
study medicine. It is easy to understand that the father longs to see
his own personal ambitions fulfilled in the boy, but after the first
Edwin himself becomes interested in the work. We see him in the
medical school, in the dissecting room. When he discovers late in his
medical school course that his father is planning to marry again,
Edwin is forced to leave home by an interior urge too strong to be
overborne. It is their definite point of cleavage.”—Boston Transcript

“Readable, yes, eminently readable—readable to a fault. If only Mr

Young could forget the impatient public and let himself be carried
away into places where he thinks they do not care to follow!” K. M.

+ − Ath p1067 O 24 ’19 1100w

“Mr Young has given us a genuine achievement, one with real

revelation for every reader who likes to experience contact with the
deeper currents of individual life. Edwin Ingleby should, if this book
has the fate it deserves, become one of the characters with whom
acquaintance is considered a prerequisite of good taste in fiction.” D.
L. M.

+ Boston Transcript p6 Jl 3 ’20 1250w

Dial 69:546 N ’20 50w

Reviewed by H. W. Boynton

+ Review 3:131 Ag 11 ’20 460w

“The book is an interesting, if somewhat morbid, study of life, as

seen by a youth in the egotistic years between boyhood and
manhood. The main theme is the hero himself—to the detriment of
several deserving minor characters.”

+ − Sat R 128:469 N 15 ’19 450w

 “But for the episode of Rosie Beaucaire and one more rather
tiresome and trivial incident Mr Brett Young would have succeeded
in producing a long and interesting work of fiction in which the
relations of sex played no part whatever.”

+ − Spec 123:774 D 6 ’19 200w

“Perhaps the most striking thing about the book is the ease with
which Mr Young blends poetry and realism—out of some such blend
as this the great novels of the next few decades must be written.
Probably Mr Young has not attained his finest balance yet. He seems
to have the power of using the modern spirit to classical ends.”

+ Springf’d Republican p11a Ag 8 ’20

700w

“If more novelists wrote as well as Mr Brett Young, whose style is

attractively clear and simple, the world would be a happier place; but
manner is not everything, and the matter of Edwin Ingleby’s life is
comparatively wanting in dramatic interest. We wish the author
could convey to his imagination the very obvious zest which moves
his pen.”

+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p531 O 2

’19 550w

YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT, and YOUNG, E.

BRETT. Undergrowth. *$2 Dutton

20–19050
 “The story which it tells is the story of a conflict between modern
men and the ancient pagan forces, the ‘old gods’ who from
prehistoric times have dominated the lonely Welsh valley in which
the action is laid. This conflict manifests itself at once physically and
spiritually. Physically, in the endless series of accidents which befall
those engaged in building the great dam that is to restrain the waters
of the Dulas; spiritually, in their effect upon the characters and souls
of Forsyth, the young engineer with whose coming to take charge of
the work on the dam the book begins, and his predecessor, Carlyon,
the dead man whose diary and whose influence form important parts
of the narrative.”—N Y Times

“As a short story, it would be a decided success, as a long one it is

overelaborated.” C. K. H.

+ − Boston Transcript p7 N 17 ’20 370w

“‘Undergrowth’ is a novel of atmosphere. Characters and incidents

alike are of value to Mr Young only as they can help to make more
vivid the picture he is painting of the rugged, fear-inspiring
mountains of South Wales.” D. L. M.

+ Freeman 2:165 O 27 ’20 150w

“We wonder whether lack of conciseness, rather than any lack in

imagination or expression, is not the great rift in this book. And at
the last the imagination slips the noose. The book becomes
hysterical.”

+ − N Y Evening Post p19 O 23 ’20 460w

 “The book is interesting, dramatic at times, and full of a strange,
compelling beauty.”

+ N Y Times p20 D 5 ’20 740w

[2]
YOUNG, GEOFFREY WINTHROP, ed.
Mountain craft. il *$7.50 Scribner 796

“This book comprises 609 pages in all; about 394 pages are
occupied by Mr Young in person in a discussion of what he justly
calls ‘Mountain craft.’ Of the remainder, sixty-three are occupied by
Mr Arnold Lunn with a section on Mountaineering on ski, which
leaves 162 pages for eleven other contributors and the index.”—The
Times [London] Lit Sup

+ Boston Transcript p3 D 4 ’20 280w

“In the result the book is disproportioned and ill-arranged; it

affords some compensations. Mr Lunn’s article is a very valuable
treatise on a subject which deserves more attention. Captain Farrar
finds it possible in a small space to say all that is necessary about
equipment and outfit, writing, as he always does, with complete
mastery of detail and admirable conciseness. Mr Spenser on
photography is helpful and adequate.”

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p754 N 18

’20 2300w
 YOUNG, GEORGE. New Germany. *$2.25 (4c)
Harcourt 943

(Eng ed 20–4808)

There is a note of optimism for Germany in this book—the

Germany that has learned “to lift up its eyes to the hills” in all its
misery—and a grave note of warning for the Entente. “The mistake
we are all making about Germany ... is that we can’t realize what
Germany today is like.... Germany has given up. It carried on until it
collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our
quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of
patching it up with doctors and food.” The author is, since the
armistice, a special correspondent of the London Daily News in
Germany. Contents: The revolution; The reaction; The council
republics; Ruin and reconstruction; Council government; The treaty
of Versailles; The constitution. The appendix contains a copy of the
constitution with notes, and there is an index.

Am Pol Sci R 14:729 N ’20 180w

+ Ath p633 My 14 ’20 1050w

“This able analysis of a complicated situation makes good

supplementary reading to Keynes.”

+ Booklist 16:341 Jl ’20

“Admirable little book.” H: W. Nevinson

 + Freeman 1:404 Jl 7 ’20 1000w
Ind 104:67 O 9 ’20 50w

“On the whole, although necessarily impressionistic and

journalistic in character, the work is an intelligent account of the
political transformations in Germany since the armistice, lively and
readable at all times, penetrating and brilliant in places.”

+ Nation 111:77 Jl 17 ’20 280w

“Mr Young, it must be added, is a companionable guide to this

unknown land. He saw Germany in the fever of revolution, when to
see it was an adventure, and we doubt whether any observer who was
there, German or foreigner, saw half so much. He came to his work,
moreover, with a background of intimate knowledge of the old
Germany. On the folly of the peace treaty he writes with knowledge
and with passion. Mr Keynes from the outside has traced its
economic effects. Mr Young from within has sketched its no less
tragic psychical results.”

+ Nation [London] 26:816 Mr 13 ’20

1700w

“It is an expert view Young presents.” A. J.

+ New Repub 23:129 Je 23 ’20 1200w

“Mr Young’s interpretation is liberal and fairminded.” A. C.

Freeman
 + N Y Call p10 Jl 18 ’20 800w
+ N Y Times 25:10 Jl 18 ’20 280w

“‘The new Germany’ is not a profound book and it is frequently

marred by bad writing, but it is one of the best accounts of political
and economic events in Germany since the armistice.”

+ − Review 3:194 S 1 ’20 200w

R of Rs 61:670 Je ’20 40w
− Spec 124:394 Mr 20 ’20 280w

“The writer has first hand knowledge of German political and

economic conditions, and sound intelligence and an understanding
of political theory illuminate his judgments.”

+ Springf’d Republican p6 Je 14 ’20 400w

“Mr Young has, as all who know his other writings would
anticipate, produced a book which is not only interesting and at
times amusing and clever, but also parts of which deserve serious
consideration by students of contemporary politics. Clever, perhaps
too clever; for some there will be too much of the cheap jest and the
facile alliteration. Mr Young has certainly done more than any other
writer to help us in understanding what happened.”

+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p131 F 26

’20 1400w
 “Despite a journalistic fondness for euphuistic phrases in their
extreme form, Mr Young holds the reader’s attention. Of real value
are the final chapters on the new German constitution, and the
appendix, which contains the text of the constitution with
illuminating annotations.” C: Seymour

+ Yale R n s 10:420 Ja ’21 360w

[2]
YOUNG, P. N. F., and FERRERS, AGNES.
India in conflict. *$1.40 Macmillan 266

“This ambitious title covers a manual for missionary workers in

India. But the authors—representatives of the Anglican church—
know that India is more interesting than missions, and it is of India
that they write. In a hundred and fifty pages they give the reader a
clear impression of the ignorance and poverty met in the teeming
native villages, and of the obstacles to true missionary work
springing from the fact that even if the ill-paid missionary lives in the
poorest, barest cabin, he seems a marvel of wealth to most natives.
They define the great needs of rural India as, first, medical aid, and
second, schools of a Montessori type.”—N Y Evening Post

N Y Evening Post p11 D 31 ’20 110w

“An instructive study of Indian conditions.”

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p443 Jl 8

’20 100w
 YOUNG, W. A. Silver and Sheffield plate
collector. (Collector’s ser.) il *$2.50 Dodd 739

(Eng ed 20–26554)

“A guide to English domestic metal work in old silver and old

Sheffield plate.” (Sub-title) In view of the considerable literature
already gathered around the above subject the author avers that no
previous writer has surveyed the field solely from the standpoint of
domestic requirements and that “the present volume seeks to furnish
something about any and every class of article made of silver or
Sheffield plate that was made between the years 1697 and 1840,
provided it was of such sort as might have had a place in the homes,
or about the persons of the well-to-do and middle classes.” (Introd.)
Contents: Some history and a little law; Some sources of
information; Marks on old metal wares; The craft of the silversmith
and the plater; Six chapters on “The quest” for the various kinds of
utensils; Bibliography; A glossary of terms used in connection with
the silversmiths’ craft and the plater’s trade; Appendix; Index and
over one hundred illustrations.

“Mr Young’s introduction is valuable and interesting, as is his first

chapter. The illustrations are well chosen and excellently
reproduced.”

+ − Sat R 129:86 Ja 24 ’20 600w

The Times [London] Lit Sup p716 D 4
’19 100w
 [2]
YOUNGHUSBAND, SIR GEORGE JOHN.
Jewel house. il $5 Doran 739

A work by the Keeper of the jewel house in the Tower of London.

“Some of the most interesting chapters in the book are those devoted
to the description of the chief pieces of the regalia and to the history
of the more famous gems. There is a full account of the sovereign’s
three crowns—Edward the Confessor’s crown, the Imperial state
crown, and the Imperial crown of India—of the Queen’s crowns, the
Prince of Wales’s crown as eldest son of the king, and the different
sceptres and orbs. The Koh-i-nur is, of course, one of the historic
jewels dealt with by Sir George in a special chapter. Another gem
with a story is the Black Prince’s ruby, presented to him after the
battle of Najera by his ally Don Pedro of Castille.”—The Times
[London] Lit Sup

+ N Y Times p10 D 19 ’20 2000w

Reviewed by E. L. Pearson

Review 3:619 D 22 ’20 680w

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p696 O 28
’20 1300w
 Z

ZAMACOÏS, EDUARDO. Their son; The

necklace. (Penguin ser.) *$1.25 (3½c) Boni &
Liveright

19–18640

Two stories translated from the Spanish by George Allan England.

In the first, an honest, faithful, industrious locomotive engineer
marries a young girl of provocative beauty. In his zeal to get on, and
to provide properly for her in case he should suddenly die, he insists
on their taking as boarder a friend of his who is fond of “wine,
women, and song.” Not until three years pass does he learn that his
friend has been too intimate with his wife; and although he knows it
must cost him his home, his delight in his wife and his gay little son,
he kills his deceiving friend in a duel. After twenty years in prison he
returns to a wife hardened and made ugly by work, and a dissolute
son. He is happy again, prosperity comes; but another duel occurs
through no fault of his, in which he is killed by the son who is not his
son. The second is a passionate story of the power of a courtesan over
a young student from the country. The translator contributes an
appreciative estimate of the author.

“‘Their son’ is a novelette of a very high order of merit. The action

is rapid, the pathos bare and virile, the observation of circumstance
exact. ‘The necklace’ is more hectic in atmosphere and the theft of
the jewels is somewhat wildly conceived.” L. L.
 + − Nation 110:sup488 Ap 10 ’20 150w

“The themes of both of the novelettes are antique, but the style is
direct, simple and vigorous. Here is a book worth reading.” A. W.
Welch

+ − N Y Call p11 Mr 21 ’20 280w

“We predict for Señor Zamacois a high appreciation among

American readers.”

+ N Y Times 25:39 Ja 25 ’20 750w

Reviewed by H. W. Boynton

Review 2:111 Ja 31 ’20 150w

“This author has been compared to both Balzac and Maupassant;

but it seems to us that his nearest double in French fiction would be
Anatole France, with whom he has in common a fine irony which
directs the thought of the reader to fundamental ills in present-day
social relationships.”

+ Survey 44:352 Je 5 ’20 200w

ZANELLA, NORA. By the waters of Fiume.

*$1.35 (*3s 6d) Longmans 940.3436
 20–4795

“This little book purports to have been written by an English girl

who married a young Italian of Fiume just before the war. The
husband had to serve as a conscript in the Austrian army, and was
shot for refusing to fire on the Italians. The wife survived him only a
few months. Whether or not the story is true it represents faithfully
enough the Italian sentiments of the majority of the people of Fiume
and their sufferings during a war in which all their sympathies were
with the Allies and against their Austrian and Croatian oppressors.”
(Spec) The facts of the author’s life are told by her sister, Madame de
Lucchi, in an introduction.

“You can tell what Fiume is like by reading the early pages of this
book.”

+ Boston Transcript p4 My 26 ’20 260w

Spec 123:446 O 4 ’19 100w

“It is a moving record of love, expressed with great exuberance.”

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p534 O 2

’19 70w

ZILBOORG, GREGORY. Passing of the old

order in Europe. *$2.50 (4c) Seltzer 940.5

The author has lived through the war as an observer and is not
writing an academic treatise or a book based on authorities but
claims merely to be analysing his own experiences. It is his
conviction that “in the course of the struggles of the present-day
world, humanity has developed a very serious disease.... The disease
is mob psychosis. The contagion was carried by the war, by
revolution, by political lying, by diplomatic betrayal, social
disturbances and moral suppression.” (Introd.) The book concerns
itself with the diagnosis of the disease and the possibilities of
restoring health. Contents: The impasse of politics; The debauch of
European thought; The morass of war; The recovery of revolution;
Revolutionary contradictions; Additional contemplations; Light and
shadows; Consequences and possibilities.

Boston Transcript p1 N 27 ’20 420w

R of Rs 62:558 D ’20 120w

“It is an important contribution, full of apposite citation from an

unusually wide range of knowledge and personal experience of
penetrating criticism and suggestive generalization. This message
just now deserves a wide hearing.” B. L.

+ Survey 45:320 N 27 ’20 560w

ZIMMERN, HELEN, and AGRESTI,

ANTONIO. New Italy. *$2 (3c) Harcourt 914.5

(Eng ed 19–264)
 The authors say in the foreword that Italy’s glorious past stands in
the way of comprehension of her present, that she is still for the
average Englishman and American the land of the renaissance and
the Risorgimento, or the country of the picturesque brigand and
lazzarone, while in fact the modern Italian is not a romanticist but a
positivist, not an excitable, emotional individual but a reflective one.
The great change that has come over the people, especially during
the last twenty years, has surprised even the nation itself into
knowing itself for the first time. The endeavor of the book is to give a
short, synthetic view of Italy as she was at the outbreak of the war, as
she is today and as she is likely to be after the conclusion of peace,
for Italy’s entrance into the war marks the end of the book. The three
main divisions of the contents are politics, civil questions, and Italy
and the great war. There is an index.

Ind 104:67 O 9 ’20 50w

“They know and love the old Italy, and they have packed much
valuable information into their book, despite haphazard statistics
and recurrent bellicose homilies on the war. There is need of an
authoritative book on new Italy; this is not it.”

+ − Nation 111:161 Ag 7 ’20 220w

“The book provides a certain amount of guidebook information

about Italian history, education, industry, etc. But, as an
interpretation of ‘New Italy,’ it is a total failure.” A. C. Freeman

− + N Y Call p11 Ag 1 ’20 580w

 “The volume as a whole is thoroughly satisfactory, and our only
regret is that its brief compass does not permit a fuller development
of the subjects with which it deals.”

+ N Y Times 25:14 Je 27 ’20 700w

+ Outlook 125:542 Jl 21 ’20 80w

“Miss Helen Zimmern and Signor Agresti have tried to explain

modern Italy to English readers, and their survey is both compact
and intelligent. The writers have not quite got to the root of Italy’s
discontents.”

+ − Sat R 125:848 S 14 ’18 1050w

Spec 121:231 Ag 31 ’18 1400w

“So far as it goes it gives a clear outline of the progress of Italy. But
her present developments are among the most interesting in all
Europe, and this book, ending the survey where it does, hardly
prepares us to understand them.”

+ − Springf’d Republican p10 S 23 ’20 280w

“She has written numerous books on Italy, and she has written
better ones, not a little better.” F. O. Beck

+ − Survey 45:73 O 9 ’20 370w

The Times [London] Lit Sup p383 Ag
15 ’18 110w
 ZOOK, GEORGE FREDERICK. Company of
royal adventurers trading into Africa. $1.10 Journal
of negro history, 1216 You st., N.W., Washington,
D.C. 382

20–4623

This monograph is reprinted from the Journal of negro history,

(April, 1919) and is a contribution to the history of the slave trade.
The time period covered is 1660–1672. Contents: Early Dutch and
English trade to West Africa; The royal adventurers in England; On
the west coast of Africa; The royal adventurers and the plantations;
Bibliography; Index. The author is professor of modern European
history in Pennsylvania state college.

“On the whole Dr Zook has presented a clear and straightforward

account of the company’s activities and relationships.”

+ − Am Hist R 25:541 Ap ’20 550w

+ − J Pol Econ 28:523 Je ’20 400w

ZWEMER, SAMUEL MARINUS. Influence of

animism on Islam; an account of popular
superstitions. il *$2 Macmillan 297

20–8879
 The object of the book is to show how animism, the superstitious
belief in spirits, witches and demons, on which all pagan religions are
founded, still controls Islam in its popular manifestations.
Mohammedanism, as an outgrowth of paganism, Judaism and
Christianity, is characterized as a religion of compromise, that has
easily yielded to the pagan survivals in the countries over which it
has spread its influence. That these superstitions are popular
expressions that have nothing to do with the monotheism of Islam,
does not make them less pernicious. The contents are: Islam and
animism; Animism in the creed and the use of the rosary; Animistic
elements in Moslem prayer; Hair, finger-nails and the hand; The
‘Aqiqa’ sacrifice; The familiar spirit or Qarina; Jinn; Pagan practices
in connection with the pilgrimage; Magic and sorcery; Amulets,
charms and knots; Tree, stone and serpent worship; The Zar:
exorcism of demons. There are illustrations and a bibliography.

+ Booklist 17:139 Ja ’21

Lit D p102 S 4 ’20 1600w
N Y Times 25:17 Jl 4 ’20 1000w

“His book is well worth reading.”

+ Spec 124:54 Jl 10 ’20 160w

The Times [London] Lit Sup p407 Je
24 ’20 120w
The Times [London] Lit Sup p723 N 4
’20 150w
2. This book is mentioned for the first time in this issue.