Summary
A collection of essays by the renowned South African writer, paying particular attention to the question of state censorship of political writings.
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Media Reviews
"These closely argued essays on censorship's insidious subtleties make for dense but rewarding reading....[H]is erudition and intelligence remain truly formidable throughout."
-- Kirkus
"[Coetzee] is taking us on meandering, disturbing, and illuminating moral expedition....'Nothing human is alien to me', goes the Latin phrase. For Coetzee, whose voice and sensibility were forged in a complex literary and moral reaction to oppression, the equivalent would be: 'Nothing powerless is alien to me.' His essays extend the humane and artistic meaning of powerlessness-and by extension, power-to unexpected places, and with original and unexpected implications." -- Richard Eder
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A]n extraordinary collection of essay written over the past eight years...." -- Martha Bayles
-- New York Times Book Review
"Coetzee's quiet and illuminating book helps us to escape the nostalgia which the history of censorship now evokes in those sated with freedom of speech." -- Michael Ignatieff
-- London Review of Books
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Published date: 1996
Size: 5.75 x 9 inches
Weight: 1.15 pounds
Pages: 289
Publisher's Notes
In "Giving Offense," South African writer J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of a writer who has lived and worked under its shadow.
Widely acclaimed for his many novels, Coetzee is also a brilliant literary critic and essayist. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. Subscribing neither to the myth of the writer as a moral giant nor to that of the writer as persecuted innocent, Coetzee argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.
From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with with the organs of the Soviet state, "Giving Offense" focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.
Finally, Coetzee delves into the early history of apartheid and criticizes the blankness of contemporary political science in its efforts to address the deeper motives behind apartheid.
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