Overview

Focusing on work by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, Literary Cynics explores the relationship between literature and cynicism to consider what happens when authors write themselves into their art, against the rhetoric of authority. Rose takes as his starting point three moments of aesthetic crisis in the careers of these literary cynics: Borges’s parables of the 1950s, Beckett’s plays of the 1980s, and Coetzee’s pedagogic novels of the 2000s. In their transition to ‘late style’, the works reflect their writers’ abiding concern with particular conceptions of rhetoric and aesthetic form. Literary Cynics combines accounts of these ‘late’ works with classic, lesser known, and archival texts by the three writers, from Coetzee’s Disgrace to Beckett’s letters, as well as detailed analysis of cynicism, both ancient and modern, as a philosophical and political movement.

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9781350090019

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Reviews

Concentrated and cerebral, it is also deeply embroiled in a conversation with existing scholarship. It is without a doubt a vital addition to studies of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee, however; and of literary cynicism itself. * Times Literary Supplement * Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee is a study that will serve scholars of any of these respective authors looking for a thematic connection across continents. More meaningfully, it is revelatory in its theoretical discussion of revolution at its thresholds. * A Contracorriente * Rose writes in the same way he lectures, with great authority ... fluency, flair, and self-assurance. * Review 31 * Here is an urbane polemic, a quietly cynical response to critical practices that ground authorial authority. * Mike Marais, Professor of English, Rhodes University, South Africa, in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies *

Author Information

Arthur Rose is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies, and the Centre for Medical Humanities, at Durham University, UK.

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