Migration and the South in J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Novels

The first two novels in South African and Australian writer J.M. Coetzee's Jesus novel trilogy invite being read as studies in migration that explore the ambiguities of crossing over and arriving in a seeming "new life," as it is repeatedly called. The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of modern literature Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 127 - 139
Main Author Boehmer, Elleke
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Bloomington Indiana University Press 01.01.2023
Subjects
Australians
British & Irish literature
Chatwin, Bruce (1940-1989)
Coetzee, J M (1940- )
English literature
Geography
Migrants
Migration
Novels
Poetics
South African literature
Australia
South Africa
United Kingdom
Argentina
Karoo
Southern Hemisphere
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Summary:The first two novels in South African and Australian writer J.M. Coetzee's Jesus novel trilogy invite being read as studies in migration that explore the ambiguities of crossing over and arriving in a seeming "new life," as it is repeatedly called. The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) dramatize this arrival as a one-way experience, with no possibility of return. Moreover, key features of the migrant crossing--contingency, isolation, an inarticulable mystery and strangeness, and repetition--are evoked through what we might term a southern poetics, following Coetzee's own definition of the "one south." This southern framing in turn throws light on the provinciality of the trilogy's settings, on the provisional and derivative nature of the lives lived there, and on the precarity of migrant crossings, not least in the south, including the Global South, today.
ISSN:0022-281X
1529-1464
DOI:10.2979/jmodelite.46.2.10