2024.12.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Stephen Mulhall, In Other Words: Transpositions of Philosophy in J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy, Oxford University Press, 2022, 128pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192869715.
Reviewed by Alexander Altonji, New York University/Fordham University
Stephen Mulhall’s recent work examines the legacy of metaphysical realism in modernity. In particular, he investigates how the authority of the natural order of things collapses in modernity, thereby transforming the ancient project of realism. Two ways that he develops this research are through discussions of religion and theology, and of aesthetics and the arts. Both themes come together in In Other Words, which is Mulhall’s second monograph on J. M. Coetzee. In his first, The Wounded Animal, Mulhall discusses realism in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. At stake in Coetzee’s writings and Mulhall’s interpretation of them is how the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature is taken up and transformed in modernity, for instance, in the aspirations and failures of literary realism…
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