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Article Dans Une Revue Short Fiction in Theory & Practice Année : 2016

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: when transnational short fiction travels from utopian transcape to dystopian globalscape

Résumé

The Childhood of Jesus is a novella by J. M. Coetzee that poses as an allegory of Jesus’ early life, to better ponder over wider social issues pertaining to the possibility of welcoming and caring for the other. The lens used by Coetzee to apprehend his favourite topic is that of the utopian versus the dystopian nature of a community where differences have seemingly been erased and individual needs have become insignificant. Two contrapuntal discourses are woven in the text: on the one hand, the nameless country where the two main characters take refuge appears as an allegory of a benign communal society where everybody’s basic needs are provided for, and, on the other hand, the systematic smoothing out of every possible desire cannot fail to carry some ominous undertones. What the society that welcomes the main protagonists seeks to expel either pertains to bodily needs or to the exercise of a critical mind. Characteristically enough, Coetzee does not make clear whether the reader should opt for the utopian or the dystopian grid of reading his novel, which may strike us as an allegory of our own condition in an anaesthesized globalized world. The forceful impact of this short text undoubtedly lies with its own paucity of definite answers given to the reader’s interrogations, so that she is made to revisit her own ideological assumptions. This article will attempt to show that this definite lack of allegorical clarity allows for a revisiting of both the fictional and the allegorical modes in Coetzee’s novel, which paves the way for a deeper understanding of the self/other relation in a transnational context.
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hal-02503359 , version 1 (09-03-2020)

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Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès. The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: when transnational short fiction travels from utopian transcape to dystopian globalscape. Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 2016, 5 (1-2), pp.21-29. ⟨10.1386/fict.5.1-2.21_1⟩. ⟨hal-02503359⟩
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