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Jacques Rancière, J. M. Coetzee, and Doing Things Oneself
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 4, Autumn 2024
- pp. 1595-1611
- 10.1353/nlh.2024.a922187
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Jacques Rancière and J. M. Coetzee, exact contemporaries, are both interested the worker’s access to aesthetic experience. In Rancière’s case, this involves looking backward to the fact that nineteenth-century workers were able to squeeze time from their working lives for art and literature. In Coetzee’s case, however, this problem of distributing aesthetic sensibility turns out to be a matter of looking forward in history, and of his own practice. How is he to write in a way that does not unfairly exempt him from work?