For tomorrow: Read another essay.

But this, too, is something I must accept as part of the dissertation.

And so I do.

But I grumble, too. I occasionally grit my teeth as well. And once, in a particularly weak moment, I beat my breast and shouted lamentations to the heavens. Then again, I may have read that somewhere.

As far as what I have been reading, today I read Rachel McCoppin's "Existential Endurance: Resolution from Accepting the 'Other' in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace," from the special Stirrings Still issue devoted entirely to Coetzee. In it, McCoppin bypasses the critical tendency to turn towards Emmanuel Levinas's conception of the other, back to the Sartrean understanding of the concept and towards Nietzsche for an understanding of the formation of David Lurie's personal ethical system in the novel. What McCoppin does most effectively is reveal just how much the poststructuralists are indebted to the existentialists they are so often said to have superseded, especially in terms of the concept of the Other. Much of her reasoning does, however, proceed along the same general lines as many other readings of the novel: Lurie's encounters with the Other -- be they with his daughter (one of McCoppin's more inspired interpretations), the three assailants, or non-human animals -- force him to recognize the ultimate value of the Other, the necessity of relinquishing the drive to dominate that which he cannot control, and the small blessings brought about by the assumption of a humility hitherto absent from his existence. In a similar -- though explicitly Levinasian -- vein, Michael Marais concludes that the humbling "responsibility [for the Other] is an effect of [Lurie]'s loss of control over that which [he] thought [he] could control" (18). Unlike McCoppin's essay, which emphasizes Lurie's conscious decision to become a better person, Marais's text -- "Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace" -- suggests that "[a]lthough he becomes a better person in the course of the novel, he does not do so of his own volition" (10). Indeed, in learning to love despite himself, Lurie joins the ranks of the doctor in Life & Times of Michael K, Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron, and Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg by loving the unloveable and/or unknowable: K., John, and Sergei Nechaev, respectively.

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

Marais, Michael. "Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace." The English Academy Review 18.1 (2001): 1-20.

McCoppin, Rachel. "Existential Endurance: Resolution from Accepting the 'Other' in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 3.1 (2006): 71-81.

For tomorrow: Read another essay. And do it before three-thirty in the damn morning!

For tomorrow: Read another article.

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

When headhunters looking for "a full-time receptionist/administrative assistant" begin targeting people with MAs and PhDs, one cannot help but reflect upon his or her decision to attend graduate school. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a receptionist position in the window tinting industry, but from a certain jaded perspective, one has to wonder what this says about the relative value of a decade of post-secondary education in an economy like ours . . . I mean, theoretically one need not attend college to qualify him- or herself for a career in the service industry or in retail, yet many people I know with fancy-sounding degrees end up working in fields they need not have spent so much time and money in school to enter. Obviously, the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual value of an education should be enough of an incentive for an individual to attend post-secondary schools, but the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of people in the United States who attend college and graduate school with the explicit goal of obtaining a particular type of job and lifestyle theoretically only possible with an expensive and time-consuming education. And, sadly, it seems, many of these dreams will go unfulfilled despite the best efforts to succeed. This, too, is another throbbing anxiety in the mind of many a graduate student: will all this work pay off and position me for a satisfying career in academia? The answer in all its painfully unsettling glory: maybe.

And speaking of emails, I received this message yesterday:

I have a hard time believing that no library has a copy of the Cape Argus from less than a decade ago, so if there's anyone who might have a copy of this brief newspaper article, I would be elated if you could contact me.

As far as reading goes, I finished two articles since yesterday evening, both of which deal heavily with poststructural theory. Of the two, the essay I read this afternoon -- Zoe Wicomb's "Translations in the Yard of Africa" -- struck me as most relevant to my dissertation. In her discussion of the correlations between the act of cultural transformation and literal and figurative translation, Wicomb cuts to the heart of one of the central issues in postcolonial studies: the palimpsestic nature of cultural production. Indeed, the traces of apartheid-era society is never fully erased and, in Coetzee's book, they often foil attempts at translating experience. This, in Wicomb's estimation, can be shown to reveal "the failure of transition as a crossing over to democracy" (Wicomb). The essay I read last night, Lucy Graham's "'Yes, I am Giving Him Up': Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness With Dogs in JM Coetzee's Recent Fiction," like so many others, deals with the connections between The Lives of Animals and Disgrace. Although Graham is one of the Coetzee scholars I most enjoy, I wasn't as impressed by this essay as I normally am. This is not to say that her essay is not very good -- it is -- but I feel that the weight of the theory she brings into the article detracts from her astute reading of the novel. Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, each make an appearance in this brief (eleven pages!) essay. Although many academics are quite familiar with what amounts to a who's who of postmodern thought, Graham's tightly-packed essay demands a certain readerly vigilance not to get lost in the waves of complexly-wrought theoretical language running throughout the text. That said, Graham reads against the Mike Marais's Levinasian interpretation of Disgrace, arguing that Coetzee's texts "challenge the limitations of autrui and dissociation implicit in notions of transcendence," providing a slightly different (yet valuable) interpretation of the oft-cited "sympathetic imagination" at work in both Disgrace and The Lives of Animals / Elizabeth Costello (4). While I do not wholly agree with Graham's reading, I applaud her focus on the body as a site of suffering as well as the negative presence of silenced suffering in the two texts.

For tomorrow: Read another article.

Graham, Lucy. "'Yes, I am Giving Him Up': Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness With Dogs in JM Coetzee's Recent Fiction." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 4-15.

Wicomb, Zoe. "Translations in the Yard of Africa." Journal of Literary Studies 18.3-4 (2000): 209-33.

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

Instead, a friend invited me over for the afternoon to play Dungeons and Dragons, like the proper icosahedronic dice-rollers that we are. Having been a bit lonely lately, I figured, socializing might well be the ticket to ensuring a better attitude towards my own work. It certainly can't hurt.

So, I read a couple of reviews so that I could enjoy myself knowing I had gotten some work completed already. The first review, Rachel L. Swams's "After Apartheid, White Anxiety," as the title suggests, situates Coetzee 's text among "a new literature of South Africa's whites that vents and explores their fears about the post-apartheid nation" (1). Drawing comparisons to Nadine Gordimer's less negative House Gun, Swams sees Coetzee's novel as depicting the "chilling indifference" of a society in which vengefully violent acts of retribution may be exacted upon seemingly innocent white individuals like the "warm-hearted" Lucy Lurie (1). Swams's essay, it seems to me, stands out as a particularly strong introduction to a certain vein of critical concern among the South African literary establishment. Additionally, by drawing upon critics such as David Attwell and contemporary novelists such as Zakes Mda, Swams effectively presents a learned, relatively unbiased view of this branch of critical discourse in her native land. I also read Robin Vidimos's review of Disgrace which, despite misidentifying the novel's protagonist as "James Lurie," is a fairly solid reading of the text. Although not explicitly evoked, existentialism seems central to Vidimos's interpretation of the book and, accordingly, focuses on the origins and solutions to the "rudderless" Lurie's detachment (5).

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

Swams, Rachel L. "After Apartheid, White Anxiety." The New York Times 14 Nov 1999: 4.1.

Vidimos, Robin. "Midlife Tragedy Quickly Grabs and Retains Interest." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Denver Post 14 Nov. 1999: F5+.

In his brief review marking the release of Disgrace in paperback, Michael Holland rather pithily writes "[c]olonialism at best is the tyranny of the paternal. Disgrace is not knowing when to let go," an observation I believe adroitly synthesizes several of the central themes running through Coetzee's narrative. Indeed, the colonial past haunts David Lurie, the man many critics view as an embodiment of apartheid-era white privilege, who struggles to adjust to the post-apartheid society into which history has thrust him. Indeed, as Tony Freemantle writes, David Lurie "no longer has control in the new social order" and, accordingly, "he cannot find his place in this unfamiliar land" (15). Furthermore, the refusal to "let go" highlighted by Holland extends beyond the political sphere, into Lurie's bedroom, where the professor's "libido . . . won't politely fade away with flagging physical appeal and status." Disgrace, then, "develops into a debate between generations," revealing the social, political, sexual, and ontological fissures separating David Lurie's generation from that of his daughter and post-apartheid South Africa in general (Adams). I also read Suzanne Rhodenbaugh's early review of the novel in which she views the "disillusionment and emptiness" David Lurie experiences as signs of an existential crisis (12). As always, I tend to agree with the existential reading, having written (and published) essays highlighting precisely this concern. All bias aside, though, Rhodenbaugh does provide one of the better American reviews of the novel, especially among the early critics.

In addition to the reviews mentioned above, I also read Agata Krzychylkiewicz's survey of Coetzee's reception in Russia, which highlights several interesting readings of Disgrace, as well as the author's other novels, especially (and, perhaps, predictably) The Master of Petersburg. The Russian critics Krzychylkiewicz cites tend to view Coetzee's narrative as both a supremely realized example of literary refinement and an extremely bleak, often painful-to-read depiction of modern life. Particularly illustrative of the Russian response to the novel is the reviewer for NaStoiaschaia literatura's comment that Disgrace is an "echellent and at the same time hopeless novel" that presents a "repugnant" world in which "[o]ne can get on . . . only when one submits to it" (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz). Likewise, Dmitrii Olshanskii claims that, for Coetzee, "life [is] chaotic and terrifying" while the anonymous reviewer writing for Knizhnyi klub asserts that "[t]he topic of the book is as always in Coetzee's writing twisted and dizzy" (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz).

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

Adams, Phoebe-Lou. "Brief Reviews." The Atlantic Monthly. March 2000. Available online.

Freemantle, Tony. "The 'New South Africa': Damaged Souls Struggle For Redemption, Answers." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Houston Chronicle 19 Dec. 1999: 15.

Holland, Michael. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Observer. 23 April 2000.

Hollands, Glenn. "Sophisticated Award Winner." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Dispatch. 20 May 2000. Available Online.

Krzychylkiewicz, Agata. "The Reception of J. M. Coetzee in Russia." Journal of Literary Studies 21.3-4 (2005): 338-368.

Rhodenbaugh, Suzanne. "Professor Takes on the Coils of Predator, Loving Father in 'Dog's Life' Existence." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12 Dec. 1999: 12.

Still, I am at a stage in my research where I really don't feel as if my reading is likely to further my understanding of Coetzee's novel in any way. Since virtually everything I read now seems to be another way of phrasing something I have already read several times previously, I find that I am lucky if, upon finishing an article, I have underlined a few cleverly-phrased passages that I can draw upon when writing a chapter I thought I would have started months ago.

And that's not good. Reading shouldn't become a chore I have to force myself to complete in spite of a conviction that it is a futile, bankrupt endeavor.

But, I suppose that this is a common feeling for people working with texts that have been glossed hundreds of times over. Yuck, though.

For tomorrow: Read another essay.